//------------------------------//
// Dragons Are Still Losers But Now I Feel Bad About It 
// Story: Not The Hero 
// by alarajrogers 
//------------------------------//

Why didn't one of you ponies stop me from doing that?

Well, obviously, because from your perspective all of this is happening in the past and I'm either dead or in stone, but really, if you actually cared, you might have found a way around that. It is so terribly, blatantly obvious when I reread my last chapter that I was mind-whammied into going and confronting Anon... I mean I started out by saying I knew there were better strategies than just rushing in to kill Anon, and doing that would probably get me killed, and I had a plan... and yet I went and did it anyway.

This scares me. Why am I recording this journal if I'm not going to bother to read it? If it never enters my head to check over my prior entries to make sure that they aren't advising me not to do the thing I've just decided to do, then how can I place a check on myself? That's not Anon's doing, I fear; I've always been impulsive. It's an occupational hazard of chaos. Twilight Sparkle should be the one fighting a mind-warper; she could make a checklist where the top item was to check her checklist and then her checklist could list all the things that she shouldn't do and everyone knows Twilight Sparkle will never undertake anything without checking her checklist first, so if she was in my position and writing on her checklist "Don't go kill Anon because it will get you killed and you have a better plan than that," and then she worked herself up into a rage and decided to go kill Anon, she would check her checklist first and there it would be, "don't go kill Anon." Whereas I don't check checklists. And writing a checklist to myself to tell me to check the checklist would fail at the first step because I wouldn't check the checklist that would tell me to check the checklist. So in other words I'm doomed.

Well. I managed to avoid dying this time. And if I start rounding up my gang of misfits to carry my Elements of Disharmony, they might be able to warn me the next time this happens. Elements of Disharmony don't work well together but there's no reason for any of them not to get along with me, I just have to keep them away from each other. Shouldn't be too hard. I'm going to start recruiting candidates as soon as I'm done writing about what just happened. Because after I write this down, I think that anypony who picks this up after I fall will recognize, beyond a doubt, exactly how awful Anon is and how badly Equestria needs to get rid of him. 

Trying to kill me? Hah, as if any of you ponies would do different if you had the power to. Turning stallions into mares? You probably don't even believe me that that happened. (Check the census records. Do you have any idea how incredibly, unbelievably dull it is to read census records? Do you know I would rather be chopped into very tiny bits by Anon's sword and fricasseed while still conscious than attempt to forge an entire nation's worth of census records for multiple generations? Seriously I know it is going through your heads right now, "But how can we trust Discord? He could have forged the records himself!" No, I couldn't have, not and retain what I have that passes for sanity. My brain was melting out my ears just from reading a few of those record sets. Besides, I can't count, so you can prove it wasn't me by checking to see if the math adds up. If it does, then boom, I have an alibi.) Making mares into rapists? Can't prove that was Anon. Forcing the Bearers to fall in love with him? You're a species that's okay with the concept of love magic and love potions, so quite possibly you don't find this idea as repulsive as I do. (Which is why I'm better than you. When I break ponies and mess with their minds, I do it in a way that makes everypony convinced it's a change for the worse and should be corrected. Nopony wants to keep my violations of pony minds and personalities around permanently or treat them like they're real. Whereas you ponies with your love magic and love potions think that magically compulsory love is just fine!) Messing with my history? You have only my word for it that it was the true history; certainly Celestia and Luna can't tell you differently.

But when I tell you what just happened, you'll realize that in his own way, Anon has caused as much disharmony as I did, breaking bonds as sacred as the bonds of friendship between the bearers, or even more so. You'd have to be a total xenophobe not to be moved by this story. It bothers me, and you all know what a callous bastard I am.





So as I'm sure you all recall from my last riveting chapter, I became overwhelmed with rage after writing down the details of how Anon erased Celestia's (and presumably Luna's) memories of our actual childhood together in favor of some horribly clichéd melodrama where I killed their father (who was the closest thing I had to a father, meaning I was just a trifle more upset with this turn of events than one might otherwise think), and decided to run off and kill Anon, despite having said to myself at the start of that same very chapter that I wasn't going to run off and kill Anon. To be entirely fair, it's possible I wasn't being mind-whammied; I was really upset, and I've been known to do things that were, shall we say, poorly thought out, when I get sufficiently upset.

