Normally Discord spent a significant portion of his mornings goofing off before settling down to the serious business of finding food. Today, however, he had a mission. Go early, get something fun to play with, and spend his afternoon with Little Sister. Also, get back at those ponies who had nearly skewered him with a pitchfork.
First were morning chores. Normally he put these off until after noon, since normally his first few hours of wakefulness were spent playing, but he had stuff to do today. He took the water from his corn last night, now cooled, and brought it to the back of the cave, in the cool dark region where sunlight never penetrated and even Fire's light and heat rarely reached. In that area he had a large wooden crate, which he had packed with dirt and clay all along the inside walls and used his powers to make it harden like his ceramic pots. He'd then filled it with water and borne down on the water with all of his willpower to make it turn to ice, and hollowed out the center of the ice to make a place to keep his milk jugs. Discord carefully poured the water in, turning it to ice as it fell, lining the hollow in his icebox with it to replenish what might have melted yesterday.
He removed a milk jug from the icebox. From a second wooden crate lined with homemade ceramic, one that did not contain ice, he took out a cheese brick, a butter stick, and an ear of corn. He kept short-lived perishable food like his milk in the icebox, somewhat longer-lived food in the second crate where rats and bugs couldn't get in at it, and food that could last a very long time in jars, such as dried fruit, or the tree nuts that were the only food he could usually find in his own forest.
Half a stick of butter went into a pot, which he sat on Fire. With his talon he sliced corn kernels off two cobs and let them fall into the pot, then fed the cobs to Fire. He put a lid -- oversized, none of Discord's lids fit his pots since he stole all his cookware or fished it out of the garbage, but it was close enough -- on the pot, then balanced a ceramic bowl carefully on top of the slightly rounded lid. Again he used his talon, this time shaving his cheddar cheese brick and letting the shavings fill the bowl.
By the time the corn kernels in the pot were done exploding into fluffy popcorn, the cheese in the bowl had melted into goo. Discord took his popcorn off of Fire, dumped in a bunch of nuts, dried grapes and dried apples from a jar, stirred with a smooth stick he'd peeled the bark off of, and poured the melted cheese on top of the mixture. He then ate the cheesy popcorn, nut and fruit mix with his paws, directly out of the pot, being careful not to touch the hot ceramic, and washed it down with milk.
He set the dirtied pots outside his cave for the bugs and the animals to eat them clean. Discord never bothered to clean anything; whatever the bugs didn't get, he'd bake to carbon smears by putting the pots directly in Fire later on, and if there ever got to be so much ash buildup on his pots that it was affecting the taste of his food, he'd use his powers to turn the ash into ceramic and re-glaze the inside of the pot. He washed himself frequently because he loved to play in water and he loved the different funny smells of the soaps he stole from ponies and playing with soap bubbles was a lot of fun, and he washed Little Sister when she got dirty, but he never washed anything else.
As his last task before leaving, he picked up Little Sister, brushed off the dirt from the ground she'd acquired by being his pillow, and snuggled her against his cheek. "Goodbye, Little Sister," he said. "I'm gonna go get some butter so we can play!"
He didn't animate her, so she didn't respond. Carefully, so as not to disturb her sleep, he put her back on her shelf and re-covered her with her protective crystal dome.
Then, with a full belly and a spring in his step, he headed out of the cave, to go down the mountain and steal from ponies.
Very quickly he remembered why he didn't usually eat breakfast before going on his adventures. After gorging himself on cheesy popcorn, he found he had much less stamina than usual; he acquired a stitch in his side after only a few minutes of vigorous trotting. This wouldn't do at all.
Discord went to the stream that ran near his cave and began walking through it, hopping from rock to rock, splashing into the stream and letting the cool water run over his feet to invigorate himself. He was slower this way, but slower was better with the muscle cramps in his side; the important thing was to go slower in a way that wouldn't bore him, because if he just tried going slower on the path, he'd get bored and try to speed up.
Soon he reached where the stream ran into the river, which gave him a great idea. A few minutes trotting by the banks of the river brought him to the large fallen oak he remembered from his last trip to the river; the tree had toppled into the river some time ago, and the top half of it, where there had been branches, was mostly worn away, but the bottom half was still a fairly firm tree trunk. Discord focused his magic on it, telling parts of the wood to rot and turn goopy, then to liquefy and run off, until he had carved away a section of tree trunk about the length of his body and hollowed it out. More magic forced the ends to grow together and bend up, until the tree trunk was an impromptu, lumpy, uneven canoe. Discord pushed the canoe out into the river, first walking and then swimming behind it, until it had enough clearance that he could pull himself into it.
The first two times he tried, he capsized the canoe, flipping it over with himself underneath. This was annoying as heck. Discord could breathe under water, but every time he changed from water to air or vice versa, there was a moment of gasping panic as his body tried to shift from one type of oxygenation organ to another, and going from one to the other always made him feel like there was something around his neck choking him in the moments before his gills opened up or closed off. He didn't want to simply stay underwater, though, because the current was fast and unpredictable in places, and he could easily get caught and smashed into a rock. If he was in a canoe, his canoe would smash into the rock, not him, and his distance vision was a lot better above water, so he'd have better luck seeing the rock in time and paddling away from it. The third time, he got in by throwing one arm and his tail over the side of the canoe first and then kicking with the arm and leg that were still underwater, until the canoe flipped, and he beat his wings and twisted his body just enough to fall into the canoe instead of being pulled over the side into the water again.
The canoe was just wide enough that if Discord held onto its sides in the front, with his arms, he could dangle his legs off either side of the canoe into the water and kick, and this was how he paddled. Occasionally when he had a current to fight he would let his tail fall into the water on one side of the canoe or the other, and use it to provide extra power.
This lasted until his canoe got caught by the rapids, at which point Discord needed to keep all his limbs inside the canoe and braced against it just to make sure he wasn't thrown out of it. The canoe was flung through the water at high speed, smashing against rocks hard enough to punch holes in it, then spinning off again through the rushing water. Discord frantically focused his magic on the canoe, making the holes seal over, which didn't prevent him from being thoroughly soaked with cold river water or keep the water level inside the canoe from rising every time it happened. Sometimes as they approached an underwater rock Discord would flap his wings desperately, lifting the canoe just enough to clear the rock, and this kept him from losing the entire bottom of his canoe at once, but mostly he was unable to do anything except ride it out as the rapids bounced his canoe off rock after rock, lifted him up and down, and spun him with great force. Discord's heart beat wildly with a mixture of exhilaration and terror, and his paws clung to the canoe so tightly the knuckles under the fur of his lion paw had gone white.
And then he saw the waterfall up ahead.
"Oh poop--"
He barely had time to scream before what felt like a wall of water slammed down on him. Even with gills open Discord wasn't going to be able to breathe in this, and what he'd seen before going over the edge and being sucked under the water was that the ground was very very very very far below him. For a few moments he thrashed, trying uselessly to swim to the edge of the falling mass of water, before it struck him how little that was going to help him. He was falling, and if the water driving him down with its weight didn't crush him when he hit the ground, gravity itself would.
Up is down, up is down, up is down! It was several seconds before the magic clicked; falling to his death wasn't good for his concentration. Then the world inverted, and Discord, his canoe, and some quantity of the water from the waterfall arced in the opposite direction, falling away from the waterfall. As they burst out of the mass of water, Discord could see again. Above him, the ground, green grass and gray rocks and silver water up above his head. Below him, endless, bottomless blue sky, and he was falling down into it, falling forever.
Discord screamed, and screamed, thrashing his limbs and beating his sopping wet wings in too uncoordinated and chaotic a fashion to get any lift at all, as he fell into the infinite well of the sky. Okay, okay, go back, down is down, let down be down!
This time the water and the canoe did not come with him; they continued to fall upward into the sky. Only Discord himself started falling back to the ground again. The world spun around him, sky returning to up, land returning to down, and now his plunge was decidedly not bottomless. There was a very visible and very finite end to it, rushing toward him.
For just a few moments, he decided that down was sideways. This was somehow even worse than the bottomless sky; as he fell perpendicular to ground and sky, he realized that he was plunging toward the horizon, a thin line where sky and earth met, and it seemed to him that the narrow meeting of the two must mean that if he were to fall into it, it would squash him, turn him into a line as narrow as the horizon itself. No. He made down up again, fell enough into the sky to gain altitude, and then reversed it, high enough from the ground that by now, after multiple reversals and a commensurate lessening of his panic, he could actually get his wings under control. They were small, and asymmetrical, and he wasn't a strong flier, so all his frantic wingbeats were doing were slowing his descent and allowing him to change his direction to "forward and down" rather than straight down, but that was enough. Discord aimed himself at a cloud, and plowed into it, sliding across its puffy soft surface fast and hard enough that he'd have fallen off the edge if he hadn't been digging in with claws and tail and hoof, as hard as he could, while he slid.
