Essays Index
Pantheon series: Part 1 - Elder Gods and Outer Gods | Part 2 - Greater Deities - Eternals | Part 3 - Greater Deities - The Great Wyrms of Time | Part 4 - Lesser Deities - Earth Gods | Part 5 - Lesser Deities - Alien Gods

A long overdue retrospective of Discord, the Tree of Harmony, and the oft-referenced third member of the cosmic trio.

Greater Deities - Eternals:
The Eternals are trio of beings born from the Fundament of Magic, an entity from the beginning of the universe, which was itself born during the death of the previous universe when all magic was compressed into a single point. When the Big Bang occurred and time began, the Fundament of Magic was ruptured, breaking into three smaller magical constructs. These constructs were the Fundament of Order, the Fundament of Chaos, and the Fundament of Harmony, each of which encompasses a different range of wavelengths on the magical spectrum. This was the inception of the three types of magic, as each magic type originated from a different Fundament.

The three Fundaments of Magic remained metaphysically connected to all magic of their type, and were initially completely unliving entities that merely drifted across the cosmos, riding the wave of the Big Bang and leaking magic everywhere. Their magic would spread to the furthest corners of the universe, forming into souls, empowering stars, influencing evolution, and being converted into matter and other forms of energy. When the Fundaments of Magic themselves finally stabilised and stopped leaking their energy, the magic that remained in them also formed into souls, and the Eternals were born.

The Eternals are classed as greater deities, as they unique amongst the gods for their connection to the magic of the world, which manifests in numerous traits and abilities that no other gods could ever replicate.

The most notable of these traits is that the Eternals, as their name suggests, are true immortals, the only examples of such in the known universe. While both spirits and mortal souls can outlast the death of their bodies, even souls are not immune to being destroyed. The Eternals, however, can survive even their own souls being obliterated, as their consciousnesses are partially merged with the Fundaments of Magic, which are, by all measures, indestructible.

Their connection to magic gifts the Eternals with extraordinary powers of perception. Just by listening through their magic, the Eternals are theoretically able to perceive anything occurring in the universe, so long as it is in some way using or generating magic of their type. However, the Eternals tune out most of this as background noise, and it takes time and effort for them to listen to anything specific, especially if there's a great distance between them and it. Still, this makes it remarkably easy for the Eternals to gather information and learn things.

The Eternals can also draw upon their connection to their Fundament to replenish their magical energy stores. At any time they desire, the Eternals can draw compatible magic from anywhere in the local environment that they may find it, even from the souls of others, giving them effectively infinite magic. The Eternals are the literal embodiments of the source of all magic, and so all magic is treated as a part of them, even if it does not reside within their souls at any given time.

Being part of magic itself also grants the Eternals immunity to direct harm from their own type of magic. While they can still be indirectly harmed by it, such as by using that magic to summon a sword and cut them, this same magic in its pure form would simply bounce off the Eternal or be absorbed. Only magic of the other two types can be used to directly harm an Eternal.

However, even for all their advantages, the Eternals possess one great limitation, which is that they suffer a unique, fundamental incompatibility with other types of magic. While foreign magic types can affect them, Eternals cannot use these magic types themselves, no matter how much they try. Attempting to do so would only cause their own Fundaments of Magic to rebel against them and attempt to reassert the correct magic type. The Tree of Harmony could risk lobotomising herself, Discord could drive himself mad or lose control of his own powers, and Order could lose all free will and become a slave in his own body, an unthinking automaton with only a desire to enslave and control.

To prevent this happening, the Fundaments of Magic automatically reject emotional energy that would normally be converted into incompatible magic, and sometimes even forcibly convert it into compatible magic instead, even if this is at a large energy loss. As such, the souls of the Eternals remain magically pure even after thirteen billion years, a feat that is thought to be impossible for others.

The Eternals, like all other gods, were unintelligent, feral beings when they were first born, with only simple desires. They each wished to cover the universe in their own type of magic, and to do so implicitly involved destroying the other two types. This was impossible, as all three Eternals were true immortals even then, but they nonetheless engaged in this pointless struggle for eons. This began what is now known as the Eternal War, a conflict that has spanned all of history and been fought all across the universe.