Fortunately for me, I wasn't stupid enough to go challenge him openly to a duel or something like that. I suppose villains don't get to swell up with righteous rage and demand that the hero face retribution for his crimes; villains get to sneak around and come up with totally underhanded plans even when they're rushing off and being stupid. Thank chaos for that; I've never been more glad that I gave up on the heroic career path centuries ago. Whammied or provoked, either way I had still managed to retain enough of my cool to come up with a plan.

The library has served as the ladies' unofficial headquarters since they kicked Moonie's flank, so Anon's home is technically there, though on the principle that friendship is sharing they have him going over to the others' homes. A lot. Or several of them get together for a "sleepover" at the library, which seems to involve rather little actual sleeping. (Before you call me a voyeur, I should point out that I have been using the Panauricon to gather this sort of information, which means I can only hear the action, not see it. Thus I am technically an audieur or something like that.) My plan was fairly simple: slip into the library at night while they are all sleeping, cast sleep spells on any ponies around as well as the baby dragon, drag Anon out of bed (in his jammies or the altogether, however he likes to sleep), take him someplace safe (for me, not him) like the Everfree, and slowly strangle him to death. Preferably after breaking both his wrists so that if he could somehow magically summon the Element of Protection to himself, he still wouldn't be able to use it. 

As a plan it had some merit. It wasn't an overly complicated deathtrap, it didn't require complex magic, it was fairly simple and it kept all of the innocent bystanders out of it. However, there were some obvious problems that I might have thought of, if I'd been thinking. Strangling someone to death is both slow and boring; if a plan was going to overcome my personal tendency to want to ditch the plan in favor of jazzing things up, it would have to either be exciting in the first place, in which case it would be complicated enough to fail, or I'd have to do it fast and efficiently. I can do fast, but I am not good at efficient. One swipe of my claws in his sleep and he'd have been done for, but then he wouldn't be awake for it and he wouldn't even know he was dying, let alone who was killing him. If my true goal had been his death, I could have just replaced his heart with a baked potato, or something else long distance. But no, I wanted him to know he was dying, and I wanted him to know why, because this was about revenge.

Revenge rarely works out well for me. Can't imagine why not.





Ponies are always very down on snakes for some reason. Why, they call other ponies snakes as if it were an insult. If you want to know the truth, I think they're jealous. See how far they could get without legs. Slithering is a wonderful form of locomotion when you're trying to be invisible without actually using magic to do it; with your body so low to the ground, there's very little contrast, and so you're very difficult to see. Particularly if you are not a bright pastel-colored pony, but colored in naturalistic and mostly dark earth tones. Oh, I'm superb at claiming the center of attention and making sure everypony's looking at me when I so choose, but I'm also one of the stealthiest creatures on the planet when I want to be. 

I summoned clouds – perfectly ordinary, boring, pegasus-made clouds, full of water vapor, nothing to do with cotton candy or chocolate milk whatsoever, or in fact anything chaotic or unusual aside from the fact that they'd been scheduled for a small town north of Ponyville and I'd taken them instead – and used them to cover the moon, throwing Ponyville into dimness. Batponies, cats, and I can see perfectly well in the dark, but the more common pony types can't, so I had excellent cover as I climbed the Golden Oaks library tree, located a window, and slithered in through it. Twilight had wards around the place to block inbound teleportation, but left her window open. I don't actually think this was Anon-brand idiocy on her part; I think my dear little Element of Nerdiness would have made such an oversight under any circumstances. She doesn't think of ordinary pegasi or flying animals as threats, she doesn't expect wyverns or griffins or ikaroi to be coming in her window, ponies can't climb trees and she doesn't expect a threat from bears or minotaurs or cats, and she forgets that in addition to all my marvelous chaos magic, I'm incredible and amazing just on the level of my animal abilities. Twilight sees other mages as a potential threat, and compensates, but who besides Rainbow Dash is going to come in her open window?

