The Quandary of DisQord

by Kane Magus

Chapter 6

From my den deep inside the Royal Palace, I sensed them coming back. A part of me was gleeful at having two new untainted ponies to play with, Alicorn even, but part of me was, and always had been, raging against what had already been done to them, but that part was still very small. I spread my essence to the edge of the forest and spied upon them as they approached.

"W-what has he done to the forest?" said Luna, looking around in a mixture of despair and rage at the deplorable state of the Everfree Forest.

Celestia sniffed the air and frowned. "It almost as if… he has removed the influence of all pony magic from it." Tentatively, she tried to exert her will on the surrounding lands. For the briefest of moments, the forest in that area returned to what had once been its normal state, but as soon as she let her power fade, it snapped back into what was now, and forever after would be, its natural state. "I… can't correct this," she said, sorrow clear in her voice. "I fear, even after we defeat Discord himself, and even if we use the power of the Elements, the forest will remain forever tainted."

"Add that to the list of crimes for which he must pay," said Luna, resolutely. I chuckled at this, and as I did so, the winds carried it to their ears as it rustled the leaves. "He knows we're coming," added Luna.

"I would have expected nothing less," replied her sister. "Be wary."

"Your quest is futile, my dear Celestia," I said, my voice echoing through the forest all around them. I giggled a bit. "Give up! Turn around and go home! Oh, wait, that's right, your home belongs to me now. Wherever will you go?"

"All of Equestria is our home, fiend," growled Luna. "And we mean to take it back."

"How precious," I said. "You know, my sweet Luna, we never did finish our little tiff from before. Care for round 2, hmm?"

"We'll give you more than you bargain for, you devil," said Luna, all but snarling.

"Oooh, I can hardly wait!" I said. "But you do realize that I can taste every drop of the fear that pervades your being even now, right? You are the same scared little baby girl you were hundreds of years ago. I almost want to pick you up and give you a big ol' hug, poor thing."

"Just you try it." Luna said through clenched teeth.

"I just might, at that!" I said with a chortle.

While I carried on my idle verbal banter with her sister, I had actually put most of my attention on Celestia. I was looking for any hint of regret or hesitation on her part, but so far I found absolutely nothing. The tiny part of me that was raging inside of me felt sorrow at this. The rest of me laughed at that other part of me and called it mean names. "My dear Celestia-"

"Never call me that again," said Celestia, the briefest flare of her rage showing through before she put the impassive mask back into place.

"My dear Celestia," I said again, utterly ignoring her. "Really, what do you hope to accomplish here? You know as well as I do that I will simply do to you what I did to your poor, fragile mother. And to you, Luna, I will do what I did to your feeble, powerless father… before also doing to you what I did to your mother, of course."

Luna made as if to charge forward and leave her sister behind, but Celestia stopped her with small a telekinetic jolt. "Patience, dear sister," she said. "It will be time soon enough." To me, she said simply, "No, Discord, I don't think you will do any of those things to us."

"Ah, is this the beginnings of an impassioned appeal to my better nature?" I said, the smirk on my face evident in my voice, though they obviously couldn't see it with their own eyes yet. "You mean to try to get me to come to my senses and realize the error of my ways? Is that it?"

"Nothing of the sort," said Celestia. "I just mean that we are going to do what… our mother failed to do. We are going to encase you in stone for all of eternity." Luna smiled as Celestia said this, though Celestia herself remained as impassive as before.

"You know," I said in a perfectly normal conversational tone of voice, as though this were just a simple chat, "that's something that has been bugging me all these years. Those little trinkets that you have with you, the Elements of Harmony I believe you called them? Explain to me how, and more importantly, why the ideals of Kindness, Generosity, Honesty, Loyalty, and Laughter, of all things, would turn poor pitiful little me into stone?"

"You neglect the sixth element," said Celestia. "Magic. That is what will be your undoing. The others merely bolster this."

"Yes, yes, and I'm sure your mother thought much the same thing, just before I ripped her very soul to shreds," I said. I chuckled again.

"Do not speak of our mother!" shouted Luna. "I will rip your-"

"Tsk tsk, my sweet innocent Luna," I interrupted her. "That's not very Kind of you. Nor is it very Generous of you to selfishly spend all of your time with me, charmed though I am by the gesture, when I'm sure you have far more pressing matters to attend to, such as the well being of your people. Of course, not a single one of them even remember you by this point, I'm afraid. In fact, none of them can remember a time before the Age of Discord descended upon them. You should be out there, trying to heal your people, rather than here, futilely trying to defeat me. It's the only worthwhile thing you could be doing, given that your fool's errand here has no chance of success."