When organic life emerged, the Eternals began to inhabit mortal bodies, and in doing so, their fights became physical as well as magical. The Eternals killed each other many times and in many forms, but this was what finally facilitated their evolution into sapient beings, as when sapience emerged in the mortal species whose bodies they inhabited, so too did it emerge in the Eternals.

With intelligence came emotion, and the ability to learn. The Eternals developed complex spells to fight one another with, invented ideologies and philosophies that supported the development of their compatible magic, and made allies and enemies of other sapient beings. From then on, the Eternal War raged across the stars, drawing in whole planets of mortals and whole pantheons of gods to support one side or the other. Soon, one's position in the Eternal War was one of the most important facets of cosmic politics.

All throughout, the Eternals themselves grew and changed as people, with each new reincarnation allowing them a new childhood and new life experiences.

The Tree of Harmony:
The Tree of Harmony is the Eternal born from the Fundament of Harmony, and consistently takes the form of a living crystal tree, for which she takes her name. Despite preferring to take the form of a sexless plant species, she is very much a sapient entity, and does have a gender, identifying as a female due to her protective and motherly nature.

She is the least-known of the three Eternals, and has the smallest presence in the Eternal War, as she does not field armies nor unleash monsters on her enemies as her two main rivals do. Rather, the Tree of Harmony fights an ideological battle, working from the shadows in order to improve the lives of others and promote peace, safety, and happiness. In doing this, she leaves behind content and peaceful societies that are able to rule themselves and function without her, but which are also strongly harmonious, and would willingly choose to oppose both Order and Chaos if either ever came to make trouble for them.

In the earliest days of her existence, when she existed in a purely spiritual form, Harmony was just like the other two Eternals, and fought conventional battles of magic in an attempt to assert her own magic type as the dominant one in the universe. This changed with time as she evolved. Although she was not the first Eternal to develop sapience, she was the first to develop a sense of empathy, and Harmony was almost a pacifist even before she started taking physical forms.

As organic life emerged, Harmony spent some time in animal forms, usually as a herbivore, allowing her to develop her consciousness further and interact with primitive societies. As she began to form an understanding of how happiness and other pleasant emotions created the harmonic magic that she was made from, she realised the truth of her existence, and changed goals. Rather than trying to become the dominant form of magic in the cosmos by destroying Order and Chaos, she learned that simply trying to make the universe a better place was a far more effective strategy. Order and Chaos could not be destroyed, but they could be starved.

This was the selfish motive that began Harmony's quest, but over time, it evolved into a genuine sense of altruism. At first, Harmony desired a static world, where people could be happy forever, without Order's fear and tyranny, or Discord's anger and confusion. However, in time, her empathic nature led her to see good qualities in her rivals as well, and she came to recognise the value of the rationality and logic that Order championed, as well as Discord's desire for freedom, creativity, and passion. This led Harmony to redefine herself not as a third faction of the Eternal War, but as a bridge between sides who embodied the best of both, while still opposing their worst qualities.

The crystal tree species that her spirit now inhabits, known as the archtrees, were Harmony's own creations, made to help serve this purpose. Their crystalline forms are rigid and strong, like Order, but their garish colours and the contradictory nature of living organisms made out of minerals is representative of Discord's creative chaos. The Tree of Harmony seeds new archtrees as needed, which can grow extremely fast, and these archtrees all form a telepathic hivemind with each other. Through this, the Tree of Harmony can spread her will as far as needed, and can jump bodies immediately if a particular archtree is slain.

The Tree of Harmony's standard operating procedure in the Eternal War is to send out her friends and allies to seed new worlds, upon which she then grows an archtree to inhabit. Individual archtrees may go by different names or identities to the planet's locals, and can vary greatly in their form, but all archtrees are a part of the Tree of Harmony, and she exerts her will through all of them.

Through these archtrees, she can telepathically communicate if need be, but more often, she simply spreads her magic and uses spells to pacify violent creatures and empower peaceful ones. In some cases, she lends her direct magical assistance in bringing down dangerous threats, and protects the vulnerable, but more often than not, she works from behind the scenes, and only communicates cryptically, if at all.

After the Eternals made contact with the Great Wyrms of Time and brought the Eternal War to the Time Void as well, the Tree of Harmony also made alliance with a Timewyrm called Moment, who named her the Crystal Guardian of Time. From her, the Tree of Harmony also learned the art of viewing possible futures, allowing her to manipulate the course of destiny. She later made frequent use of this power, often advising her champions and partners through various means to take specific actions in order to bring about more desirable outcomes. Celestia's prophetic dreams and the Cutie Map are both expressions of this power.