Well, me, for starters. I ended up in a guest bedroom, which Anon was notably not sleeping in. Slithering, in addition to being barely visible when you're dark-colored and stick to the shadows, is also almost silent. Twilight's pet owl isn't much of a watch-bird; he spends most of the night hunting for food, since Twilight's too squeamish to catch live mice for him. I'd already confirmed he wasn't on the premises. Had there been a dog present, I might have worried, but Applejack's the only one of the group who has one; Fluttershy has ill or injured dogs recuperating on her premises frequently but no full-on carnivores actually live with her, for somewhat obvious reasons, and Twilight is barely capable of taking care of one pet. It sometimes surprises me that her dragon survived infancy. Checklists or no, Twilight hyperfocuses on things like her studies and really, any book she happens to be reading, and frequently forgets to eat, let alone feed the pets. So no creature in the library was awake, and none had sufficiently good hearing to detect me in their sleep.

Anon and Twilight were both in Twilight's bed, which was too small for a six-head coatless monkey to fully stretch out in, so he was more or less curled on his side, around her. One of his arms was under her neck, and one of her forelegs was under his. It might have looked adorable if I didn't know the monkey had no right to be there. Also, if I thought the sight of ponies being lovey-dovey and snuggly with each other was adorable, which I don't. Also, if I didn't totally despise Anon, which I do. Both were naked, with a thin blanket thrown over Anon's lower body and then Twilight's hind legs on top of that. Of course, ponies are usually naked, but humans are usually not, since they stand on two legs, unlike ponies, and don't hide their genitals inside their body, like me, dragons, minotaurs, and practically every other bipedal creature actually native to this planet, with the result that the male ones have really stupid-looking floppy things hanging between their legs when they're unclothed. (Let it not be said that I have no appreciation for male genitalia. Quite aside from my great appreciation of my own, I've found great enjoyment in the equipment of others, over the years. Sex is much too much fun to limit oneself to playmates of a single given gender. But like any sports or gaming equipment, genitals should be put away when not actually in use, otherwise they get in the way and look quite silly.)  

I smirked to myself. Possibly because of how dumb they look without clothing, humans find it humiliating to be seen that way outside of sexual, medical or hygienic contexts. Anon was the sort who expected his death, when it came, to be heroic and noble. Instead he was going to die butt naked and too busy choking to make any brave final speech, far from his friends, with my tail around his neck, and then I'd leave him in the forest to be food for wild creatures. There are more ignoble deaths, but they'd take more work to set up and run a greater risk of him escaping his fate.

Spike was sleeping in his usual bed, at the foot of Twilight's. I frowned at that. Exposing kids who are too young to start having sex yet to sexual situations is just rude. Rather like eating cookies and not sharing any, except that the person you're not sharing with is just as likely to be nauseated by your cookies as to want any. Of course, dragons are infamous for being able to sleep through almost anything, so perhaps they kept their activities restrained to his sleepytimes, but with an entire guest room why hadn't they given the little dragon his own room? 

Well, it wasn't going to matter soon, I thought, because I was going to remove the problem from both of their lives, and solve everything. 

For a moment – just a moment – I actually considered biting the three of them. If I haven't emptied it for safety or changed what's inside it to some other substance, the venom sac attached to my fang contains a potent hallucinogen. I use it so rarely I sometimes forget I even have it, as biting is rather brute and animalistic – I am an intelligent, sophisticated creature of chaos, not a mindless, speechless beast – and because I prefer to create chaos in pony minds through magic, not drugging them. I did at one point have a cult who actively brought me gifts and showered me with attention in exchange for my biting them with my fang – they called it the Mark of Chaos and did everything in their power to persuade me to let them trip out on my venom as much as possible – but obviously they haven't been around in a while. Normally the thought of biting my opponents never even enters my head. But ever since making the decision to kill Anon without using magic, I'd been feeling very – hmm, how to put this. Very much in tune with my animal nature. The thought of using my claws and teeth and fang was appealing, rather than appalling as it usually is. And with my venom in them neither Twilight nor her baby dragon would be in any shape to be able to fight me; they'd be much too busy cooing at the green elephants in tutus morphing into baby carrots with giant eyeballs. 