"That's where you are wrong, Discord," said Celestia. "Only by ridding this world of your wretched taint can we even begin to aid our people."

"How very Honest of you," I said. "Your Loyalty to your people is so very admirable." I paused for a bit, then added, "What? No Laughter? Very well then, I shall take that one upon myself." The forest shook with my morbid amusement. "Ah, but I see you have reached your former home. I hope you like what I've done with the place."

The two sisters stopped in their tracks as the palace came into view, the shock evident upon their faces. They had been expecting a decrepit ruin to match the surrounding forest, but instead found the palace still in a pristine state.

I chuckled again. "Surely, now, you didn't expect me to live anywhere else did you? And while I may have changed the surrounding forest to be more… one with true nature, shall we say, I left the palace completely untouched. I drove all of the ponies out, of course, but that just means there's more for me."

"You very presence alone is more than enough of a defilement," said Luna.

"Ah Luna, I never tire of your barbed words," I said dryly. "Oh, wait, yes I do! Well, then, this is starting to bore me. Let's speed things up, shall we?" With that, accompanied by a prodigious burst of light and sound, I appeared in front of them. "Should we have a climactic, epic battle now? Or maybe we can settle this with a game of golf? Perhaps a little go-karting? Or maybe you'd prefer to bet on some pony races? I can easily arrange a nice derby for your benefit as I'm sure your subjects wouldn't mind performing for our entertainment. Then again, my dear Celestia, there are far more… enjoyable… ways that we could be spending our time, you know." I wiggled my eyebrows at her knowingly. "It's what you've always wanted from me, after all."

Her mask of impassivity slipped a bit as her gorge began to rise. And did I seriously see a hint of blush in her cheeks, despite everything? She certainly still remembered the feelings she had once had for me, and the oh so naughty thoughts they had engendered in her, even if she no longer felt them and the idea of acting on those thoughts now turned her stomach almost as much as it did my own.

"You disgusting swine," said Luna.

"Alas, lovely Luna," I said, glancing at her briefly. "A swine was not one of the animals I modeled myself after." Turning back to Celestia, I said, "How about it, my dear? Even if the illicit thoughts of getting intimate with me no longer appeal to you, surely you at least recall with fondness all of the delightfully deep conversations we had with one another throughout the years, no? You can't claim that our time together was all bad, can you?"

"Lies," said Celestia, averting her eyes from my own. "Y-you were just toying with me the entire time. You never cared for me at all. You were just… using me."

This hurt me in a way that her cold rage had not. I don't know what bothered me more: the idea that she was merely trying to intentionally inflict pain on me with these words, or the idea that she genuinely believed that I had never cared for her and that it had all been some sort of sick ruse on my part. "That is not true, and you know it, Celestia," I said, my madness breaking for a brief moment. "I thought the world of you! Rarely in my eons of existence have I found someone with the ability to… to… share my simple delight in the universe at large. Together, we could have lived an eternity in happiness!"

Celestia dropped her mask completely. "Then why, Discord? Why did you do all of these terrible things? Why did you kill my father and mother? WHY?"

"I told you!" I said with a vague hint of imploring in my voice. How very much I wanted her to understand. "I was improving your people! And, failing that, I was separating the wheat from the chaff! As for your father and mother…" I sighed heavily, and lowered my head. "I never wanted them to die, but they foolishly chose to oppose me! That, quite simply, is the fate for any and all who do so."

Celestia shook her head, tears starting to form in her eyes. "I l…" She paused, took a deep breath, and shook her head again. "I loved you, damn it all! I deeply and truly loved you! You were indeed charming and thoughtful at one point in time. I was sure that I had found that special somepony that I would be spending my entire life with. And… and then you took my heart and you ground it into dust! I love you no longer, Discord. I cannot love you again. I will not love you again! I will not!"

Luna, throughout all of this, had merely watched us with wide eyes. "Tia?" she said, her voice nearly whisper.