Because of this, the Tree of Harmony was the first Eternal to become aware of the Split, the event which created the Borderworld and its network of portals across the galaxy. Having seen it in visions, the Tree arrived early to the planet, and seeded it before her rivals' forces could arrive. She grew herself over a particularly volatile superportal in the area that became the Everfree Forest, using it to spread her influence and seed countless other worlds. She also laid roots in Alfheim as well, designating it and Midgard as the first of the Realms of Harmony. To the natives of Earth, she came to be known as Yggdrasil, the World Tree.

In time, Discord and Order arrived with their own forces, then going by the names Havoc and Borr. Yggdrasil and her followers on Midgard weathered the assaults from both sides for centuries, maintaining their position and keeping Midgard relatively peaceful, while Alfheim bloomed into a vibrant, untouched paradise.

Eventually, Borr made a ploy to seize control of the sun and moon, holding the Nine Realms hostage, and so Yggdrasil formed an alliance of convenience with Havoc to breach the dimensional barriers around Asgard, the Realm of Order where the sun-controlling alicorns dwelled. She granted them the gift of emotions, turning them from orderly beings into harmonious ones, and Havoc stirred them into a rebellion against their master.

During the ensuing battle, Havoc and Borr were both killed, along with many other gods on all sides, and countless mortals. The armies of Order and the hordes of Chaos were both driven off in the end, and the alicorns held Asgard for Harmony. In the aftermath, an alicorn named Odin was crowned their king with Yggdrasil's blessing, and the rest is history.

Discord:
Discord is the Eternal born from the Fundament of Chaos, self-identifying as the Spirit of Chaos and Disharmony to indicate his understanding of the difference between Order and Harmony, and his ideological opposition to both. His choice to not call himself a god, despite truly being one, is so as to not make mortals feel compelled to worship him; while he does desire admiration, he abhors the total obedience that worship brings. Discord has been male in the majority of his incarnations, but he has been known to have female incarnations as well.

In the universe at large, his reputation varies between messiah and devil, depending on the world and how much its inhabitants appreciate his spreading of chaos on their planets, as well as how harmful it was to them in the long run. As chaos is naturally unorganised, Discord has no central power-base anywhere for his mortal followers, who are scattered and isolated amongst the stars.

Being formed of chaos magic, Discord was the first of the Eternals to develop consciousness, but took longer to develop a conscience. Early on, he preferred to take the bodies of predators and other powerful, primal creatures, which were best to fight and kill with. But as sapient life emerged and Discord grew more intelligent, he acquired a taste for stranger and more unusual-looking forms, and began actively using his magic to modify his bodies' appearances for fashion purposes, a habit that he would maintain through every subsequent incarnation. After meeting Hixelkicks, he began to favour her style of chimeric bodies.

Discord chose his name very early on, taking it from a language spoken by a now-extinct alien race, and translating it as appropriate throughout his existence so that it maintained the same meaning. Discord came to be the name that was used to refer to him throughout all of his lives, as opposed to the birth names of each of his incarnations, of which there were too many to count.

As he grew and came to understand the emotions that fed chaos magic, Discord invented an ideological philosophy of chaos, summarising his values and what chaos should ideally be.

Most central to his beliefs were that creative chaos is a fundamentally positive thing, being what makes life interesting, and that disharmony is also necessary to enjoy life for the same reason, because the Tree of Harmony's desire for simple, unchallenging peace and happiness can only lead to stagnation, boredom, and eventual decay. His beliefs also encompass the idea that as order and harmony both encourage sameness and deference to another's will, that freedom is necessary for there to be chaos, and that freedom is therefore the most important thing to have in life, and is ideally never to be infringed.

In the name of fighting for freedom, Discord is a diehard anarchist, and has torn down countless governments and other power structures on many planets, defying authority wherever it is found. Of all forms of government, democracies are the only ones that Discord finds even slightly tolerable, as they allow for at least some degree of freedom, but he still prefers for civilization to exist in total lawlessness, even if he himself has to paradoxically enforce this lawlessness.