But no, I decided. I didn't like the idea of using something that many ponies (and griffins, and goats, and minotaurs, and you get the idea) had considered something precious and desirable, and had begged me for, as a weapon. Twilight and Spike and Anon wouldn't appreciate my hallucinogenic venom, and therefore I wasn't going to give it to them. Nyaah. If Twilight and Spike woke up while I was preparing to kill Anon, then fine, they could watch helplessly as I dragged him away to his fate. Once he was dead, hopefully their heads would clear and they'd realize what a favor I'd just done them.

First things first, though. The Element of Protection was still on a chain around Anon's neck, even in his sleep. I examined the chain – not the element itself, it made me rather ill to look at it with my magical senses, just the chain --  and determined it to be a perfectly normal, non-magical, soft gold chain. The Element of Protection radiating its distorted harmonics so close to it would prevent me from using the trick I used on Winnie's chain, and just making it snap with magic. But a gold chain is soft enough for me to tear it with my bare hands. So I slithered over to the side of the bed, reached up, very delicately took the chain from the back of his neck with my eagle talon... and yanked, hard.

This woke him up, of course, but I grabbed his free wrist, the one not pinned under Twilight, with my lion paw, and yanked him off the bed before he had time to do much more than thrash. The broken chain slipped off his neck, and the Element of Protection clattered to the floor and went bouncing under the bed. I wrapped my tail around his neck and flew upward, giving me more clearance to let his body dangle down without his being able to touch the floor. Of course he pulled at my tail with the hand I wasn't holding, the one that had been under Twilight before I snatched him off the bed, but my tail is covered in dragon scales and is significantly stronger than a boa constrictor. Pulling at it and digging his miniscule flat claws (I believe humans call them nails, but I can't imagine why – nails are supposed to be sharp, long and skinny, and human nails are none of those things) into it did him no good whatsoever. He also tried to get his other hand free from my talon. He was having a bit more success there – my talon is my more dexterous arm, but not my strongest one, and Anon might have actually been a bit stronger than me there. On the other hand, my talon has claws. Once I dug them into his wrist hard enough, he stopped moving his arm quite so much.  He kept trying to kick me, but since he was hanging in front of me, and humans aren't designed so well for back kicks, he just kept hitting my tail or my dragon leg, which, again, dragon scales. I barely noticed.

Twilight, of course, woke up. Her horn lit up, at which point I snapped my fingers and collected it in my lion paw. "Ah-ah-ah, Twilight, you could hurt someone with that if you're not careful!" I said, and stuck it in a wall sconce I had just made for it. It was still alight with the magic she was trying to cast, and shone a dim purple glow in the darkened room.

Then something very sharp bit the back of my tail.

"Agh!" I yelled, and instinctively swung my tail at the thing that bit me, which resulted in me whacking Spike with Anon and sending him rolling across the room. (Dragon teeth can get through dragon scales, apparently.) This put Anon in a position where he was actually able to kick me in the ribs and wing, hard, but I didn't let go of him. Instead I snapped my talon (which for obvious reasons was no longer holding Anon's wrist), and suspended both Spike and Anon in front of me, rings of energy around their necks. Human necks being as weak as they are, Anon had to hold onto the energy ring I had suspended him by, or he'd have strangled under his own weight. 

"Anon!" Twilight screamed, and tried to charge me, but I made a flicking motion and flung her backward, into the bed.

I had just had a much better idea than carrying Anon off and slowly strangling him, I thought, and grinned at the three of them. I was going to make him suffer before he died by making the pony he'd mind-controlled into being one of his six fillyfriends sentence him to death.