"Then it all comes down to this," I said, drawing back to my full height once again, though the madness no longer touched my eyes. "You are going to unleash your power and that of the Elements upon me. In order to protect myself, I will then rip them from your being, shredding your souls in the process. You will die, Celestia, you and your precious little sister. You, who would have otherwise lived essentially forever, will cease to exist. Is that what you want? Is this some crazy form of suicide on your part? Celestia, I know that you will never believe me when I say this, but I do not want to kill you. But if you attack me with those things, I will have no choice but to do so. Please don't force me to have to do this! Are you really going to rob me of one of the rare few things in this universe that I…" a look of surprise came over me "…loved? Truly, can this be? Yes, I was indeed certainly fond of you. I definitely respected you and I wanted to be near you and your perspicacious mind and your captivating conversation for all time… But I…" I looked down at myself in confusion. "I honestly didn't think myself capable of true love. Is that what I was feeling? Is that what I still am feeling even now?"

"Discord, please…" said Celestia, her voice cracking as the tears now freely spilled down her face. "Stop torturing me like this. You are a horrible, despicable creature that doesn't deserve to live. You don't love me! You never loved me! You truly aren't capable of loving me! It's all a lie! It has to be."

"And yet…" I said, "you do still love me, don't you…" I wasn't asking a question. "Deep down… and even despite everything…"

"Tia, please don't listen to him!" said Luna. She moved so that she was standing between me and her sister, as if to somehow protect her from my words. "He's just trying to twist your mind! He only wants to make you hesitate! You're right! There's no way that he could love you! And t-there's no way that you could love him, right?"

"I…" Celestia said. "I don't know! My feelings are so jumbled together… I hate him for everything he's done to me, to us, to mom and dad, to our little ponies. And yet…" She closed her eyes and shook her head violently. Luna reached out a hoof toward her, wanting to touch her, but not actually doing so. Then Celestia looked up at me again finally, and I saw her eyes harden. At that point, I knew, truly, how this was going to end, and I regretted the fact that I was about to lose her forever. "But… no matter how I may personally feel, I am still resolute in what we have to do. Discord, you have committed far too many crimes against this world to ever be forgiven, no matter what. Prepare yourself, Luna."

Luna stepped back again and took up a position beside her sister. I merely watched them. This wasn't fun anymore. To be honest, this hadn't been fun for many centuries. For the longest time, I had just been going through the motions of it all, despite my madness. "You know what," I said. "Go ahead. I will let you take the first shot. Give it your very best effort. But simply be aware that when you fail, your souls are forfeit." I spread my arms wide and just floated there, waiting from them to begin.

Celestia and Luna closed their eyes. The Elements appeared out of nowhere and began to swirl around them, moving faster and faster. I couldn't tell if any one of the Elements favored a particular sister or not. As I watched, everything began to glow, including the two pony sisters and myself. Suddenly, Celestia and Luna both opened their eyes at the same time. There was nothing but pure white energy visible in those eyes.

Once again, the power of the Elements of Harmony encircled me. And once again, I felt my body beginning to turn to stone. And once again, I noted with no small amount of sadness and regret, it would take merely a fraction of my power to shred their connection to the Elements, and with it their very life force, into tatters. I looked deeply into Celestia's eyes, hers channeling the power of the Elements and mine having finally and fully lost the multi-colored madness that had been resident there these past long centuries. I was purely back to myself again at long last. "My dear Celestia, I am so very sorry for what I am about to do. I will sorely miss you, my… love."

And with that, I lashed out at them with my full power. Except… nothing happened. My body still continued to slowly turn to stone. It finally dawned upon me that my powers were being blocked somehow. And then, the full realization of what was happening crashed into me. The Continuum had finally decided to step in, had they? I sighed a defeated sigh. Very well, then. So be it. Being trapped in stone for however long it took for the Continuum to consider me no longer a nuisance? I'd endured far worse than that in my long existence. And, in my heart of hearts, it was with great and wonderful relief that I realized that Celestia wouldn't die after all. She would continue to live a long and healthy life. With a newfound lightheartedness, I struck the very same pose that I had taken when I had first made myself known to her: my right hand on my chest, my left hand extended outward, and my mouth opened to scream out, "GOOD BYE, MY DEAR PRINCESS CELESTIAAAAAAAAAA!"

And then, the stone completely engulfed me.

---

"That little time out did you good, Q," said my companion. "Or… so we thought, anyway. But then, when you finally got out several thousand years later, not even a full day passed before you were back to your old tricks again. What happened, Q? What in the name of the Continuum caused you to immediately start tormenting them again?"

I sighed. "For several millennia, I was indeed honestly at peace with what had happened. Sure, I was completely immobile, trapped inside a physical body made entirely out of stone. But my mind was still free. I could still watch them as they rebuilt what I had destroyed. At first, I thought that this was just an additional part of my punishment from the Continuum, and it may very well have been intended as such, but I soon came to view it as a kindness.