He came to a stop with his head hanging off the edge of the cloud, but enough of the rest of his body on it that he was able to safely sit up, and then fall backward against the cloud, lying on it. For a few moments he panted. And then he began to laugh.
"That was awesome! I gotta tell Little Sister about this! That was like the best stunt ever!"
With survival guaranteed, the adrenaline of his fear converted to exhilaration, and he laughed and laughed in delight at the rush his experience had just given him. The last few times he'd decided to ride the river, he had caught up with it much further down the mountain, below the waterfall; this was the first time he'd dealt with the rapids, and while he'd technically known there was a waterfall, having seen it from below, he hadn't really been thinking about it when he'd decided to canoe down the river from close to home. Now he had survived the rapids, and the waterfall, and he was up on a cloud, just like a pegasus!
Which, of course, begged the question of how he was going to get down.
Discord knew he wasn't good enough at flying to safely descend on wingpower. But he was very exposed up here. The occasional dragons that hunted in the mountains left ponies alone, but they'd make off with goats or deer if they could, so Discord was fairly certain that they'd take him for prey if they saw him. Also, ponies hated and feared him, and he was up where pegasi could easily see him if there were any around. He couldn't afford to stay on a cloud; plus there wasn't any food up here and he couldn't control the cloud's direction.
The cloud reminded him of the canoe; he was floating on the air in a cloud the same way he'd floated on a canoe in the water. And the canoe had sunk deeper into the water when it had acquired holes in it and the water had flowed in. Maybe he could punch holes in the cloud and let air in?
He soon discovered it didn't work like that. He could punch a hole in the cloud with his tail, but that didn't seem to change the aerodynamics of the cloud at all. This was going to take using his magic.
First he tried making the cloud sink like a rock would. Very quickly he decided this was a bad idea, as he and his cloud plummeted rapidly, fast enough that even though he released the spell in seconds, the cloud continued to fall for another second or two before regaining its buoyancy. Then he tried making the cloud behave like a feather, which made him quite dizzy as the light wind pushing his cloud down into the valley flung and spun the cloud the way it would a feather. Eventually he hit on the way floating balloons would slowly lose their floatation property and sink to the ground, and drained "floatness" out of the cloud for the next twenty minutes until it finally drifted to Earth... at which point, having lost all of its floatness, it went flaccid and flat the way an actual balloon would.
Discord laughed for a solid five minutes at the flat cloud on the ground. Every time he thought he had it under control and he could move on toward his target, he noticed something else silly and disconcerting about the cloud being flat, like that it had wrinkles in it or there were lumps in it where it draped over rocks, and he'd start laughing hysterically again. Finally, though, the hilarity of a flat cloud wore off, and he was able to move on, only occasionally giggling to himself as he remembered the cloud.
There were no convenient produce carts rolling down the road for Discord to stow away on. He waited for what seemed like a very long time, but only ponies, unhindered by carts, walked the road. This was disappointing. Discord knew from experience that some days, ponies just didn't go to the market, but he couldn't tell why not; it wasn't the weather, ponies never went to market on rainy days but they also had days they didn't go when it was perfectly nice, like today. He wondered if somepony ran around to all the farms every morning to tell the ponies whether it was a market day or not.
Still, it wasn't much of a hardship for him to run from branch to branch through the trees that lined the road, staying out of pony sight. Since he'd cut his trip time down from the mountain by a good bit with his river-and-cloud adventure, and barely used his paws for any of it, he was in good shape for tree-traveling. His wings ached a little, but deep inside tree cover he was too big to use them much anyway; he could barely even spread them with the branches so thick around him, which was excellent because it meant that even pegasi couldn't get in at him. It wasn't impossible for ponies to climb trees, but it was very difficult for them. He, on the other paw, could live in a tree if he wanted to.
Before long he reached the farm with all the butter, the one he'd hit yesterday. He snuck in the same way he had last time. Once again, there was the yellow pony who'd kept trying to kill him, churning butter. Once again, she didn't notice him. She did keep lifting her head and looking around, this time, but she was looking at the windows and doors. Discord had come through the wall again, and was hiding back in the racks where the butter was stored.
He reached out to the shelf, and stopped. There was an aura there, brighter and more colorful than the energy flows he saw beneath the earth, though he couldn't have said exactly what color it was. Discord peered at it intently, focusing into it, trying to see the pattern and understand it.
There was a piece that said "make a loud noise". And there was a piece that made a boundary, and there was a piece that said what that boundary should be shaped like. His eyes went back and forth, reading the magic and comparing it to reality. The boundary was designed to go around the shelves. And there was a piece that looked for the boundary to be touched on its outside, and another piece that linked that to the loud noise, and then a piece that said "except if this" and that went to a piece that was checking for something. He inspected that piece more closely. Oh. It was checking for pony-ness.
The structure assembled itself in Discord's head. It was an alarm. The boundary went all around the shelves, making an invisible wall of magic. If anything that wasn't a pony touched the outside of that boundary, the loud noise would sound. Clever, clever ponies. They thought they'd beaten him. He couldn't make himself be a pony, so he couldn't touch the wall without setting it off.
However, it wasn't designed to keep out magic, only paws. And it wasn't designed to be triggered if something that wasn't a pony touched it from the other side.
Grinning, Discord pointed a claw at the butter sticks and made them have legness. And with legness came what usually came with legness, movingness. The butter sticks grew little legs and milled about for a bit before Discord gave them a focus -- come to me. Then they walked to the edge of the shelves, jumped, and stumbled through the barrier and into his paws. He made all the butter on the shelf jump off and walk to him. Then he made some burlap sacks that were hanging on a post across the room start flapping themselves and flying to him. The pony churning the butter was looking down at her work intently and didn't notice a thing. Even when she looked up, she was still looking at windows and doors, not at the sacks hanging on the wall. Discord stuffed several sacks full of butter and crept back out of the barn, going through the wall again directly into the cornfield. He dug a hole to connect to his hole in his cave and made all the butter walk through, out of the sacks, to the other side. He then tied the sacks around his middle so he'd have them available for the rest of the thieving he planned to do today.
First things first, though. How could he possibly enjoy his triumph over the stupid ponies if they never saw his achievement until after he was gone?
He snuck back into the barn. Carefully he gauged the distance to the rafters. It would be hard to fly up there under his own power, but if he made his up into down, he'd fall most of the way and could easily break his fall with his wings. That would work.
With a small snicker, he poked the boundary with his tail. And then inverted his up and down and plunged toward the ceiling as a loud whooping alarm went off. He wrapped himself around a rafter, twining his tail around it, and flipped his down back to down so he could look down at the chaos that was about to ensue, rather than craning his head up. The butter churning pony was running up and down the aisles, shouting for her relatives, looking for evidence of Discord's presence. When she found the row with the missing butter, she stared so hard Discord thought her eyes would pop out of her head.
This was going to be hilarious.
He reached out and animated the cheese bricks on the shelf behind the pony. As they began leaping off the shelves, she turned in startlement, and then stared in horror. And then she ran.
When she came back to the barn with her two relatives, they began frantically attempting to catch the cheese. Meanwhile, Discord animated the milk jugs on another row, making them jump. Of course, being glass jugs, most of them broke, spilling the milk everywhere, so he pulled milk up into small liquid twisters, like whirlpools of milk floating in air. The white pony ran headlong into one, slipped and fell, and started screaming hysterically.
And then she looked up.
Discord waved at her, grinning. He concentrated, turned the roof over his head into strings, inverted his gravity, and let himself fall into the air, through the roof. Falling into the sky was still just as terrifying as it had been this morning, but this time Discord knew what to expect; he reverted his gravity as soon as he thought he was up high enough that his small wings could get him down to the tree cover. Underneath him and behind him, he saw the three earth ponies charging through their fields, searching for him, but while they were scanning the skies, they weren't looking high enough. Falling into the sky was much, much faster than a typical pegasus launch, and Discord had reverted himself when he was well above the level the pegasi usually flew at, figuring he needed lots and lots of runway to make it down to the tops of the trees. The only reason Discord could see them was that when he chose to, he could shift his eyes so they could see far, far away. It was similar to the way he could make his limbs sync to each other and let three of them adopt the properties of the fourth, so he could make them all behave like the goat leg when he needed to run fast up a hill, or all behave like the dragon leg when he needed to climb rocks, and so on. His talon came from an eagle, and eagles could see at great distances – he knew this, not because he had been taught it, but because when he looked at eagles with his magic and saw the properties they had, the chief property of their eyes was in seeing well at a long distance. So Discord was using eagle vision to look down, and they merely had pony vision, and earth pony vision at that. They could see him if they looked straight up, but they didn't seem to want to. And the noontime sun was high enough that Discord's shadow on the ground was only the tiniest of dots, as the light shone almost straight down around him.
