Partying With The Enemy
Editor's Note:
Discord asked me to look over this chapter to see what would offend "conservative pony sensibilities" so badly that they wouldn't want to keep reading anymore, on the grounds that I am "exquisitely trained in being a stick in the mud," and told me to cut it out of my copy of his document, the one he wants me to publish if Anon kills him or something. I... thought it would be a good idea to cut a lot of stuff. Discord disagreed and made me put most of it back, but I got rid of the worst stuff. This chapter talks a lot about a society that is so disgusting, it's hard to imagine that they're actually real, except that I don't think even Discord would make stuff like this up.
There's stuff that happens in it that's a big deal, so I don't think ponies should skip it, but if you think you can't handle reading about a society that turns mares into, uh, love slaves, except without the part about loving them... gosh, this is hard to even write about for me. I can copy Discord's words about it a lot easier than I can write them myself. Look, there's a country in here where all the mares are sex slaves, okay? I said it. And it's really, really gross to read about. So if you can't handle reading about that, skip to the next chapter – I put in tabs before putting this thing in a binder, so you can jump ahead – and I'll try to provide a short summary of the important stuff that happens in here before the chapter starts. -end note.
Home again, home again, jiggity jog. Let me tell you, that was disturbing. Several different layers of disturbing, in fact. My entire trip to the north consisted of a soup of disturbing with disturbing salad followed by a fine meal of unease, displeasure and disturbance with disturbing ice cream for dessert. Not as tasty as it sounds when I write it down, I assure you.
I'm done with my adventure in the North, thank chaos. A lot has happened, including some things I still find completely implausible and can barely believe I pulled off, including... well, spoilers. We'll get to that when we get to it. It won't make any sense as to why I did what I did without telling the whole story to begin with. Which I don't want to do, because aside from the things that are just disgusting and unpleasant to talk about... well. Now I know what it feels like to be mind-controlled into thinking and feeling things you find utterly abhorrent. I... am getting just the tiniest inkling of an understanding why ponies really, really hate it when I do that to them. Of course, when I do it to ponies I'm just making them into annoying jerks, usually, not... well, not the really awful thing I could have potentially become if I hadn't figured out what was going on and broken free of it.
But I'm trying to figure out how to even begin to talk about what happened, and stalling out, because I have no idea how I'm going to describe any of this. Part of my problem here is my audience. I'm all for telling a good risqué joke in front of a group of like-minded adults, but I have no idea who is going to pick up this document and read it, and in my experience, there are certain things one can discuss that are so grotesque, so shocking to the sensibilities of the ordinary pony, that simply describing them will cause the pony to recoil in disgust... and then refuse to read the rest of the document. I mean, if I make ponies recoil in disgust because I describe in great detail a peanut butter pickled mango ice cream sandwich with cole slaw, ketchup and raw fish eggs, odds are the pony will come back to the document, because nopony considers reading about disgusting food to be something either immoral or so horrifying that sensitive eyes must be protected from it. But you talk about one orgy, and all of a sudden it's "Well! I never!", and pearl clutching, and fainting, and the end result is the pony simply ignores everything else you have to say.
Unfortunately caribou society is of a nature that simply describing it in front of foals could probably get a pony thrown in jail for a day or two. And not because of anything as pleasant as mutually enjoyable orgies, either. I'm going to do my best to be as circumspect and euphemistic as I can be, in telling a tale whose very setting is unsettling even to me, let alone ponies. But it won't be easy, I fear.
Reindeer make their home a paradise within the land of eternal winter by using harmony, feelings of friendship and love and gratitude harvested from all over Neighropa, every Yule, which they induce by doing good deeds and bringing cookies to foals and whatnot. Caribou make their homeland livable through dark magic. They harvest feelings of despair, depression, misery, hatred, sadism, and the brute enjoyment of dominance, to gain the magic they require. Also, while they don't practice outright necromancy, they did discover that it's possible to gain power by sacrificing a sapient child's intelligence. Basically, perform a spell on a child that severs her from her willpower and her higher mental functions, so what you get is a child who's obedient and stupid to the point of being barely able to manufacture language – about as bright as your average Diamond Dog, actually, but with no personal ambition and no ability or desire to disobey orders. It takes several such sacrifices of sapience to match one sacrifice of life, but performing it on half your population generates a lot of power.