"Though they weren't able to restore the Everfree Forest surrounding it, the palace itself was still fully usable, though any visiting dignitaries had to be flown in via Pegasus-drawn carriage now, granted. They even took my statue and placed it in the rebuilt statue gallery. They were using me as an example to all ponies of the dangers of confusion, evil, and chaos. The dangers of Discord, in other words."

"A pretty fitting fate for you, I have to admit," said Q. "Big bad Q, forever serving as a signpost to guide all ponies away from the corruption of chaos. HC SVNT DRACONES! Turn away! Yeah, those two ponies are pretty classy ladies."

I glanced at him and just rolled my eyes. But I couldn't really disagree.

---

But there was apparently an ulterior motive to that act as well. It surprised me when it first happened, but I eventually grew to relish it. You see, during the evenings, when no other pony was around, mainly due to nopony wanting to be outside at night with the danger of the corrupted Everfree so close by, Celestia would come out to the statue gallery by herself, the same as she had all those years ago. She would sit on a bench next to me and talk. I don't know if she knew that I could indeed actually hear her, or if she even hoped that was the case or not, or if she was simply doing it for her own peace of mind and nothing more. She would talk about anything, and everything. The state of her kingdom, or rather principality I suppose, since neither Celestia nor Luna ever assumed their rightful titles as Queens of the land and simply remained Princesses. The actual titles meant very little one way or the other. The mundane trivialities of her existence, such as those dreadfully boring Grand Galloping Galas that she had never enjoyed, even back when her parents were still alive, but especially loathed now that she was actually expected to attend the awful things on a yearly basis. The relationship with her sister, which had its ups and downs, as all sibling relationships do. And, in general, just the restoration of the land and its inhabitants after all the troubles I had caused. At the end of the evening, when she finally retired for the night, I could tell it was with a spring in her step, as though she had unloaded all of her troubles onto me. I didn't mind it at all. It was nice just to hear her voice, even if I couldn't answer.

As for Luna, she never joined her sister on these nightly excursions, of course, or was even aware that Celestia was doing it, since Luna herself was always too busy holding court and dealing with more important matters of the night during this time. I seriously doubt she would have approved of it had she known.

It continued this way for several thousand years. All of the subjects loved Celestia. She and her sister had saved them from the dreaded Age of Discord after all. After four or five generations, the madness was finally not much more than something taught about to little colts and fillies in their history classes. Things probably would have continued that way for who knows how long, but then something began to change.

As time went on, Celestia's talks with (or rather to) me began to revolve more and more around her sister, Luna. She never straight out said what was going on, but I could tell from her tone that something bad was happening with Luna. However, one thing that I had noticed, even in my state, was that the nights were starting to last longer and longer. And then, one day… or perhaps I should say one night… the sun never rose, and the moon remained hanging directly overhead in the sky, motionless. Well, I couldn't actually see it myself, as my eyes were frozen shut in that ridiculous pose I had struck, but I could still sense it. The rotation of the planet had completely stopped altogether. As you well know, the consequences of such a thing had dire implications, even on a planet that wasn't being manipulated by pony magic as this one was.

And then, one day, I heard some dreadful sounds coming from within the palace. It was audible even to me, all the way out in the statue gallery, and despite the fact that my ears were filled with stone. For hours, perhaps even days, it sounded as though a terrible battle were taking place. I didn't know if the palace was somehow being invaded or what, though from my limited vantage point I could sense no such invaders. I could hear stone and mortar crumbling as the palace was being completely destroyed by whatever was happening. And then, before I knew what exactly was going on, the battle erupted through one of the nearby walls and was right there at my very feet.

I don't think I need to emphasize just how shocked I was when I saw that the battle was being waged between Celestia and Luna, of all ponies. Though I couldn't actually physically see what was going on, my powers were still with me enough such that I could get a mental picture of the thing. Luna was decked out in some strange armor that I had never seen before. But, more than that, her colors had inverted. Her fur was now pitch black, except for that beneath her crescent moon cutie mark, which was now purple. She hardly looked like the same pony that I remembered. Both she and Celestia were bleeding in several places over their bodies, and I could tell that both of them were running on empty. Celestia seemed to have taken the worst of it, though. As their battle raged on, they repeatedly shouted back and forth to each other.

"For the last time, submit to me, Celestia!" shouted Luna, using the Royal Voice.

"Please, Lu! Stop this madness!" replied Celestia in a ragged voice. "This eternal night must end, or the world is doomed!"