"How sweet," I said. "Even without your horn, you're still willing to fling yourself bravely into battle with the Spirit of Chaos to save your boytoy and your pet dragon. Tell me, Twilight, what were you planning to do? Stomp on my foot? Buck me in the leg?"

"Let them go!" she screamed at me.

"Mm, not yet. I have a fun game we can play first! It's called 'Who Does Twilight Truly Love?'"

"Let them go now, Discord!" 

Anon choked out, "Twi – E'men – unner bed!"

"Oh no no no," I said, chuckling. "Twilight, make one move toward the underside of that bed and you'll doom both of them. And you, monkey, be quiet. The grownups are talking." I tightened the energy ring around Anon's neck enough that he had to gasp to suck in any air. 

"Please," Twilight said, her eyes starting to fill with tears. "Please don't hurt them."

"Well, that's up to you, my dear." I let the lights blaze up in the room and surrounded us with cameras, screens displaying the faces of my captives – Spike absolutely terrified, wide-eyed, digging into my energy ring with all the strength in his little claws (uselessly – an adult dragon actually might have been able to cut through that ring, which was why I didn't bother using anything like it on Winnie, but Spike was much too young and weak to manage it), and Anon, gasping and turning purple. "It's time to play Twilight's Choice!" 

In front of Twilight's face I manifested a doll, a smiling toy pony with button eyes and a floppy body made of rags. It was made to look remarkably similar to the one she'd made her entire town go mad about the week after she'd turned me to stone. (So many Ponyville residents had dreams about that doll and their own mad obsession for it, it wasn't that hard for me to figure out what was going on, even though I was once again paralyzed in darkness at the time.) I hadn't actually taken her doll or duplicated it perfectly, since to be honest, I'd only seen it in the dreams of ponies and had no idea what exactly the thing looked like or where it was, but it was similar enough that I hoped it reminded her. Another golden, glowing energy ring, just like the ones I had around Spike and Anon, held the doll up by the neck. 

"Our contestant for this evening is Twilight Sparkle!" I said. "Now, Twilight, since you're new to our game, here is how it's played. You're going to pick one of these two fine fellows for me to let go. And the other one..." I made a pincer motion with my talon, and the energy ring around the doll's neck contracted violently. The doll's head popped off and went flying, shedding stuffing, while its ragdoll body dropped to the ground.

Twilight started shaking her head. "No, no," she said, starting to cry. "Please, Discord, please let them both go, please..."

"Sorry, no can do! Those are the rules. Two ponies enter, one pony leaves! Well, technically, neither of them are ponies, but you know what I mean." I let the spotlight fall on Spike, and the camera zoom in for a closeup. "Who will you save? Will it be the dragon you've raised from an egg? Your faithful assistant, best friend, and errand boy? The little guy you hatched, who sleeps at the foot of your bed and treats you like his big sister?" The spotlight switched over to Anon. "Or the guy you just met that you inexplicably fell madly in love with and decided to share with all your best pony pals?" I left a spotlight on both of them, and closeups on two different screens, enjoying the look of impotent rage and helplessness on Anon's face as he struggled. I wasn't choking him hard enough for him to black out, just enough to make him very, very uncomfortable in his last moments. Cut my tail off, will you? Try to kill me? Laugh while your sword's Harmony energies disintegrate me? Oh, I was going to get my revenge. First I'd make him suffer helplessness, humiliation and pain, just as he'd done to me. And then I was going to make him watch as a pony who supposedly loved him gave him up to a horrible death to save the creature he obviously thought of as a worthless sidekick, given what I'd been hearing in the Panauricon.

I knew Twilight Sparkle. I'd been watching her since the day she hatched this dragon, after all. I knew how much she loved him. I'd observed her doting on him like a little mother when she was a little filly and he was barely hatched. I'd seen her dream of hand-feeding him tiny little gems and rocking him to sleep in her forelegs, or with her magic. Anon might be her boyfriend, she might even believe him to be her One True Love, but Spike was like Twilight's child, or at the very least like her baby brother. So I didn't doubt for a moment who her choice was going to be.

