• Published 6th Mar 2014
  • 4,164 Views, 139 Comments

Mail Order Orphan - kudzuhaiku



These days, you can get anything through the mail. Fluttershy orders an orphan. Good things arrive in small, if sometimes, confusing packages. Warning, contents may be flammable!

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Discordant Interlude

Discord roamed the Everfree, the very wood that he had helped create. His magic had done this.

His magic.

It had started off small. He had discovered it by accident. A simple twist of fate. After much struggle, more came. The secret, he found, was the pain of others. That was chaos magic. He had roamed the world. Like a thief, he had broken into Tartarus, the prison that the ancient alicorns had created, and he learned from the imprisoned beings within. And then, as a real test of his power, he had broken out. Tartarus could not hold him. Celestia and Luna would discover that later. He had released the denizens of Tartarus during his escape, plunging the world into madness and chaos.

Sweet chaos.

His magic.

With all the horrors of Tartarus loosened, he was free to continue his studies, and the world was full of test subjects. He figured out how to give beings magical abilities. He learned how to take magic away. He could make a pony a pegasus, and the reverse was true as well, he could make a pegasus a plain old pony. Even unicorns weren’t safe from him, or…

His magic.

With his magic, he could do almost anything.

He broke the sun and the moons from their celestial anchors, forever ruining their motion. The damage could not be repaired. He had seen to that.

And those first steps into immortality. Those first few painful steps, learning that anything that didn’t kill him, really could make him stronger. The body had to be destroyed before magic could rebuild it. And then ripped apart again. Little bits at a time, each time coming back a little better than before.

It was nearly too late when the sisters had realised what was happening. They had been too delicate, too careful, just like the other alicorns. They avoided injury. They fled from pain. They were full of weakness, hiding it from the world by calling it gentleness and kindness.

He had destroyed them, those ancient alicorns. How?

His magic.

Their soft living had done nothing to harden their bodies or bolster their defenses. They had came after him, and, one by one, he had obliterated them, their feeble attacks only served to make Discord stronger, burning away his weakness, each time his body coming back even stronger, the previous failing points burned away like so much chaff.

Eventually, there were only two, and oh how the mighty had fallen. Desperation had robbed them of hope, but given them strength. One delved into shadow magic, the other delved into black magic. Shadow magic wasn’t particularly evil, nor was it good. It simply was. But black magic was anti-harmonious. And Celestia had fallen.

He was still able to defeat them. Time and time again, he would be near the point of destroying them, burning them away, singing them, boiling them in acid, drowning them in a boiling sea.

He was perhaps a little arrogant. He didn’t catch on right away what they were doing. He realised it a little too late. They had done what he had done, taking the abuse upon their bodies, using the grievous injuries to rebuild themselves, to shape new flesh, flesh without weakness. The horrors they had endured.

And then he had two nigh immortal foes to contend with, and he only had one ally. One thing he could fall back on. One way to always have the last laugh.

His magic.

He couldn’t kill them. Not anymore. He wasn’t sure how. And they couldn’t kill him. It was horrifying what an immortal being could live though. Celestia had once struck him directly with a solar flare, burning him to a crisp, and scorching a large patch of the planet. It was now the wastelands, down to the south, a huge desert, filled mostly with sand. It used to be filled with trees. She was mad with grief, believing Luna had perished. Discord had been so close to unraveling Luna’s life, breaking her hold on immortality. One more alicorn almost down, with only one left to go.

Luna had lived. Somehow, Luna had lived. Discord had dragged down the second moon from the sky, the small one, the one he could wrest the most control over, and had smashed it into Luna. The blast turned a mountain range into an ocean. The only thing Celestia had found was Luna’s horn, calling it to her with her magic.

Somehow, Luna had managed a miraculous recovery.

Discord could not kill them, so he settled for pranking them instead. He changed their genders. He swapped their precious cutie marks. He tortured their precious ponies. Precious mortal ponies. He had managed to rip away their magic once, their wings, their horns. The sisters had persisted, and discovered the elements of harmony. They restored themselves to their former power and tracked him down. Knowing they could not kill him, they had turned him to stone.

The stoning had only further reinforced his immortality. A thousand years in stone does wonders for the constitution as the body constantly fights back against the stone, trying to rebuild flesh.

His magic.

What good was it?

What did he have to show for it? What great thing had he accomplished? The sisters had built an empire. Carved it from the scorched remains of the burned earth. All he had done is destroy. Ruination.

His magic.

There was one less moon now because of him. The tides have never been the same since. The sea ponies have suffered endlessly. Because of him.

And…

His magic.