Though at first Discord's intent was to eliminate his two rivals and spread chaos magic to every corner of the cosmos, his goals changed over the eons as he gradually developed a sense of morality and empathy, as stunted as it might be. In time, Discord came to recognise that almost nobody but him would enjoy a total absence of order. Thus, Discord's desire now is not complete and total chaos, as it used to be, but merely an overwhelming abundance of chaos, retaining the bare minimum of order necessary to stop the universe from becoming a nightmarish chaotic abyss.

Over the course of the Eternal War, Discord has been involved in many notable cosmic events, but the first one of great significance was his breach of the Time Void, which he initiated after hearing of a clash between Order and a Timewyrm known as Flux. It was from Flux that Discord learned the art of time travel and paradox-engineering, and Flux, who would later rename himself Paradox, was also the one who named Discord the White Guardian of Time, charging him with using his chaos to defend the future by keeping it uncertain, and thus free from the inevitable darkness of Order. Paradox would later go on to become one of the key figures of Discord's side in the Eternal War.

Another of Discord's most steadfast followers is Hixelkicks, who met Discord when the Eternal War came to her planet, Chimeros. When Order's forces occupied Chimeros and began a genocide of Hixelkicks's chimeric creations, it was Discord who came to help liberate the planet, along with an army of his chaos demons. Hixelkicks joined him in gratitude afterwards, and supported him with her talent of blending together various species in unnatural and contradictory ways.

Her chimeras soon became the backbone of what could loosely be called Discord's forces, just as much as the demons, and Discord many times chose to reincarnate into chimeric bodies. In fact, it happened so often that Discord came to identify primarily as a chimera after a few lives, and like most chimeras, he began to consider Hixelkicks something of a motherly figure, even though she was technically a younger deity than himself.

Eventually, after billions of years of constant warfare, creating new species, toppling interstellar empires, enforcing anarchy on primitive worlds, and generally disrupting things to amuse himself, Discord's attention was caught by the creation of the Borderworld. When the Split created a vast network of portals throughout Mutter's Spiral, stemming from Earth, Discord knew that Order and the Tree of Harmony could not be allowed to take the planet. Then in the form of a female chimera known as Havoc, Discord traveled to the Borderworld to stop them.

After entrenching her forces in the new Realms of Chaos, Havoc launched multiple offensives on both of her rivals, unleashing her demons on the Realms of Order, while Hixelkicks and her chimeras shook things up on Midgard, which was under the control of Yggdrasil.

When Borr, the then-current incarnation of Order, took control of the sun and moon with intent to hold the Nine Realms hostage, Havoc and Yggdrasil formed a temporary alliance to breach the dimensional barriers of Asgard and corrupt Borr's alicorns into rebelling against him. Yggdrasil instilled a capacity for emotion into the alicorns, breaking Borr's control over them, while Havoc incited them to rebellion, kickstarting the War of the Sun.

In the ensuing three-way battle, hundreds of gods on all sides were killed, Havoc herself among them, slain by Agamarath, though Borr was also killed by his own creations. In the end, both Order's armies and Discord's hordes were driven off from Asgard, and only the alicorns remained standing, now counting themselves as allies of Yggdrasil. In the aftermath of his latest death, Discord's soul drifted to Jotunheim, where he would be reborn under the name Loki on the banks of the Lost River to the Frostclaws draconequus tribe.

Order:
Order is the Eternal born from the Fundament of Order, and has since very early in his existence gone by many grand titles. To most, he is simply the God, Spirit, or Lord of Order, but he also calls himself "Emperor of the Universe," as he believes that Creation is rightfully his to rule, and "the Dark Lord," in reference to the dichotomy of light and dark between harmonic and orderly magic, and his opposition to Harmony as well as Chaos. Ever resolute and unchanging, he has always identified as male, and has never taken any name other than Order when referring to the entirety of his being.

Order has always been the slowest to change out of the three Eternals. He was both the last of the Eternals to develop sapience, and also the last to develop a concept of empathy. When organic life began emerging in the universe, he at first opposed this change, and tried to destroy primordial life rather than take physical form like his fellow gods. As he gradually grew in intelligence, he relented on his hardline stance, recognising the value of change through learning, and inhabiting a physical body of his own in order to learn.