Once he was safely in the trees, he traveled from tree to tree along the roadside again, looking for a specific farm. The trees started thinning out, too widely spaced for him to just jump from branch to branch, but not too far for him to fly from one tree to another. His wings were getting very, very sore, but he imagined how strong and powerful they'd be and how good he would be at flying after he'd exercised them this hard. Before long the oaks and maples of the roadside woods had turned into apple trees.
Apple trees weren't good cover for him, but if he was right about which farm this was, if he followed the apple trees in away from the road he should encounter a vineyard, and that would offer him almost as much protection as the cornfield had. As he snuck through the orchard, he giggled to himself, remembering the total chaos as the three ponies had run frantically around their dairy storage shelves. And they'd even put a magical ward in place, too! Now that he thought about it, he wondered how they'd pulled that one off. No earth pony he'd ever met could cast complicated magic like that; generally, only unicorns could. But from listening to the earth ponies grumble about the unicorns, Discord would have thought they'd have sold their own mothers before admitting to a unicorn that they needed help. Wow, he must have really gotten to them. He snickered. Not that any unicorn's magic was a match for his. They could weave all the complicated spells they wanted, and Discord would still find a way around them, because he was smarter than ponies.
He found the vineyard, and dropped to the ground, sneaking through the vines. They were hung on wooden trellises staked deep into the ground, but when he clambered over the trellises, the vine growth was thick enough that most of him was hidden. Other times, he made the vines bend out of his way and the trellis itself become strings for a moment, or acquire the properties of cloud or water or something else that Discord could slip through easily. The grapes themselves were delicious. Discord had eaten about a dozen apples on his way in, without storing any, but he could always make room for grapes.
This wasn't a dairy farm, so he didn't need to worry about cows. Given the pony propensity for naming themselves after their talents, this farm, which appeared to specialize in making delicious apple cider and grape juice, was probably the one the pony had been referring to when he talked about the Quench farm. They made a lot of tasty food out of their apples and grapes as well. It was the storehouse for those treats that Discord was headed for now.
The layout of the farm consisted of the farmers' home; a barn, which mostly contained their tools, as well as haystacks – no matter what farmers grew for profit, they always set aside some land to grow grass for hay, since it appeared to be the main staple of the pony diet; a brewery, where they squished the fruits and turned them into delicious drinks, spoiled weird drinks that tasted kind of bad and made Discord's head spin, and totally awful sour liquid that wasn't even a drink, though sometimes he smelled that ponies mixed it with oil and put a little bit of it on their salads; a place attached to the brewery where they put the drinks (and the yucky stuff) into bottles; and a large cellar that stretched under all the buildings and served as a storehouse for everything yummy. The farmers were all out working in the field today, none of them in the brewery or the bottling place, which was good. Discord couldn't tell what bottles were what, because they didn't have labels yet, and if he pulled the corks out or took the lids off he wouldn't be able to get them back on, and besides there were a lot more bottles down in the cellar. With no one in the brewery or the bottling plant, it was a good bet that probably no one was in the storehouse either.
There were two ways to get from the bottling plant down to the cellar. There was a pair of double doors, locked, which Discord knew from the last time he'd been here led to a ramp down into the storehouse. And there was a large basket, made of metal lattice and lined with woven straw, attached to a rope and pulley contraption, which would go straight down. The basket was not large enough for a pony, but could easily accommodate Discord if he curled up. It was also totally unlocked. He grabbed the rope, figured out which side did what, used his magic to release the catch holding the rope, and used his paws to lower himself by tugging on the part of the rope that made the basket go down.
The cellar was cold. Discord shivered, hugging himself. He didn't like the cold. But the reward for enduring it was right in front of him. Racks and racks of labeled bottles. While Discord couldn't read the labels, he'd learned through trial and error to recognize them. The ones with blocky lines and simple pictures of apples or grapes were the ones for him. The ones with fancy, curly lines on them were the ones that would make his head feel funny and make the world go all spinny if he drank them. And the ones with blocky lines but no pictures were the nasty stuff. Discord collected as many of the nice apple and grape bottles as he could fit in his bags while still leaving room for treats, and added one of the fancy label ones, because sometimes it was fun to drink a little bit of that stuff and get all silly and dizzy and then fall asleep. Not much, because it didn't taste good, but the effects were fun enough to make him overlook the taste once in a while. He didn't take any of the nasty ones. Why did ponies even have bottles of nasty sour liquid that no one would want to drink?
On exploring deeper into the cellar, he found the treats. Jars of dried up grapes and dried flakes of apple. Jars of hay flakes with sugar and the dried fruits – which kept forever, and was the only way Discord could stand to eat hay, otherwise the most boring food in existence. Jars containing mixtures of nuts and dried fruit, a delicious snack that satisfied the same cravings in him that meat did. Jars of canned fruit, juicy-looking and floating in liquid inside glass. He took as many of the jars as he could carry and stuffed them into his bags.
Now he was heavily laden, to the point where he was almost not quite strong enough to carry all these things. The tight-packed earth of the storage cellar was too dense for him to dig a hole, though, so carrying them up and out was the only way. He piled his bags in the basket, tried to hoist himself up with the pulley, realized too late that it was too heavy, and was stymied for a few minutes. If he made up into down, then all his fragile bottles would fall to the top of the shaft and smash. He couldn't simply use telekinesis to lift the basket – unlike the unicorns he saw in the town, Discord couldn't just make things move without any other effect. He could alter the properties of objects, he could make up into down, but he couldn't easily pick things up and move them with his magic the way unicorns could, even if he could make them grow legs and move themselves.
But of course, that was the obvious answer. Discord made the pulley want to turn itself, bringing it to life the way he animated Little Sister, though with a lot less personality. It rotated, squeaking, and brought him up to the top rapidly. The bottling plant was still empty. Discord found that he couldn't easily move all of his bags without the glass items banging against each other and making a lot of noise, so he decided on a more careful strategy.
First he snuck back out to the vineyard and dug a hole, connecting it magically with the hole in his cave. Then he went back, and with great caution, keeping himself as flat to the ground as possible, ears perked up for any sound of approaching hooves, he carried each bag separately, one at a time, and stuffed them down the hole. By the time he was done, his hole was actually full, which was weird because on the cave side it was huge. That implied that Discord had stolen so many yummy things today, he'd actually filled the entire hole. He grinned happily.
Now there was only one thing left to do. This was the dangerous part, but Discord would never forgive himself if he didn't take the risk.
He crept close to the farmhouse. The delicious smell of a yummy pie wafted through the air. Discord went through the wall of the farmhouse and hid hurriedly under a kitchen table. There was an elderly pony bustling around, cleaning up after herself. She'd left the pie on the counter. Discord waited patiently, tail swishing like a cat, until she was washing one of her pots, the sound of metal pots and pans clattering in her basin as she scrubbed them. This made enough noise that he felt safe enough. He darted out, grabbed the pie off the counter, and went under the table.
The old pony turned faster than Discord expected. "What in tarn—What the hay is that?" She grabbed a broom and started poking under the table with it, but by this time, Discord had crawled into the far corner, just out of her reach. That wasn't going to last, he knew, so hurriedly he focused on the wall and made it something he could go through, again.
He was a short distance from the farmhouse when the elderly pony stuck her head out the window and started shouting. "Everypony listen up! Some big weird varmint just snuck into the house and grabbed the pie! All of you better see if you can find it before it gets away!"
At this point Discord recognized the part of his plan that was not perfectly well thought out. Inverting his gravity while holding the pie would probably cause the pie to fall out of its plate, and might result in him losing it entirely. Running on two legs would more or less ensure the ponies could catch him – he was much slower that way – but he couldn't run on four legs and still hold his pie in his paws. And with the way his wings ached, there was no way he was going to get any height on a takeoff from ground level before they found him.
This called for a new strategy. Discord wrapped his tail around the pie. He found that it was actually more pleasant to carry this way – the pie was hot enough that it had been uncomfortably warm in his paws, but his tail could take the heat just fine. Now, he had two options. Hide in the vineyard and hope they didn't find him, or run as fast as he could for the woods.
Hiding was boring, and if they caught him, he'd have little opportunity to get away. Running allowed him to taunt them with how awesome he was, stealing their pie right under their muzzles and getting away with it in front of them. So running it was. He shifted his paws so they'd all work like the lion paw and ran, flat-out, making a beeline for the trees near the roadside.
Of course the ponies saw him. "There he is!" Discord glanced back at them, and swallowed. Ponies were some of the fastest creatures in the world. They were gaining on him and would plainly intercept him before he made it to the trees. Changing his direction at random wouldn't help very much, because what he gained in confusion he'd lose in having to cover more distance. Time to try something.