"Never!" Luna said. "You lie! The ponies will love me and my night! Those that do not will be punished!"

"I will not allow that to come to pass!" Celestia said. "I will do everything in my power to stop this!"

If I could have moved at all, I would have goggled my eyes at this display. Never would I have ever imagined that Celestia and Luna would be locked in battle with each other like this. This wasn't some petty sibling spat, obviously. I could sense that there was something terribly wrong with Luna, though. If I didn't know any better, and admittedly, I didn't, I would have said that she had been possessed by something. And, no, before you even ask, I had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with this. How could I have? At any rate I could just about taste the madness boiling off of her. I should know, because the very same madness had overcome me millennia before.

Luna merely laughed. "You have nothing in your arsenal that could stop me, sister! I am just as powerful as you are! More so, now that I wear the mantle of Nightmare Moon!"

"Luna, please, I don't want to hurt you!" said Celestia. "But if you don't snap out of this, I am afraid that I may do something that I will regret for a very long time."

"Ha ha ha ha ha!" Luna sneered. "What can you possibly hope to do to me?"

"Sister…" said Celestia, with great remorse in her voice. "I am sorry."

"What are you…?" Luna's eyes widened when she saw what her sister was about to do. "NO!"

Celestia had summoned the Elements of Harmony. All of them were swirling around her, and her alone, now.

"You can't do this!" said Luna, with confidence that she suddenly didn't feel. "It simply isn't possible! Y-you'll die!"

"If I can defeat you first and restore balance to the day and night, then so be it," said Celestia. She closed her eyes, and the Elements swirled ever faster around her.

"What do you plan to do? Are you going to turn me into stone like we did to HIM?" Luna shouted, pointing a hoof at me. Then she staggered. "What? W-what is happening to me? I feel so… very weak."

Celestia didn't respond. Instead she simply unleashed her power upon her sister. Luna screamed and tried to fight back, but it was already a foregone conclusion. The battle was pretty much over at this point. I fully expected that I would soon have an eternal companion at my side here in this statue gallery, except that isn't what happened at all. Princess Luna's body simply began to disintegrate, or so it seemed. And then I knew what Celestia was doing. Luna's essence was being channeled through the falling moonbeams. She was going to banish her sister to the moon!

But she was doing something more than that. In the instant that Celestia had summoned the Elements, I felt their connection to Luna shatter. Luna should have died this night, but she didn't. In the process of banishing her sister to her lunar prison, Celestia also did something else. She channeled all but a sliver of her own life force into her sister, preventing Luna from dying due to the break in her connection with the Elements, but it came at a cost most dire to Celestia herself.

Celestia continued to pour on the power and, soon, it was over. Finally, when she was sure she had succeeded in her task, she curtailed her power and collapsed to her knees. The Elements of Harmony continued to swirl around her for a moment, but then something terrible happened. The Elements flashed, and with a dreadful cracking sound, they all turned into dull gray stone. They dropped to the ground around Celestia, and I realized with horror what had happened. Just as I had forcibly sundered her mother's connection to the Elements thousands of years before, here the very Elements themselves had cleaved their connection to Celestia. Why this happened, I can't even begin to guess, but it did. I knew that she was already in a grievous state even before this, due to having given most of her life force to her sister, and this was far too much for her to bear. It would have been too much even if she had been at full power. There was no way that she could survive this. I was screaming wordlessly in my mind as Celestia's eyes rolled back into her head, which dropped to the ground between her forelegs. More than a mere trickle of blood began to flow from her nose and mouth, and her breathing slowed to the point of stopping.

Not caring about anything else, even the fact that this technically shouldn't have been possible, I channeled every particle of my power, my essence, my very being that still remained to me into her. I was determined not to let her die the same terrible way that her mother did, despite the fact that I had attempted to do the very same thing to her in my madness just a few thousand years before. Even though I knew it was utterly futile and that I was going to have to be tormented forever with the memory of my dear Celestia dying a few short meters in front of me. Except… it wasn't futile. My powers were working! Strangely, it didn't even occur to me to break out of my stone imprisonment at the time. As quickly as I could, but still agonizingly slowly, I mended the physical, the mental, and, above all, the spiritual damage that had been done to her both with the severing of her connection to the Elements and by the ordeal she had endured prior to that. Slowly, ever so slowly, the bleeding finally slowed and then stopped. She gasped and started breathing again. Her eyelids fluttered for a moment, and then slowly opened.