By growing in intelligence, Order came to understand the thoughts and processes of life that order magic most resonated with. He came to find great value in rationality and logic, and in the concepts of stability, control, unity, predictability, and efficiency. In accepting the necessity of change in life, he also accepted himself as a vector for change, and came to see it as his duty to force the universe to conform to his ideal vision of it. Unlike the other Eternals, Order never wavered from his original goal of destroying both of his rivals in all their forms. All that changed were his reasons for this desire.

At the same time, as he evolved, Order also struggled with his own potential for emotion and empathy, which he saw as a corruption of his being. Although he tried to suppress these emotions, and to become an unfeeling psychopath that only ever thought in logical terms, he often did not succeed. Forcing Order to feel emotions anyway became a frequent angle of attack for Discord and the Tree of Harmony, and positive emotions such as happiness were too great a temptation to him. Eventually, Order had no choice but to accept his own capacity for emotion, but nevertheless he always strived to temper it. As well, he never let his empathy for others sway him from his belief that the universe would be better off under his total control.

Over the course of his existence, Order desired to maintain sameness in his choice of bodies, at first only going for host bodies with simple physical features, very little if any capacity for emotion, and high levels of intelligence. However, as species from different planets evolved in radically different directions according to their environments, Order found great difficulty in maintaining consistency between incarnations. This eventually forced him to begin creating species on his own.

It was attempting to create a consistent, ideal form for himself that led to the conception of equines. Many billions of years before Equestria ever existed, Order created alien species that resembled the ponies of today, and began seeding countless worlds across the universe with the genetic material of this species. Equinoids thus evolved and became prominent on many worlds, often evolving their own unique oddities in the process, depending on their environments. Although most were not totally rational psychopaths, as Order had hoped they would turn out, this was still a great success for his vision of a universe of similarity and unity, and ever since their creation, Order has always taken an equinoid form.

Ever since developing his vision of total unity, Order's goal in the Eternal War has been to conquer the universe. To that end, he currently rules an interstellar empire of which he is both the absolute monarch and patron deity. This empire exists under a culture and set of laws intended to stifle out Chaos and Harmony's influence as much as possible. It is best described as fascist, with Order's control being absolute, rebellion being dealt with harshly, military presence being strong, and glorification of the state and of Order himself being omnipresent to the point of brainwashing.

Although Order does allow his subjects to feel emotions, cold logic and rationality is still championed in his empire's culture. Citizens are encouraged to give up their emotions by various magical and technological means, such as submitting to the control of devices like the Loom, and are incentivised to do so by promises of better living conditions and positions of power in the government or military.

Harsh legal punishments and bans on many basic freedoms, including artistic expression, also contribute to making Order's empire a generally unpleasant place to live. Civilians who still have a capacity for emotion live in constant misery and fear, which only makes giving up their emotions seem that much more appealing. Even if they choose not to, misery and fear are still orderly emotions anyway, and so Order still benefits from making life so difficult and punishing for them.

Although Order himself does not wish to do this, and pities his citizens for the conditions they live under, he views their present suffering as a necessary evil for unifying Creation under his rule, which he believes will be an end that will justify his means. Naturally, many find this vision to be horrifying, and so Order's empire has faced resistance from mortals and spirits alike for as long as it has existed. Rebellions within the empire are frequent, no matter how devastatingly they are always crushed, and Order's military forces have been engaged in constant large-scale warfare across the stars since their inception.

Order is feared and hated by many in the universe at large, even by those who otherwise have nothing to do with the Eternal War, but he does have devoted followers as well. Most notable among them is Agamarath, a Great Wyrm of Time who came to Order's side after he fought Flux and discovered the Time Void. Agamarath named Order the Black Guardian of Time, and taught him the art of looking through time, so as to see the immutable past and the certain future, and to know when the natural progression of time had been disrupted.

When the Split occurred and created the Nine Realms and their portal network, Order came to the Borderworld with the intent to take control of them, then in the form of an alicorn-like being known as Borr. Agamarath and many of his other allies followed him, but they all arrived too late, as the Tree of Harmony had already claimed Midgard and a prominent superportal by the time they arrived. In response, Borr claimed Asgard, Niflheim, and Svartalfheim as his own, the first of the Realms of Order, and began using them as staging grounds for the war.