Discord focused hard on the ground beneath his feet. Be like ice, be like ice! He didn't want it cold, just smooth and slippery, but he couldn't keep his focus tight enough, and the ground actually iced over, turning as smooth and slick as a pond in winter. Discord was prepared for the change, and his lion paws, with their soft padding, were well equipped for sliding, so the moment the ground turned to ice, he stopped running and let momentum push him forward. He shifted his dragon leg back to its own properties and used it to kick, while the other three feet all behaved like lion paws and let him skid forward.
Ponies, neither so well equipped for skating nor as prepared to expect it, slipped, skidded, and fell behind him, the fastest and closest ones only losing their footing that much faster. Discord laughed at them tauntingly. If he wasn't genuinely worried about what would happen if they caught up with him, he might have stopped to giggle hysterically, because the sight of ponies slipping and falling, trying to get up and then having all four hooves skid out from under them in opposite directions, was incredibly funny. "Thanks for the pie, ponies!" he yelled back at them as he skated away, knowing they couldn't understand him – he understood pony reasonably well, but no pony he'd encountered seemed to realize that the draconequus tongue was even a language.
By the time the magic faded and the ponies were able to renew their pursuit, Discord had made it to the trees, where his small wings were sufficient to get him up high enough that ponies couldn't hope to climb after him, or even see him in the tree cover. He heard them bucking trees a distance away from where he was, shouting to each other about trying to knock "that varmint" onto the ground, but they had no idea how fast he could move through the high branches, and oak trees weren't nearly as responsive to bucking as apple trees anyway. As much as he wanted to laugh at them, he kept it to a muffled snicker until he was far enough away that there wasn't any real chance of them catching him.
Then he sat down in the oak tree he was currently perched in, tail wrapped around the branch for security, and proceeded to eat half the pie then and there.
With a belly full of pie and other treats, he couldn't face making the trek home without a nap. He dropped the rest of the pie on the ground below the tree and stretched out to sleep on a tree branch, tail still twined around it and paws wrapped around it, claws dug into the bark.
By the time he finally got home, he was very, very sore, and considered putting off his butter play date with Little Sister until tomorrow. But he had promised.
"Little Sister!" He lifted the dome off her and gathered her up in his arms, his power reaching out to her to wake her up. "I'm back!"
"Discord!" Her eyes came to life, focusing on him. "Yay! I'm so happy! Did you get butter?"
"Tons of it! And milk, and cheese, and fruit, and juice!" He opened one of the bottles of grape juice and chugged half of it. "Wanna play?"
"Yes, yes, yes!" She clapped her paws together.
The thought occurred to Discord that he didn't actually need to smear butter all over everything – if he could turn the ground to ice, couldn't he just give trees and rocks the trait of "slippery"? But he felt that peculiar hollowness he got when he was running low on magic, and his head hurt a little, so he didn't want to push it. If he used up all his magic, what would keep Little Sister alive?
He warmed the butter up by putting it in the pot and setting it over Fire, and then added some leaves and twigs and other fast-burning materials to Fire to get it woken up too. The ache in his magic eased some as Fire roared to life; he couldn't feel it unless he'd been really pushing himself to his limits, but when he was depleted like this, he could feel that Fire burning things filled his magic back up a little, the same way it made him warm. What he needed was mushy butter, not liquid butter, so it only took a minute or two, and then he took the butter and, with Little Sister's help, spread it all over the trunk of a nearby tree, one that had a smooth bark to begin with. Flying up to the top of the tree was too hard with the way his wings ached, so he climbed up his mountainside a bit for some height, then jumped and flew into the top of the tree, then climbed down to where the branches ended, smeared himself and Little Sister with butter, and slid.
It was more fun to butter the smooth rock that ran down the side of the mountain, near the riverbank, but that took even more butter. Discord and Little Sister shrieked as they slid a good distance down the mountain. Then Discord climbed, and Little Sister flew, back up to the top of the buttery slide and did it again.
By the time they were done playing, Discord was completely worn out, almost too tired to wash himself and Little Sister. The cold water of the stream made him shiver uncontrollably. I should try to get some blankets, he thought. Stealing something right out of one of the farmhouses? Now that would be an amazing trick. Dimly he remembered having a house, a long long time ago, where his mommy used to give him warm baths in a tub full of funny suds to play with. Maybe he would dig himself a tub and use his magic to line it with ceramic so he could fill one up with warm water and soak in it. The only problem was how long it took Fire to heat up even one jug of water; it would take forever to fill the tub. Hmm. What if he dug it so there was room for a second Fire underneath it? Then he could have a plug and let all the water out when it got dirty and it would pour into the dirt and put the second Fire out, because he didn't need two Fires to be his friend. On the other hand that was a lot of work, and certainly not worth undertaking really, really soon. Probably all he need to do was steal some blankets to sleep under or dry off with, and he'd be fine.
He made Little Sister fly in circles above Fire, high enough that no spark would catch on her but low enough to warm her, to make her dry off, while he himself laid on his pile of leaves near Fire and let the blaze warm him. Every so often he would stretch and spread his wings so that Fire could warm them too, because that made the ache feel a little better. Afterward he cuddled up with her, even though she was still a little damp. "This was a really good day, wasn't it, Little Sister?"
"Can we play again tomorrow?" Little Sister asked.
Discord grinned. "I have enough food to last for weeks. We can play as much as we want."
"Yay," Little Sister said sleepily.
There was only so much he could play with Little Sister before getting bored, though. Without the need to go down and find food every day, Discord explored the forest, used up most of his butter playing games, experimented with learning how to canoe better and not crash into quite so many rocks, practiced his flying, and even essayed an attempt at building an earth-sheltered tub with room for a fire underneath it before getting bored and leaving the project half-finished. He found animals, and played with them – catching and releasing them like a large cat; putting them on wooden boats and setting them in the stream to see if they would try to swim; making round, ball-shaped cages for them and putting them inside so he could roll them around... it was lots of fun, and the terrified chittering of the little creatures made him laugh, but he'd learned the hard way years ago that playing with the same animal for too long might make it so scared it would die just from being scared, and he didn't want that, so he always let them go before long. He animated sticks and pretended they were mages having a duel. Usually a unicorn vs. a draconequus. Usually the draconequus won.
Boredom set in. He had enough food that he could go for another month without getting more, but he would run out of milk and butter soon – milk because it would go bad if he held onto it too long and butter because he'd used most of it playing. Besides, he wanted a blanket, and maybe new nice soaps. And life wasn't very exciting when he wasn't testing his wits and skills against the dumb ponies. So it was back to the dairy farm he went.
Once again he approached the barn through the cornfield. Once again he snuck in by making the wall into strings. It was almost becoming a routine. He found the exact same magical trap he'd found last time, set to detect if something that wasn't a pony touched it, and laughed to himself. Ponies were so stupid. This hadn't worked on him the first time, why did they think it would work again?
He made a milk jug jump off the shelf, and caught it before it could break, setting it down beside him. Another, and another—
And then magic blazed to life all around him, a spell he hadn't seen before grabbing him and pinning him down, as the alarm shrieked. Discord thrashed wildly, trying to break the magic's grip. No. He needed to understand what the magic was trying to do so he could come up with a clever way to escape it.
When he read the spell, he felt despair for a moment, before beginning to struggle even harder. The spell was triggered when something passed through the barrier without passing the pony check at the same time. Let it happen three times, and the spell would set off, performing a pony check on everything in the dairy and locking it in place so it couldn't move. So when three milk jugs had gone through the barrier without three instances of pony hooves doing so as well, the spell had triggered, locking the milk jugs and Discord into position so they couldn't get up. Anything that wasn't a pony.
"Caught it!" he heard the big stallion, Brick, shout. "Worked like a charm! Just like they said it would."
The yellow mare, Sharp, trotted up to the stallion. "Ugly thing, isn't it?"
Discord hissed, trying to back away, though the spell holding him tight wouldn't let him do more than raise his back end and lower his front. I can understand you, stupid ponies, he thought angrily. You're really rude, you know that?
"So what do you wanna do? It's held pretty tight there, we could probably bash its skull in with a good strong buck," Brick said. Discord's eyes went wide. He'd seen them trying to kill him the last time, but never actually heard ponies admit outright that that was what they were trying to do.
"No," he pleaded in the ponies' own language, or what he could manage of it anyway. "No, don't! I'm sorry!"