"Please," Twilight said. "Please, Discord! You – you're not a killer! Otherwise you could have killed all of us instead of just trying to discord us and break up our friendship! Don't do this!"

"Oh, but that's not what Anon thinks," I said, and shook him by his ring. "Anon thinks I'm a vicious murderer. Anon thinks I rip ponies apart with my teeth and laugh about it. And whatever Anon believes, apparently, that's what we're all supposed to be! I wouldn't be a killer, no, but it's plainly what Anon wants me to be, and far be it for me not to give Anon what he wants, just like everypony else does!" That was as close as I felt I could come to telling the truth – I knew I couldn't actually explain that Anon had overwritten Celestia and Luna's memories to make them think I was a killer, or that Anon had been warping our reality to make everything happen the way he wanted it to. I was actually a little surprised I'd gotten away with saying as much as I had, but I guess it was cryptic enough that he, or his power, was too stupid to figure it out. "So today I can be a killer, Twilight. One of these two will live and one will die. Right here, right now, right in front of you. Which will it be?"

"Twilight," Spike whimpered – I wasn't choking him too hard for him to talk. "Please..."

I saw Anon mouthing "Save the kid" at her. Oh, how heroically droll. I knew he was only saying that because heroes are supposed to, and that he didn't think for an actual moment that she really would—

"Anon then," she said, and choked on a sob, her head lowered.

I stared at her. Had I heard that right? "Excuse me?"

"Anon, then! Let him go! Equestria needs him – needs him more than, than... Spike..." She collapsed to four knees, crying. "Let Anon go and kill Spike, then, if you have to kill someone! Equestria needs him... I need him! Please, let him go!"

I didn't look at the screen that showed Anon's face. My eyes fell on the one that showed the little dragon's. His eyes so wide and horrified, filling with tears, the betrayal plainly crushing him. And then he squeezed his eyes shut and dropped his paws from the ring, his head bending forward as much as the ring would allow. I can sense disharmonious emotions. Usually, I enjoy them. Usually, when I feel such despair radiating from a creature because I pushed a family member into abandoning or betraying them like that, it gives me gleeful satisfaction.

But this stunned even me. I'd made pony mothers reject their foals before, but not to death. Not for the sake of their deep and profound mind-whammied love for someone they'd met a month ago. And not someone I'd been watching their entire lives, someone I'd seen love and care for the one they'd just betrayed.

For a moment, just a moment, I was about to do it. End the little dragon's life. Force Twilight Sparkle to live with the consequences of the choice she'd just made, for the rest of her existence. I was utterly disgusted with Twilight, and I wanted her to suffer for the choice she'd just made.

But I hadn't come here to do that. I'd come here to kill Anon, and my little game had just failed, and by the terms of the rules I'd set up I was supposed to let him go now, but I was more disgusted with him than I had ever been. It wasn't Twilight's fault she had never been strong enough to resist Anon's power. I wasn't strong enough to resist Anon's power.

I'd just been played. He was trying to turn me into a sadistic killer who'd murder a little boy, after forcing his older sister to sacrifice him. I'd said it myself, I was going to be a killer today because that was what Anon wanted me to be. And of course I couldn't kill Anon himself, the heroic narrative would never allow that. I was supposed to kill the baby dragon to prove what an irredeemable monster I was. And I'd have done it, too, if I hadn't been staring at his face in the screen at the moment Twilight betrayed him.

I remembered crying in a cage, begging for my mother to come back for me, to save me, and I remember the moment when I realized she never would. Now that I'm an adult, I know that she couldn't come back for me because she was dead. But at the time, when I was so desperate and alone and I needed her so badly, the realization that she wasn't coming felt like abandonment, the same as it had felt the night she died and they all died and I was left all alone, and no matter how much I called for her she never came.

And Twilight wasn't even dead. She'd just abandoned Spike to die, in front of his face. I knew she was mind controlled, but he didn't.

I didn't want the baby dragon dead. The fact that I'd even thought for a moment of going through with it and killing him horrified me. And in that moment when I was stunned, reeling in my mind with horror, Anon twisted himself around, hanging onto the energy ring with both hands, and kicked me in the face.