As Midgard was one of the many planets that Order had previously seeded, he used the native ponies of the Borderworld to create a species of alicorns in Asgard, and sent them to fight Havoc's demons and chimeras. Agamarath, meanwhile, was named the Lord of Svartalfheim, and created all manner of monsters to terrorise Midgard, including the umbrums and the nightmares. Alliance was also secured with the deer and great spiders of Midgard for further strategic value, and a great tower housing a mass mind control device called the Loom was constructed in Niflheim, so as to allow Borr to maintain local control and command reinforcements from the Eternal Empire if need be.

After a long time spent fighting, Borr eventually hatched a plan to take control of the suns and moons of the Nine Realms, with the intent to use them to hold the Realms hostage and compel his enemies to surrender. By dissolving Svartalfheim's sun for power and plunging it into darkness, creating the Great Abyss in the process, Borr did as he planned, synchronising all the other suns and moons in the Nine Realms and bringing them under his total control.

However, rather than compelling a surrender from his enemies, Yggdrasil and Havoc instead teamed up to launch a massive invasion of Asgard, where Borr was controlling the heavenly spheres from. They breached the dimensional barriers into the realm, corrupted Borr's alicorn army to give them emotions, and incited them into a rebellion. In the ensuing battle, known as the War of the Sun, control of the heavenly spheres was lost to the Unicorn Kingdom, Borr was killed by his own creations, Havoc also died, and both Order's armies and Discord's hordes were driven out of Asgard, which then became a Realm of Harmony.

In the aftermath, Order's soul lingered in Asgard, trapped in dormancy by the Tree of Harmony, until eventually the alicorns began breeding, and he was reborn as a colt named Svaðilfari.

Acknowledgements:
-The whole idea of Order, and an absurd amount of what I wrote about Discord, was inspired by the Last Draconequus universe of Alara J. Rogers. Alara's 'verse also has a harmony tree called Yggdrasil, but that I actually came up with independently.

Fascinating stuff, especially the glimpses of the Time Void and the denizens thereof. The changing (or unchanging) approaches of the three Eternals over the course of the Forever War is a wonderful historical narrative. They may not be able to die, but they can still change in other ways.

I love how both Order and Discord are highly imperfect representations of order and chaos, respectively.

But I'd really like to point out that fear is most certainly not an orderly emotion. Depression, satisfaction, boredom, worry, anf fatigue are all orderly emotions, but fear is unpredictable and disorganized.

5658441

Terror is definitely not orderly. In fact, the kind of fear that causes panic is actively chaotic, as Discord himself reveals in the first chapter of Something Cosmic. But when I talk about orderly fear, I refer specifically to the fear that drives one to inaction. Fear of consequences. Fear of reprisal. Not the image that immediately comes to mind when one describes fear, I know, but I'm not sure there's a single word that encompasses that specific kind of fear, whereas there are words that describe the "actively frightened for your life" kind. Call it a limitation of my descriptive ability.

5659033 I see your point. Fear can be used to ensure complacency.
Such shortcomings of language have plagued me to no end.

Sheesh, Order is one screwed up guy. I was initially thinking on how its ironic that the Spirit of Order was the least empathetic person compared to Discord and Harmony even though he wants to present himself as being a good guy. I'm curious about the Mane Six, Celestia, Luna and whoeverelse on Midguard's opinion of Order is. I know that Deer King is his follower (no surprise there) but it would be entertaing to see how furious they would respond to Order's control freak ways. (Now I'm suddenly thinking about Ponies Make War/The Immortal Game fanfic's villain.)

Twilight: I finally understand Order, your just bucking insane!

I was thinking of commenting something about the Time Wyrms, but I'll post that in their article.

5663322

Order hasn't ever actually set hoof on Midgard, so most of the main characters would be hard-pressed to have much of an opinion of him. I can tell you though that both Celestia and Luna know him by reputation from the deer and from his history in Asgard, so while they don't know the true extent of his crimes, they're not fond of him either.

5664255 \
I was just saying if they ever met him, that's what I was meant to say.

Oh yeah, Celestia's 'talk' with the Deer King, I remember that. But woe if they ever find out just how much crimes Order has done, they would be so reluctant in attempting to give him a chance to redeem himself.

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Sure, if the true extent of Order's crimes were known to them, it may be that even a society as forgiving as Equestria would hard-pressed to accept him. But then again, the same is true of Discord. And you also have to consider that we're talking about reincarnating souls here, so it's kind of a murky issue how much their current incarnations can be held responsible for.