They didn't seem to even register that he was talking. Of course not. Ashamed, Discord admitted to himself that he wasn't even sure another draconequus would be able to understand him anymore. When he'd been transformed that night, he'd acquired a tongue three times longer than what he'd had before, and forked, and his mouth had a fang sticking out of it, and he hadn't been able to talk to any real living draconequus, or any other creature either, since it had happened. Little Sister didn't count, since it was his magic making her talk. His speech even in his own language was slurred, thick-tongued, and he suspected he was pronouncing a lot of it wrong. Pony speech, which he'd never formally learned and just picked up from listening to ponies, was nearly impossible; he simply didn't know how to make the sounds they made, not anymore, if he ever had. So they behaved as if he was making animal noises. "Well, it's a nasty lookin' critter, and a smart'un too; I wouldn't want to try to tame that thing. But I heard those unicorns talking yesterday. Seems as you can sell exotic animals to the circus and they'll pay good hard bits."
"Kick in its head and we can sell its pelt," Brick offered.
"Too small and too many weird shapes. Is that even all one pelt? I can't figure who'd wanna buy that to make a fur coat."
His muscles weren't doing him any good against the magic holding him in place. And he'd already tried inverting gravity; his mane hung straight up when he did and he felt himself to be upside down, but the field still held him. What if he used his own magic against it? Magic wasn't a thing, like a wall he could make into strings or a field he could make into ice. But magic was a rule, like gravity. He could make gravity invert; could he make magic invert?
The third mare, White, arrived. "Oh earth below what is that thing?"
"It's the critter we nearly trapped in the barn a week ago," Brick said.
White rolled her eyes. "I ain't stupid. But that don't answer the question. You ever seen a critter like that ever before?"
"Nope."
No. He couldn't just invert the magic. Gravity was a very, very simple rule – things fell toward the place gravity pointed at. Point gravity somewhere else and things would fall a different way. The magic was much more complicated. Discord attacked it from every angle he could think of, trying to make the magic be like something else, but it all tied together.
"Looks kinda like a picture I saw in a book once," Sharp said. "Think it was called a wyvern."
"Yeah, but a wyvern's like a little dragon. That thing – that thing's got a dragon tail, but I don't think we can rightly call it a dragon," Brick said.
"Well, whatever. Why don't we find out if we can sell it?"
"I'd feel safer if it was dead."
"I'm for that," White said. "We're in the business of sellin' milk and dairy, not weird exotic critters. How're we even supposed to keep it caged up while we find somepony to buy it? That spell won't last forever."
Wait. He was going about this wrong. Discord panted, terrified but thinking faster than he'd ever before in his life. The magic did have one simple place it pointed – to ponies. Be a pony, and the magic didn't care about you.
Discord couldn't literally make himself into a pony. But he could make the magic think he was a pony, the same way he could make a wall act like it was made of strings when to anyone's eyes it was plainly still a wall. He focused his magic, fear sharpening rather than scattering him. I'm a pony, I'm a pony, you think I'm a pony!
"Well," Sharp said, reluctantly, "I suppose, if you think it's best, we can—"
The magic released him, convinced of his ponyness, and Discord took off like an arrow.
"What the—"
"Tarnation! The spell ran out!"
"It's gettin' away!"
He'd run right under Brick's legs. The stallion didn't even have the presence of mind to buck until all of Discord but his tail was clear, so the hard kick caught his tail and flung it upward, making Discord yelp in pain, but doing no other damage. The three ponies turned themselves around and began chasing after Discord, and as fast as he was moving he knew he still couldn't outrun ponies.
He could turn the ground to ice again, but the idea of doing the same thing he'd done last time made him uneasy. Doing the same thing he'd done last time had just almost gotten him killed, and if he couldn't get away, it still might. Discord's preference was for always doing different things if he could anyway, and this just seemed to reinforce that that was the smart thing to do. So what could he do? He didn't think he could invert gravity on those ponies without touching them or being nearer to them than he wanted to be. Anything they might have done to prepare for ice would be something they could use for any kind of slippery. Inverting his own gravity was how he'd gotten away last time from this farm specifically, so that was suspect as well.
He could make a solid wall take on the property of a thing that wasn't solid. Could he make empty air take on the property of being a wall?
Discord turned his head – they were gaining on him, uncomfortably close – and lashed at the air with his magic. Be a wall!
And White, who was in the lead, hit it head-on.
Discord grinned savagely, but kept running, no breath to spare for laughter. Behind him he heard Sharp break off the chase to attend to her fallen family. Unfortunately, the only reason Brick had been behind White in the first place was that he hadn't gotten himself turned around and launched as quickly. He was actually faster than the two mares. And the wall had only lasted a second, and he hadn't stopped to take care of White like Sharp had.
Well. The ground couldn't be slippery, but what if it was squishy and sticky? Be marshmallow, Discord commanded the earth behind him, and Brick abruptly landed hard on something that squashed under his hooves, and collapsed, and was sticky enough that he couldn't easily pull free. He tumbled to the ground as well, to be caught in the marshmallow, swearing at Discord angrily as he tried to pull himself free. This time Discord did snicker at him, stopping to look for a moment, before turning back to his escape and continuing to run as fast as his legs and lungs would support.
He was completely out of breath by the time he got to the tree line. And he had no milk or butter to show for himself. And he was too shaken and scared, not to mention exhausted from his run, to try stealing anything else today. He wanted to go home and cuddle Little Sister and take his nap there, where he'd be safe.
"...and they said they were going to kill me!" Discord told Little Sister, outraged. "Can you believe that?"
"Ponies are horrible!" Little Sister agreed. "I'm so glad you fixed me so I don't have to be a pony anymore, big brother!"
"I'm gonna show them," Discord said, clenching his paws into fists, almost snarling. "I'm going to go back and get revenge. I'm going to take everything in that dairy farm."
"Don't do that! If they almost killed you, you should stay far away from them!" Little Sister was agitated. "You have to stay safe!"
"Uh-uh. Now that I know their trick, I can fix them good. I'm going to look for magic and I'm going to break any magic I can find, same way I broke the spell they had on me," Discord said. "They thought they could fool me by hiding a spell under their spell. Well, now I know what they do and I'm gonna look for all the spells! It doesn't matter if they put eleventy bazillion spells inside each other, I'm gonna find them all and break them all. And then you know what?"
"I don't like this," Little Sister moaned.
"I'm gonna take all the milk jugs I want and then make the rest of the jugs turn to sugar. And the milk will go right through the sugar and dissolve it and spill all over everything and it will all be ruined and ponies will never get to drink it, because if they wanna kill me just because I want some milk, then okay! We'll play that game. I can play rough, too. I can ruin all their milk. And I can make all their cheese and butter run away into the forest and then the birds and the little critters will get to eat it and that's better than ponies eating it!"
"But what if they catch you?"
"I told you they won't catch me. I know their trick now! I'll go late in the day when they're all inside eating their dinner, and I'll ruin everything they have. And then I'm gonna go back to that other farm, with the pies, and eat their pie, and leave the pie tin right there so they can see I did it."
"But what if they catch you? They didn't use magic to try to catch you, the last time, they just almost did it by chasing you!"
"Well, if they chase me, I'll make the ground into melty chocolate. Good luck running on that, ponies!"
"That sounds like a lot of magic," Little Sister said uncertainly. "What if you run out?"
"Ha! Me run out? I'm getting better and better all the time!" Discord bragged. "And whenever ponies start running around all crazy because I took their stuff or I made something turn weird, and they get upset and they yell? That just makes me stronger!"
"Really?"
"Yeah, I noticed it that day I did the really big haul. So I can't possibly run out of magic, because if they're mad at me and chasing me, that just gives me more magic!" He rubbed his paws together. "I am totally gonna wreck their whole night. Serves them right. Kill me! I didn't even hurt any of them, why do they want to kill me just because I took some food? It's not like they'd give it to me if I asked! What am I supposed to do, starve?"
"It's totally unfair," Little Sister said, nodding. "Ponies are so mean to you, Discord. But I'm so worried! We have plenty of food – can't you stay here and play for a long time until they forget about you? They almost caught you!"
"I can't do that. Then they'll think they can walk all over me! They think I'm an animal, Little Sister. They can't even tell that I'm talking to them!" Tears of frustration welled in his eyes. Was it so much to expect that ponies would at least recognize him as a talking-animal, rather than a speechless beast? Draconequui had always known that ponies were talking-animals, and the Way of Harmony said that you couldn't kill any kind of animal but especially not a talking-animal.
Of course, what good had the Way of Harmony done his mommy and any of the others? They'd still had to go somewhere far away and leave Discord behind...
He swallowed. He wasn't going to cry about that. Not anymore. It had happened three whole winters ago, and he was a lot bigger now and could take care of himself. And someday mommy would find her way back from wherever that place was that she'd gone, right? And he wanted to be able to tell her he had followed the Way of Harmony when she came back. But ponies talked about Harmony a lot and yet they wanted to kill him! That was just wrong.