Shocked to her very core that she was somehow still alive, she finally realized what had happened. She rose to her feet and walked unsteadily over to me. "Discord? Did you…? How…? Why…?" She staggered forward and then fell. She lay unconscious at the base of the platform on which my statue had been placed.

---

"Good on you, Q" said Q. "I didn't know you had it in you."

"To say that I was surprised myself afterward would have been a gross understatement," I freely admitted. "I shouldn't have been able to affect anything at all." Then I narrowed my eyes and looked at him. "Did the Continuum-"

"Absolutely not!" said Q, shaking his head forcefully. "As far as we were concerned, all of your power was completely sealed inside that stone flesh of yours."

"Then how?" I asked.

"I honestly can't give you an answer," he said, shrugging. "Maybe it was the power of true love, or some other such thing as that."

I stared at him, open mouthed.

"Close your mouth. You'll draw space-flies," he said.

"The power of… what? Are you kidding me? What utter nonsense!" I said, incredulously.

"How so?" he said. "Stranger things have happened in this universe of ours."

"Not to us! Not to me!" I said.

"And why not?" he asked. "You said yourself earlier that you did indeed love her, didn't you?"

"Well… yes… I suppose I did say that. Honestly, I'm still not entirely sure what my feelings were… or are… but, even so, do you really expect me to believe such utter tripe as the 'power of true love'?" I couldn't believe I was hearing this.

"Do you have any other explanation for what happened?" said Q evenly.

"Of course I don't," I said. "And I think you're lying. The Continuum surely just returned my powers briefly… or maybe it was you who healed her and just led me to believe that I was doing it myself, as part of my punishment somehow!"

"And what possible reason would we have had for helping you or her in that instant?" said Q, annoyance evident in his voice. "From our perspective, cruel though it may have been, her dying in front of you like that would have been a most delicious twist to your punishment, one that we hoped would further drive home the lesson you needed to learn. In the end, however, we decided that, no matter how you had accomplished it, the obvious reason that you had somehow temporarily overcome your imprisonment was solely in order to save her. Because of that, you would not be further punished for doing it, especially since you hadn't tried to fully escape. In fact, if it means anything to you, several members of the Continuum wanted to let you out right then and there."

"Really?" I said, dumbfounded.

"Yes, really," he replied. "I wasn't one of them, mind you. I agreed with the rest of the Continuum that you saving one single solitary life, extraordinary though it was that you had been able to do so at all, did very little to mitigate all of the other billions of lives you had absolutely wrecked prior to that."

"I see…" I said.

"Anyway, you're getting distracted," he said, the faintest hint of impatience in his voice.

"From what?" I asked with great annoyance. "What could possibly be more important than this?"

"Finishing your story, obviously," said Q. "You still haven't told me what made you go nuts again when you were finally released from your stone prison."

"Ah," I said, coming back down to earth again, so to speak. My mood began to darken severely. "Well, it was Luna's banishment."

"Oh?" said Q. "How so?"

"Another thousand years went by," I said. "And then Luna came back. Just like that. She was welcomed with open arms by her sister and the new bearers of the Elements of Harmony and all of Equestria. I had merely tormented some ponies for a few thousand years, and they had locked me into a stone body for what they had hoped was an eternity. Luna, on the other hand, had stopped the rotation of the entire planet, threatening to bring about the very extinction of all of ponykind, not to mention all other life on the planet. And she got banished to the moon for a relative blink of an eye, and then it was as though it had never happened. Welcome back, Princess Luna! You only did something that would have killed every single pony on the entire planet within the span of maybe a year or so at the very most! All water under the bridge! Here, Princess Luna, have the adoration of all of your subjects again!"

"Yes, I suppose I can see how that would have made you angry all over again," said Q reasonably. "It's rather petty, to be sure, but I can kind of understand it."

"Then… why did you let me out when you did?" I said. "You had to know what I was feeling at that time."

"We felt that you needed to learn another lesson that wasn't going to be learned while you were stuck in that stone body of yours," said Q. "So we let you out. Pretty fitting that it happened while those three fillies were arguing and fighting over what your true nature was. So, tell me, did you learn your lesson?"

"You were there. What do you think?" I answered his question with my own.

"I think you need to finish your story," was all he said.

I merely sighed wearily in response.

Comments

[Winter Storms]

OK in my comments Q1 is discord Q2 is Q. got it? good

so who do you think Q was when discord got out of the stone prison or do you think he was hiding?
tell me who he would of been and why or where he was hidding and why.

also this question comes from the line in the story

So, tell me, did you learn your lesson?"
"You were there. What do you think?