5659033
I tend to think of despair as more of the orderly version of fear. The hopelessness that makes you give up. But yeah, there is an element of wanting to freeze and play dead to panic, so that would be an orderly fear.

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Despair is definitely close to the mark. Might edit that in on a later revision. Thanks.

7277745
Glad to help

Random question, but is it possible for the original Fundament of Magic to ever be re-constructed?

Like, say something took Discord, Harmony, and Order's fundaments and attempted to merge them into a single entity, similar to what Starlight pulled in your variant of the wasteland timeline.

Would it become a mindless monster, or would it perhaps gain sapience and become its own thing? Or would it just self-destruct?

Is it even possible for the Fundament of Magic to gain sentience without being divided?

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Oh wow, sorry it took so long to answer this! I don't check here for comments very regularly if I haven't posted anything recently.

Anyway, good question. Reconstructing the original Fundament of Magic is theoretically possible, yes, though it'd take much more extreme conditions than what Starlight pulled in that timeline. What Starlight did was simply drive the Fundament of Chaos rampant by trying to control it with a much weaker dark spirit, which was certainly a threat to Discord and to mortal life on Earth, but was still within (relatively) normal parameters for how the Fundament of Chaos itself behaves. She didn't really change its nature, and she couldn't have even if she'd had the actual opposing Fundament of Order on hand. The Fundaments of Magic in their current forms are just too incompatible to easily fuse back together again by any conventional means. Even if Discord willingly let Order and Harmony try to merge the three of them back together like that, the Fundament of Chaos would still rebel against the attempt.

So no, if we wanted to merge the Fundaments of Magic back together again, we'd need something similarly cataclysmic to Big Crunch of the previous universe which created the original Fundament of Magic in the first place. This doesn't necessarily require all magic in the universe to be compressed together again to pull off, but it does need a Big Crunch level of dimension-warping pressure, enough to break the unbreakable constructs of the current Fundaments of Magic and essentially put them through a blender.

This could probably be achieved relatively easily with some kind of disposable pocket universe to collapse, but it would require an enormous amount of energy, and it obviously wouldn't be very safe, especially not for the Eternals themselves. If they actually carried out this hypothetical scenario and "blended" themselves, this process would shred their consciousnesses too and effectively kill them for good, and whatever being emerges afterwards wouldn't be them. But theoretically, they could avoid this fate with some careful planning. If they separated their consciousnesses from their respective Fundaments of Magic before the blending, then they might be able to safely merge the Fundaments back together in the pocket universe while their consciousnesses remain safely outside. Though of course, this presents its own problems, such as how they control the process from outside, and how they'd merge their consciousnesses back into the Fundament of Magic when it's done.

So it's all theoretically doable, but incredibly risky, and not something I'd ever see these characters attempting, at least not in any timeline even remotely close to the prime ones.

As for the restored Fundament of Magic, yes, assuming that it was a blank slate, it could certainly achieve consciousness on its own like the Eternals did. That's a property of magic in general, not a specific ability of the lesser Fundaments, so it could easily happen. The only reason it didn't happen before was that the original Fundament of Magic only existed for a metaphorical eyeblink between the death of the old universe and the start of the next one. But what this new entity would be like, it's really impossible to tell.

Discord, Order, and the Tree of Harmony were all to some degree fated to follow the paths they did, because they drew their power from different emotional sources, which pushed them towards different ideologies and behaviours which resonated with them. This new entity wouldn't have those influences, because it would freely draw on the entire magical spectrum, and all magic would basically be the same for it. So in a way, it would be a lot more free to choose its own destiny.

But on the flipside, that just means that it would be all the more strongly influenced by where and how it's born, and its life experiences after that. Like the Eternals, it would start out powerful but ignorant, and would have to learn and grow over time, but unlike them, it presumably wouldn't be growing up in an empty universe. If this entity actually lived in the present day of the Borderworld's universe, it would no doubt be influenced by the other gods and civilizations around it. The upside of this is that it would learn, grow, and evolve much faster than the Eternals did. But the downside is that like any child, what it grows into would entirely depend on the quality of its "parenting."

Alternatively, if the Eternals in our hypothetical scenario from earlier succeeded in merging their consciousnesses back into the Fundament of Magic, then the new entity would just be an amalgamation of their memories and personalities, which would be... interesting, to say the least. In any case, the new being would probably hate itself.