No, they needed to learn a lesson. And Discord was very, very eager to teach them.
He was the Principle of Chaos, right? Well. He was going to open up a whole jar of chaos on their flanks. Just wait.
It was hard to wait. His strategy was to attack them when they were eating dinner, which for some reason was always right around sunset. How boring. Why did they even want to eat at the same time every day? But that meant he couldn't leave until late in the day. Normally this would suit him fine – he could spend the day playing with Little Sister, or exploring, or any of the other things he usually did. But right now, he was much too focused on his plans for revenge to have fun doing anything else.
As hard as he tried to wait, he ended up getting there early anyway, when the ponies were still working in the fields. Well. He could be patient. Discord hid in the cornfield and settled down to wait.
And wait.
And wait.
This was unbelievably boring. Playing with an anthill he found alleviated a tiny fraction of the boredom, but not nearly enough. Twice, he almost decided to go prematurely, while they were still in the fields, just because he was so bored.
But finally sunset fell, and the dinner bell rang, and the ponies headed into the farmhouse. And Discord snuck up to the dairy barn.
He inspected for spells. Carefully. There were ones on the doors – apparently they hadn't yet figured out that he kept coming through the walls – and there were ones on the floor, and ones on the shelf. It didn't look as if there was actually anything new. If they were getting a unicorn to come help them, maybe he or she hadn't been able to come today. And anyway if they thought he was a mere animal, they wouldn't think he'd come back for revenge. That was a thing only talking-animals did, because only talking-animals had long enough memories to contemplate responding to an insult a day after it happened.
Discord focused on the properties of each of the spells in turn and warped them. Now instead of looking for anything that wasn't a pony, the spell that had frozen him would look for anything that was a pony. And the wards on the shelves would trigger only if they were touched by ponies. His hack job on the spells wouldn't last long, but it didn't need to. Discord animated all the food in the dairy barn. There was far, far more of it than he could possibly eat before it spoiled, so he gathered the milk and butter he wanted to take, then made the milk jugs all gather together in one place and fly into each other in a small tornado, which rapidly became a whirling hurricane of glass and milk. It was actually hard to stop; by the time he was done smashing all the milk jugs Discord was exhausted, but there was one more thing to do. Spitefully he gave the butter sticks wingness. "Hah, butterflies!" he laughed, using the pony word, since that joke didn't work in his own language. Then he made them hurl themselves like locusts at the outside of the dairy barn, splattering it completely with butter.
Then Brick came out of the farmhouse, apparently drawn by the sound, and charged at Discord with a shout of fury. If he hadn't yelled like that, Discord might have been taken completely by surprise. As it was, he barely dodged the charge.
He heightened the slipperiness of the butter and milk everywhere, making Brick fall and skid into the pile of broken glass. Well, that was an ow. Before Discord could decide whether this called for reluctant sympathy or schadenfreude, Brick flung his lasso. In the dark, Discord hadn't seen it. He yelped as it snagged around his neck, and shrieked as Brick swung him around, flinging him at the side of the dairy too fast for Discord to use his magic to compensate. The blow stunned him, and Brick was easily able to pull him close.
"Ugly thing, aren't you," Brick said. "Welp, better take care of you before Sharp gets out here."
He lifted his foreleg – which required that he drop the lasso – and that was the only thing that saved Discord's life. As soon as the lasso was dropped, Discord was able to twist his body so the hoof slammed down on his bat wing instead of his head. Discord screamed, convulsed like a snake, and raked his claws against Brick's side, making the pony rear up in pain. When he reared, Discord swung his tail against the pony's back leg, hard, knocking Brick over. He bit through the rope, the same way as he'd done the last time Brick had lassoed him, and ran.
"Oh no you don't! You ain't gettin' away this time!"
Brick got to his hooves and gave chase. But it was nighttime. Discord's damaged wing wasn't truly a bat wing, it was a batpony wing, and batponies had night vision. Just as he'd been able to shift his vision to the properties of an eagle's eyes, when he was up high, he could shift it to the properties of a batpony's eyes, and see in the dark. With an injured pony who couldn't see chasing an injured small draconequus who could, in a cornfield, the outcome was never really in doubt. Discord disappeared into the cornfield and left his tormenter behind him.
No night predators challenged Discord on his way home. The mountains were home to bobcats and bears, but they'd all learned to keep their distance from a creature who smelled like ashes and flame, and if any hadn't, they'd have learned why Discord smelled like that. He could summon Fire anytime he wanted to. He'd never had to kill a predator – they always backed away the moment he summoned Fire. As long as he gave their lairs a wide berth and didn't challenge them, they recognized him as too dangerous to try to eat. This was good, because his wing really hurt and he had strained his magic to its limits. If anything had attacked him, he was irritable enough, pumped up on enough adrenaline, and magic-depleted enough that he'd probably have tried to rip and bite it with claws and teeth instead of using his magic.
Little Sister was very upset. "I told you it wasn't safe, big brother!" she wailed. "Now look at your poor wing!"
Discord hissed at her as she approached it. "Don't touch it!"
"It looks like it hurts a lot."
"Yes, how did you figure that out?" Discord snarled, and withdrew his magic from Little Sister, letting her fall to the floor of the cave. He hurt too much to deal with her right now. The wing was broken, he thought, and he didn't know how to use his magic to fix a broken wing.
Well, now was the time to learn, apparently.
He got no sleep that night. Pain kept him awake, pain and his desperate magical experiments to make his wing heal. Making it acquire the property of unbrokenness worked for a few minutes, but just like all of Discord's magic, it didn't stay. He thought he could see a way to make his magic permanent, but doing it would use up all his magic, and he didn't know how long he'd have to wait before he got it back, and what if it didn't work? Trying to make it grow unbroken was as successful as all his other experiments with using magic to make things grow, which is to say it didn't work at all. Giving it the toughness of a dragon wing didn't help because it was already broken. It hurt too much to move it, so he couldn't piece it back together to make the bones stay right.
By morning it had healed, somewhat. Discord didn't realize how absurdly fast this was – his burns from Fire had healed at a similar rate. It ached, and he couldn't use it, but the bone was starting to knit together and the extreme pain had faded. His magic hadn't fully replenished itself, since he'd been experimenting with it all night, but he had enough to bring Little Sister to life.
"Your poor wing," she said sadly, perched on his shoulder and looking down at it. "Well, at least you did get plenty of milk and butter, so you don't have to go back anytime soon, right?"
"Right," Discord agreed. "I could stay here for a month and not go back."
"Yay! I love it when you stay home and play with me!"
"Sure." He forced a smile. "We'll play together a lot!"
But it nagged at him. His pride was hurt as badly as his wing had been. The stupid pony had almost killed him. Again. For the third time. And they got closer each time. And if he didn't go back, they'd think they won, and that infuriated him. The whole point to destroying everything in their dairy barn was to make them realize how much better he was than they were and how dumb they were for fighting him. It hardly proved the point if they almost killed him, and managed to chase him off for a month.
He had to go back. But every time he went back they got closer to killing him. Discord was seriously frightened. What if he did wait a month, until his supplies ran out, and he went back and they were still on the alert for him? What if he didn't manage to get away next time? They'd broken his wing. And it really, really hurt.
The other farm, he thought. The Quench farm. The ponies at the dairy farm knew about him hitting the Quench farm because that was how he'd learned its name, when they'd mentioned it. All the other places he had hit in the past, and the farmers taking their carts to market... he had no idea if the dairy ponies knew any of those other ponies, but they knew about the Quench farm and what happened on it, at least to the extent of knowing that Discord had gone after it. He'd hit there, where so far the worst he'd suffered was nearly being hit with a broom. That would prove that he wasn't unbowed, that he wasn't out of the game. And then he'd take a while off to go through his stores.
He waited a day, playing with Little Sister, letting his wing heal some more. And then he headed for the farm, early enough that the ponies would be in the fields, late enough that there would be yummy things.
In the dim cellar where all the juice and canned fruit were stored, he brought bottles and bottles of the stuff to life, giving them the properties of balloons so they would float, and tiny wings so they could fly. They piled themselves into the dumbwaiter shaft and flew up it, so Discord didn't even need to haul the stuff up. There was too much of it to use his trick with the hole, so he had all the things hide themselves in a bale of hay, where he'd come back for them tonight after the ponies went inside.
And now for pie. This time he found one sitting on a windowsill, cooling. In fact it was cold by now, but he didn't care; it was pie. He grabbed it, hid behind the hay bale, and started devouring it.
He was less than a quarter through the pie when he suddenly felt overwhelmingly sleepy. Funny, the need to nap usually didn't hit him this hard unless he overate by a lot, and a quarter of a pie was nothing, particularly since he had gotten up early enough that he hadn't had any real breakfast, just a pawful of nuts and dried fruit. Discord burrowed into the hay bale. So tired. He brought the pie with him. He'd eat it later, after his nap. He was so sleepy he was actually feeling dizzy, and barely had time to cover himself with hay before sleep took him.