And he had suffered too. Why? What did he hope to accomplish? What was there to do now? Return to warring with the sisters? Continue destroying the planet? What about Fluttershy? Ivy? His heart twinged in his chest. There was an odd pain and he found it difficult to breathe. He had nothing to show for his impossibly long life.

His creations had all turned on him, and his greatest prank had almost been his undoing. When Celestia had sent her army of pegasi after him, to buy time so she could go hunting for her precious elements of harmony, he didn’t destroy them. No, he remade them. One huge magical blast, and he tore her precious pegasi away from the sun forever. Where they had once been beautiful, he made them ugly. Where once they could control the weather and hold back Discord’s storms, they lost their ability to manipulate the weather entirely, or to even walk on clouds for that matter. He had made them vile creatures of the night. Who fed on flesh and walked in shadow, hunting the daytime ponies. He tore away their beautiful feathers and gave them hideous bat-like wings. He gave them perfect eyes to hunt in the dark, seeking out their prey. Other ponies.

Until Luna had her way with them. She had turned them against him. And his creations were truly horrible, vile, and hardened against his magic. He couldn’t undo what he had done. Killing them was difficult and time consuming. They weren’t fragile like the pegasi of the day. Killing them required dedicated effort, and they had come at him by the thousands. He made a great accounting of himself before he finally had to retreat, the wretched lunar pegasi becoming his bane. Hideous parodies of their former selves. They reveled in war. It was their bread and butter. And it was Discord’s undoing. His prank had backfired in the worst way possible.

His magic.

It all came down to his magic.

Discord paused, reflecting on his long life…

And his magic.

He was suddenly filled with self loathing. He didn’t want to be in his own skin.

He thought of Fluttershy and her budding infatuation with him. He felt sick. She deserved better. So much better. She was a beautiful creature. Delicate. Graceful. He thought about her gentle pegasus form. And then he thought about how he could turn her into a hideous flesh eating horror of the night, a gruesome shadow of her former self.

His magic.

The problem was his magic.

He hated his magic. It was something he no longer wanted.

Could he be rid of it?

Discord didn’t know.

But the thought was in his fevered mind now. He had once torn the magic from the two sisters. It had nearly destroyed them.

He pondered for a moment.

His magic.

Better to die than continue to live with it. If death happened, that is.

It was a pretty big “if” really. Open ended. Lots of chaos. Lots of consequences, either way the coin landed. Especially if the coin landed on the edge. It had done so before.

He rubbed his chin. He looked around at his surroundings, the nightmarish wood he had created so long ago.

His magic.

It had created this wood, this place of horror. Things lived here that fed on ponies. Wild things. The wood’s strange magic took the most mundane life and mutated it, turning it into exceptional horrors.

Discord screamed, filling the wood with his anguished cry.

His magic had to go.

Somehow.

He rubbed his forehead with a talon, thoughtful, trying to recall the very blackest of his abilities. As he did so, the wood around him began to die. The trees withered and began to weep blood. Vines shriveled and died, turning grey at first, and then crumbling away into ash. The soil, black, and full of life, turned grey and became dust.

Far away in Canterlot, Celestia recoiled in horror, feeling a presence that she had not felt for a long time. Panic gripped her. Even when Discord had escaped not that long ago, she hadn’t felt what she was feeling now. It had been at least a thousand years since this sort of fear gripped her. Her bowels turned to water and her blood ran cold. She cried out for her sister and sounded the alarm. Discord had finally returned to his usual self. And she was ready.

In the Everfree, a tall figure stood, two mismatched forelegs on his chest, claws digging into flesh. The air crackled with black lightning bolts, striking the nearby dead trees, causing them to explode into dust and chunks of dead petrified wood. The figure cried out, an otherworldly sound.

Far away in her cottage, Fluttershy heard a strange keening sound. It thoroughly unnerved Ivy, causing her to whimper and run to her mama. Fluttershy cuddled the upset foal, trying to sooth her distress. The air around them seemed to crackle alarmingly, as though a storm was brewing. The skies were clear.

Discord gritted his teeth. His magic was an ingrained part of his being now, and he was having trouble letting go. He struggled against himself, straining. His body was wracked with pain. The worst pain he had ever experienced. Worse than the solar flare, worse than Celestia dropping a mountain on his head, worse than Luna accelerating him dozens of times past the speed of sound and slamming him into an incoming meteor in mid atmosphere.

His magic…

Was going to have to go.

He tore himself open, in a metaphysical sense at least, ripping open the source of his magic. It was something that was never meant to be opened.

Discord’s world exploded violently all around him, and he experienced an all new type of pain. His last thought was of Fluttershy and Ivy as his consciousness was shredded and the world became a Tartarus based nightmare of flame and pain.

It was gone.

His magic.