Now I was really stunned. I dropped them both, the energy rings vanishing. You'd think Anon would need time to recuperate after nearly being strangled, but no, he grabbed me by my tail and swung me into the wall, hard. "You son of a bitch!" he screamed at me, repeatedly flailing me at the wall, first in one direction and then in the other, which led to my hitting a lot of furniture along the way too. I might have enjoyed the mess I was making of Twilight's room if it wasn't being made by me being flung back and forth. Half my antler snapped off, my jaw broke, and I ended up with whiplash, a horrible ache in my back and neck, and a concussion. "You fucking asshole! How dare you put Twilight through that! How dare you!" I was too dazed to fight back or even struggle very much, it all happened so fast. 

"Anon! I've found the Element!" I heard Twilight say.

Anon dropped me. "Give it here. I'm going to end this fucker once and for all."

I lifted my head, and saw Spike staring at me. Well, actually I saw three Spikes staring at me and a lot of random blobs of darkness floating around the room. Twilight had gotten her horn back when I'd lost control of my magic, so my spotlights were all gone but the normal magical room lighting was on, and they weren't playing nice with the concussion I'd just acquired.

There was Twilight, still focused on Anon, bringing him a weapon to kill me with, paying no attention to her little dragon at all. There was Anon, full of self-righteous fury, entirely focused on beating and killing the villain and not at all on helping my victim. And there was Spike, all three of him, eyes still full of tears, looking at me with an expression I couldn't read. Sadness? Weariness? Emptiness? 

Twilight's choice didn't surprise him, I realized. It had horrified and shocked him, but then when it sank in he'd decided that it didn't surprise him after all. Somewhere, somehow, he'd learned that he was worthless to the ponies he loved, or at least, not worth as much as Anon was.

I don't do empathy so I'm still trying to figure out why I reacted as strongly as I did. Maybe because he's a dragon, and as a draconequus I'm closer to his species than I am to ponies... though I'm pretty sure that can't be it, given how many dragon hatchlings I killed during the war. Maybe because I've never seen a pony foal abandoned and betrayed the way I was unless I myself caused it, and I'd done nothing to make Twilight choose Anon. Maybe just because I was so surprised at her choice. I don't know.

I was sick and dizzy and it was hard to concentrate on my magic, but I wasn't going to let Anon kill me. I wasn't going to leave the world in the hands of this creature that could make a mare give up her little brother to be killed and feel righteous about it. He thought Twilight's anguish from making that horrible choice was because I forced her to it, but it was his fault. His power had orchestrated this whole thing, and I had just nearly fallen for it.

He raised the small crystal to the air, summoning power as he had before. The gem lengthened into a sword; his armor materialized around him. And I snarled at him, tongue thick with a concussion and the fact that I'd bitten it several times while he was smashing my head into the wall, "This isn't over, monkey boy."

Then I teleported.





Okay, on writing this down I can see how ponies might take this story the wrong way. I do look pretty villainous here, don't I. I mean, if I'd stuck to the plan and hadn't involved Twilight and Spike, Anon would be dead and feeding the wildlife in the Everfree, Twilight would never have sold Spike out and the world might even be returning to normal right now, except for the part where I'd be coming in with my chaos. But no, I had to gloat, I had to try to torment Anon with being abandoned by his loved ones the way he made Celestia turn on me, and now boy don't I look stupid.

In my defense, I can't know that Anon made me come up with all those mustachio-twirling idiocies; I've been known to do some awfully dumb things in the pursuit of villainy all by my lonesome, like, um, standing around and putting a target on my chest for the Elements to fire at because I was so convinced they couldn't have pulled themselves back together that I didn't bother to look. And I'll confess it, the thought of making Anon suffer emotionally because his lover abandoned him to die was, and still is, much more viscerally satisfying to me than the thought of killing him. I mean, I'm the Spirit of Disharmony, not the Spirit of Death. Crushing love and destroying relationships is my bread and butter, and doing it to an enemy who didn't deserve that love in the first place (and who more or less did the same thing to me by retroactively erasing the one love I ever had) is a very, very attractive notion, even now. So, you know, it's possible that I did all of that on my own, from idiotically and impulsively charging off to kill Anon, to deciding to drag it out with a sadistic game so he'd suffer more. 