Barking woke him up.
He was groggy, thick-headed. That never happened. Discord was always quick to awaken, even after a nap was cut short. And the sound of barking dogs frightened him, but when he tried to wake up to deal with the threat, he could barely move. Get up, come on, get up! he cajoled himself, but try as he might, he couldn't overcome the terrible sleepiness that still had hold of him.
Then something bit his tail.
Discord screamed. The pain brought him fully alert, but he was still dizzy, the world spinning around him. The teeth in his tail pulled, and he was being dragged out of the hay bale by a growling dog. "Good boy! You found it!" one of the farmer ponies, a blue stallion, said.
"What is that thing?"
"Don't rightly know but it's definitely the critter that's been wreaking havoc."
Discord tried to pull his tail free, but the dog's teeth were well secure. It hurt, terribly, and yet he was still dizzy, and weak, and felt far from alert. The sun had still been high in the sky when he'd gotten here, though on the afternoon side. Now it had descended a quarter of the sky, indicating late afternoon. Discord took a lot of naps, but rarely for this long, and never in potentially hostile conditions like this. A horrible thought occurred to him. None of this was normal for him. Had the pie been poisoned? A sleeping potion in it?
He was surrounded by ponies. Terrified, Discord struggled with the dog, weakly, and then started to cry, from fear and pain. He looked up at the ring of ponies around him. "Please, it hurts, stop, please," he begged. "Stop, dog, you're hurting me, please let go..."
The dog did not let go. "You send them unicorn trappers their message?"
"Sent Apple Berry to go get 'em. She's fast."
"Cheddars wanted to kill the thing."
"That's dumb, it was the unicorns they hired to trap it who wanted to buy it. I think they're takin' it too personal. It's just a dumb animal." The pony who was speaking, a pale green mare, kicked Discord – not very hard, considering how hard ponies could kick, but it hit him in the ribs and made him double over and gasp.
No. No, he wasn't going to lose this way. His head was swirling and he could barely concentrate on anything and he was in so much pain but if he didn't do this, he might die. Discord inverted his gravity, and fell down into the sky. For a few moments the dog followed him, yelping in shock, before it let go of his tail and fell back to the ground, its gravity still oriented normally.
The problem here was that his wing still ached terribly from being broken two days ago. While Discord healed from injury faster than any other creature around, two days was not enough to have his wing back at full strength. So now he was free of the dog, and the ponies, but he was falling into the sky and if he reverted his gravity he'd have to fly on the bad wing.
What he really needed was distance from the ponies. He remembered making the horizon his gravity-point, and how terrifying that had been. No, he couldn't do that. But as he looked up at the ground, he caught a glimpse, upside down, of his mountain. That was where he should point gravity. That was where he should fall toward. Home.
He shifted his focus, flipped as gravity changed around him. For a little while it seemed to work fine; the mountain loomed, far in the distance, and he was falling toward it, fast. But he hadn't compensated for how the forest rose up on foothills before the mountain began, or the size of some of the trees. Discord had only a moment of warning to change his gravity back to the ground before he slammed into the top of a very tall tree. Ribs cracked, and he gasped with pain, before falling down the trunk of the tree, hitting what felt like every branch along the way. When he hit the ground, the combination of the pain, the shock of his injuries, and the drugged pie made him black out.
He was only out for a short while, but it was long enough that sunset was beginning, the sky changing color and the sun huge and orange on the horizon. Why did it look like that when it dropped low, he wondered? Were the unicorns who moved it responsible for that? And why did they always move it in the same direction, and at the same pace? If he was the one moving the sun he'd make it go fast, or do loop-de-loops.
Everything hurt. His tail was still bleeding, and he couldn't move on all fours because the arm his talon was attached to had broken, and a branch had torn a nasty gash along the side of his goat hip. It was bleeding too. There was nothing he could use to bandage himself here; he had to get home. Discord tried to lift into the air, but his wings, while not broken anymore, ached horribly and wouldn't give him lift. Here in the thick of the forest, he didn't dare use his gravity inversion trick; he'd hit tree branches again. So flight was out. He had to make it home on two legs, one of them injured.
For what seemed like hours, Discord limped up the mountain, occasionally forced to go to three legs by the steepness of the incline. He was crying with pain before he'd even gotten halfway there, and he had to stop several times to rest. Stupid ponies. Stupid ponies. He'd just wanted to eat. It seemed like he could still hear the barking of dogs, far away. The thought that maybe he wasn't hearing things, maybe there actually were dogs, spurred him with fear. The sleeping potion hadn't worked its way out of his system yet; he was still dizzy, and groggy, and when he stumbled and fell in the dirt it took all the willpower he had to force himself to get back up and not just go to sleep right there.
He needed his home. He needed his stream to wash his dirty wounds in, because he'd acquired many, many small injuries while his mommy was still with him and she had always washed them carefully, telling him that if he let dirt in them, tiny magical animals that lived in the dirt, so small he couldn't see them, would get into his blood and make him sick. He needed clean cloth to use as bandages to keep the tiny animals out after he washed himself, and make the bleeding stop. He needed milk. He needed to snuggle Little Sister, and sleep in his own bed of straw and leaves, safe in his cave. He couldn't stop and sleep here. He had to get home so he could have those things and then he could sleep. Discord reminded himself of this, over and over, as he staggered up the mountain, trailing blood from his tail. It hurt so much; the bite was on the underside, so if he didn't keep it lifted or turned the injury would drag against the ground, but the bite made it hurt too much to keep it lifted or turned, so no matter what he did the pain got worse.
By the time he got back to his cave, night had fallen, and he still felt sick and dizzy. Honestly, Discord didn't even want to take the time to wash himself, but his mommy had been very stern about the little animals, and having had fleas, as well as having been bitten by horseflies and mosquitos and spiders on occasions, not to mention the time he'd napped on an ant hill... well, Discord was well aware of how annoying tiny animals that he could see were on his skin. The thought of tiny animals he couldn't see biting him on the inside of his body, where his blood was, was scary and gross enough that he forced himself to wash up and bandage himself. Then he grabbed Little Sister and without even bothering to wake her, dropped to the floor, curled around her, and fell asleep. Food could wait until tomorrow.
Dogs were barking.
This time Discord woke quickly, terror shooting through him. That sounded close. Why were there dogs so close?
He heard a pony voice. "Must be in this cave. The trail leads here."
"Smells like smoke. You think some ponies were camping in there?"
"Could've been deer. They don't do fire much, but they'll light up a campfire to chase off bears and bobcats on occasion."
They were right outside his cave.
Discord shrank back, trembling. His cave wasn't designed as a place he could rapidly escape from; it was a shelter. He'd never imagined he'd have to escape from it. It extended fairly far into the back, twists and turns that would stymie a pony... but not a dog, and the further back he went, the narrower the passages were and the harder it would be for him to get past ponies or dogs blocking him in. He was injured, and his magic wasn't back at full strength yet, and he was still dizzy... and ponies were right outside his cave, with dogs. What could he do?
Well. If running wasn't an option, then he needed to scare them away. They smelled Fire's smoke? Let them get a taste of his friend up close and personal.
Discord snapped his lion paw, making the rocks that caged Fire roll themselves away and the leaves on the floor of his sanctuary line themselves up , making a path for Fire to eat its way out of the cave. And then he pushed some power into Fire, making it jump onto the leaves.
He stood well behind Fire, holding Little Sister tightly with his wing wrapped around her so she'd be safe, as he heard the shouts of the ponies. "What the buck--!" "Where'd that fire come from?" "It's coming out of the cave mouth! Get back!"
"Be very quiet, Little Sister," Discord whispered, animating her. "There's ponies with dogs right outside the cave."
"Oh no!" Little Sister whimpered... quietly. "What are we going to do, Discord?"
"I'm chasing them off with Fire, see?"
"Oh, that's clever!"
Outside he heard "Get that water from the stream and send it over here! This thing's gonna spread if we don't put it out pronto!"
What? No! He couldn't let them put Fire out! Fire was his friend, Fire was protecting him! He reached out with his magic but couldn't stretch far enough to find the water. "Stay here, Little Sister," Discord said, putting her on her stone shelf but leaving her animated, as he limped toward the front of the cave and peered carefully out. In the light of Fire, the ponies were shadows at first, but then he saw the glowing lights in different colors, near their heads, and shrank back again. They were unicorns. They had magic too. Discord's strongest weapon was now cancelled out.
On the other hand he'd never seen a unicorn do this. Now that he could see the water they were dumping on Fire, he could change it. Fire hated water, but liked to drink the bad-tasting stuff that made Discord's head feel funny, sometimes, especially when it tasted really really bad and was kind of clear-colored rather than red. Discord focused and made the water into the bad-tasting stuff that Fire liked. Fire roared in appreciation and charged forward, following the path of the liquid to reach out to the pile of wood Discord had gathered for its food.
"What the—" "Stop! Stop, that's alcohol! It turned into alcohol!" "Sweet sun and sky, what kind of magic does this thing have?"
And then one of the unicorns started ripping clods of dirt out of the ground, and gravel, and dumping them on Fire. It was as deadly to Fire as the water had been. Terrified, Discord watched them choke his friend to death with dirt, and could do nothing.
He could bring back Fire. He focused on that. Fire wasn't dead forever. There was no more food for Fire in here, not unless he dug through his pantry and set his own food on fire, so he couldn't use it to defend himself, but he could bring it back once the ponies were gone. He just had to make sure they didn't catch him.
Discord climbed up the wall, hanging onto the rocks up above the ponies' heads. The strange and alien landscape of a cave, with stalactites hanging down like bunches of tentacles or curtains, was normal to him after living here for years, and he'd clambered all over it, delighting in how weird and different it was from the world outside the cave entrance. With one limb out of commission and another injured, it was much harder than it usually was, but by the time the unicorns had finished killing Fire and had entered the cave, Discord was clinging to a batch of stalactites, claws dug into the limestone.
"You think the creature started that fire?"
"It's certainly bollixed up the dogs. They can't smell a sun-bringing thing."
"Hay, look at this! There are crates of food back here!"
Discord bit his lip as one of the unicorns dragged his pantry and his icebox out into the light. "How long has this thing been stealing food from ponies?"
"It's got magic and it's smart enough to put food in crates, so who knows? Could have been a long time."
"Are we sure it's not a dragon? Wyverns are not smart enough to do this."
"Might be a baby dragon, but dragons still count as animals, so it shouldn't change the price."
There were three of them. All three were unicorn stallions. In the dimness of the cave Discord couldn't make out the exact colors of their coats and manes, but they all had fairly dim and naturalistic colors, browns and beiges. They had bulging saddlebags, and the only one whose cutie mark Discord could make out had a picture of a cage on his flank.
Discord started to hyperventilate, and forced himself to stop before they could hear him breathing. Go away. I'm not here. Go away. Unlike the things in the real world that would change to take on the new properties he demanded they take, pony minds were impervious to him. The dogs sniffed around the room, finding his small supply of cloth for bandages and fixing Little Sister, and his pots and pans, and the rest of his food.
"You think the critter left somehow?"
"If it's got magic, it's possible. The Cheddars said they saw it go through a wall, and old Granny Quench never saw it get past her after she drove it under a table, but then it turned up outside. So it could have gone through the wall, maybe."
"Better check outside then." The pony who was speaking started to withdraw to the opening of the cave, and Discord breathed a small sigh of relief. They were going to leave. It would all be all right.
Then one of the ponies said, "Hey, what's this?" and levitated Little Sister.
Discord's eyes went wide. Little Sister was still animated by his magic, just pretending to be a mere stuffed animal, so he could feel her tremble with fear. "Look at that! The thing found a toy!"
"It's in good shape for an animal's toy. Most critters would rip something like this to bits."
"Weird looking thing though. You gotta wonder about the kid who'd play with something as creepy as this. What is it? It's like it's a pony, but with a dragon tail, and the back legs are all different animals."
"Can't imagine my foals would want something like this."
"Naah, let the dogs have it. They've been good dogs, give 'em something to play with."
Fury and terror swept across Discord. Without thinking about it, without considering his own safety, he flung more power at Little Sister. As the unicorn tossed her toward the floor, Discord's power buoyed her wings, so she could flap her way up to him where she'd be safe.
"What the—" "The toy just--!" "Oh, buck, it's over our heads!"
Power yanked Discord down from his perch. He yelped with pain as the unicorn's telekinesis threw him against the wall. Still clutching Little Sister with his good paw, Discord made the unicorn's saddlebags flap themselves, fly up off his back, and hit him in the face, while Discord backed against the wall, growling.
"What is that thing?"
"Definitely not a wyvern."
"Look, it's a half-pony half-dragon thing with mixed up legs, just like the toy!"
"Oh, horsefeathers, I know what it is now. My pop told me about them, back when there were a lot more of them around and we had to hunt them and kill them so they wouldn't kill foals for food. It's a draconequus."
"Hay, I remember learning about them too, but I thought they were extinct!"
"I never heard they were all mixed up like that though," the pony who'd identified Discord's species said. "Wish he was still alive so I could ask him. I thought they were just pony-dragon things, like griffins are eagle-lion things."
"No, there's ordinary pony-dragon things living in this faraway eastern country called Neighpon," the third unicorn said. "They're called kirings or something like that."
"Look at him, holding his toy like he's a pony. You think he knows what we're here for?"
"He's a smart animal, but that's all he is. Probably he thinks we're here to kill him. Be careful. This one looks like a cub, but watch out – they're really dangerous. They used to kill ponies all the time, back when my pop was hunting them."
Discord shook his head. That wasn't true. None of that could be true. Mommy had told him about the Way of Harmony, that the draconequui had vowed not to kill animals for food, or for any reason but self defense. If draconequui were killing ponies all the time, back when this one's father was hunting them, it was probably because he'd been hunting and killing them! It was self defense! Draconequui weren't dangerous animals. Ponies were dangerous animals!
"What are you going to do, big brother?" Little Sister whimpered fearfully. "They're blocking the way out the door!"
And he didn't think his magic could, in fact, make it so he could go through the cave wall. Rock didn't respond to his power nearly as well as anything else did.
One of the unicorns advanced on him, a force bubble glowing around the pony so that Discord couldn't attack him. "Easy now boy. We're just here to trap you and sell you. Nopony's gonna kill you," he said in a crooning voice, as if he was trying to lull Discord into trusting him, as if being trapped and sold didn't sound every bit as horrible as being killed did. A glowing rope rose from the pony's saddlebags and came toward Discord. "Just be easy. I can see you're wounded. I don't want to hurt you."
Discord waited until the rope was close enough that it was almost touching him, and then focused on it hard, making it take on the properties of a chain of flowers. As soon as the pony wrapped it around Discord's neck, Discord lunged forward, and it broke easily.
He tried to run deeper into the cave. He was familiar with the twists and turns at the back of the cave – the ponies were not, and climbing over stalagmites and eroded piles of dirt might slow them down. But as soon as he bolted, the magic of all three unicorns grabbed at him, pulling him back. He tried inverting the magic so it would push him, but there were three different magical fields and he couldn't invert them all and when he tried just one it felt like he was going to be torn apart.
There was nothing else he could do. The dogs were barking frantically, and he knew if he was to have any hope at all he couldn't spare an arm for Little Sister, but if he dropped her the dogs would take her. Magic was doing him no good against three unicorns; he didn't need it. He threw all the power he had into Little Sister, focusing on permanency. His will bore down on his toy friend to make her so she could live without him, so she could fly away to safety and then if he got free he could find her again but at least she would be safe and she wouldn't need his magic to keep her alive anymore. Everything he had drained into the spell, and he felt something click, a change in the shape of the magic, and now livingness was a property she had and not a property he had temporarily imposed on her. "Fly, Little Sister!" he screamed, throwing her into the air as the unicorns pulled him into their midst. "Fly free! Go, run!"
She hovered above him. "I can't leave you here, big brother!"
"Go! I'll get free and come find you! Just fly away and go someplace safe!"
And then one of the unicorns had some kind of terrible smelling cloth and was using magic to wrap it around Discord's muzzle. He lashed out with his claws, ripping it, but then one of the unicorns yanked his paws down onto the ground, and the sudden pain in his talon arm as the unicorn's magic pulled it roughly made him scream. The pieces of the cloth he'd torn came back and plastered themselves over his nostrils and mouth, and when he opened his mouth to get fresh air, one of them flew in and made him gag. His tongue and throat were going numb. Discord choked, and the piece of cloth came back out of his mouth, but then unicorn magic pinned his muzzle closed and fastened a strap around it, while there was still a bad-smelling thing on his nose and he couldn't breathe except through the bad-smelling cloth and he was getting dizzier and dizzier and the world was going dark. On his back on the ground, Discord writhed, trying to get his dragon paw or tail or the wingclaw on his bat wing into position to yank the thing off his face, but against three unicorns, all their magic bearing down on him and holding him to the ground, he was helpless. The last thing he saw, up above his head, was Little Sister flying away, flapping with her butterfly-like wings out toward the cave entrance. He could hear her crying, but she was doing as he said, she was flying away. She'd be safe.
Then everything went dark.