But isn't it a remarkable coincidence that if I hadn't dragged myself away at the last second, I'd have ended up validating Anon's belief that I'm a monstrous killer, without actually getting to kill him?

I'm not the sort of draconequus who presents ponies with murderous Hobson's Choices. I'm just not. No-win choices, yes, but not murderous ones. So I, personally, am convinced that that entire incident was orchestrated by Anon, except for the ending, because he, or his power since I'm fairly sure he's not doing any of this consciously, didn't expect me to have any empathy for Spike whatsoever. (Still not completely sure why I did. Maybe because it was the only thing that could break me out of following the pattern some other force was pushing me into, and chaos is all about breaking patterns and defying expectations. Maybe my own power helped me resist by making me suddenly see myself in a baby dragon. Again, I can't know.)

The point is, regardless of whether or not I'm an irredeemable bad guy... you can see how awful Anon is, right? I mean, I'm correct in this, and making Twilight betray her baby dragon was beyond the pale? That is how ponies would perceive this, right?

Well. I'm not letting this happen again. I have three Elements of Disharmony now, and a few candidates to hand them out to. By using the Panauricon, and by taking the form of Twister or other random ponies and questioning the locals in Ponyville, I've identified several ponies (well, okay, one is actually a griffin) who've been in conflicts with the Bearers, and confirmed that three of them have such ludicrously overblown feelings of anger that it's obvious they're being controlled by Anon into being continuing antagonists. For one of them in particular, I happen to know he didn't feel that way between the time he was humiliated by Rarity and the time Anon entered the picture; Prince Blueblood is Celestia's nephew, and spends enough time in Canterlot Gardens that I had opportunity to observe him before and after. 

I'm sure he was quite irritated and humiliated by Rarity's behavior during the Gala (oh, if only stone eyes could have seen! I was right there, listening to most of it, and it was gloriously chaotic... that much chaos, and so much of it created by the new Element Bearers, so close to me, when the bonds that held me had been growing steadily weaker for a decade... it warmed the cockles of my heart. Quite literally. The immediate proximate cause of my first escape was that when I pushed disharmony out at a group of foals, three of them responded by getting into a hoof-fight over moi and what I represent, directly in front of me... but the reason that wondrous bit of disharmony got me over the top and allowed me to break free had been all the chaos of the Gala. But I digress.) He never brought it up, though. He continued to take his walks in the Garden and seduce his weekly mare-toys and terrorize his servants with no reference to "that hideous peasant unicorn" until after Princess Pinkness married her boytoy, and now he more or less bitches about Rarity constantly. 

So I'm pretty sure that Rainbow Dash's former griffin pal and the unicorn showmare that Twilight outshone once were probably not nearly as obsessed with getting vengeance on the Bearers before Anon's power got hold of them. Not really sure how they match up to the Elements I have, though. Blueblood's a shoo-in for Arrogance if I ever did see one, and the griffin's got enough anger issues to qualify for Rage, but Greed doesn't quite fit the showmare. She'd be better for Deception, except that I'm fairly sure Deception is not where I left it. Well, I have my suspicious as to where it might have ended up, so maybe I should go find it, and meanwhile look a bit harder to see if I can find a good match for Greed. I did find a pair of con artists who had a run-in with Applejack once, but it's hard to split an Element between two ponies, and especially an Element of Disharmony. I'll have to interview them, see if I can make them work.

Blueblood, though, is a definite. And now that I know Celestia has been corrupted and anything she ever felt for me is gone, I feel no qualms at all about recruiting her nephew into my nefarious schemes. He already hates Anon, apparently out of mindless racism, though it might just be Anon's power ensuring that he makes a good antagonist. So I suppose I'm headed back to Canterlot. Wish me luck, future ponies!