Caribou turn their cows into near-mindless slaves, when they're still calves. (Reindeer and caribou, for some reason that I have never understood, are referred to with the same terms we use for cattle – bulls, cows and calves – rather than bucks/stags, does, and fawns as we do with regular deer, despite the fact that reindeer and caribou are, in fact, deer.) They then use these stupid, loyal creatures who would be cheerfully obedient to anything they were asked to do... as sex slaves. What, when you heard that they do it to all of their females, did you think I was going somewhere else with this?
This would be horrible enough if they only took their own sacrificed, stupid daughters and raised them up to be sexually abused by any bull with an itch in his pants, but it wouldn't generate enough misery for their magic to use. Most of the sacrificed cows are incapable of even particularly wanting to resist their fate; they literally live to please their masters. Rather like dogs. Except they're the same species, so no need for xenophilia to find them attractive; you'd just have to not care that they barely have minds. And caribou, though they are raised and trained to despise females – of any species – to the point where the only language they ever use for any female ever is the most contemptuous set of terms they could come up with, still don't manage to be quite evil enough to torture and beat their loving, loyal, stupid slaves... most of the time anyway. Sure, they use them for sex the way colts going through puberty use socks, but they can't muster up enough hatred to really dish out the abuse, and because the poor girls have been raised to believe that supplying sex to their masters is the highest grace they can aspire to, it frequently only qualifies as rape on the grounds that it's not like they'd be able to refuse if they wanted to.
So they have to have someone to hate. They have to have slaves that they can demean and torture and break down mentally. They also have to be absolutely brutal to each other, crushing dissent and any kind of nonconformity, weakness or both, in the most horrible way they can imagine. They turn dissenters into cows and enslave them, but don't sacrifice their minds. The former bulls, not having been raised to be slaves and not lacking the ability to refuse orders, of course resist their new station in life as hard as they can, but in the icy wilderness it's not as if running away is much of an option, so inevitably they become resigned enough to their fates to stop resisting. This doesn't stop them from hating what's being done to them, despising their former friends who betrayed them... and taking it out on the born-female slaves, because those are the only creatures low enough on the totem pole that they can take out their rage on.
But even that wasn't enough. The fact that it turned their entire society into a seething cesspool of backstabbing and favor-currying, where the dominance hierarchy is practically hardened into stone and anyone who challenges authority had better be doing so only in the limited sense that they want to replace one specific guy in authority with themselves, and also, they had better win... that wasn't enough either. They needed more slaves. After all, every bull's position is incredibly precarious, so if he doesn't have a lot of slaves to lord it over and take his frustrations out on, why, he might slip and actually display his anxiety to his peers... who'd see that as weakness, and bring him down. And it's considered much more manly to abuse and torment slaves that fight back.
So they go on raiding parties. They find reindeer, or yaks, or griffins, or dip down far enough south to snag ponies living in the borderlands north of Equestria, around the same latitudes as the Crystal Empire. There are a number of small settlements outside any well-defined national borders, and trading caravans crossing the wastes up here, and of course reindeer, yaks and griffins have patrol parties out looking for caribou to kill, and sometimes they're careless enough or outnumbered enough that the caribou win those skirmishes. When raiding parties find victims, they'll take the females captive, and initiate them via the entire raiding party into what will generally be their new life from now on, unless they manage to escape before being taken to caribou territory. Males might be killed, or abused the same way the females would be and dragged back to caribou territory to be turned into females, depending on how "masculine" the caribou see them as. You don't want to know what happens to any children they catch.
Once the slaves are ensconced in their new home, they're collared, which I suppose is an improvement on branding, with color-coded collars indicating how resistant they are. Black collars are there to be tortured and broken – they're the ones still fighting back. Or who the caribou still suspect of fighting back mentally, still capable of hating every moment of their new life. Red collars have submitted completely. They're either native caribou -- sacrificed cows, specifically -- or they're prisoners who have come to the conclusion that the only way to avoid being tortured is to act like you agree that you should submit to everything you're told and that you are a wholly inferior being who should be used only for sex. (Ed. note: cut some stuff here about other colored collars because they aren't relevant to Discord's story and because even Discord trying to be euphemistic ended up too graphic in my opinion.)
Back in my day, the caribou used to occasionally invade towns, and when they did, they used powerful spells to brainwash most of the males into agreeing with them and accepting their leadership. Though that cost a lot of magic, it paid off for them because it usually meant they could take and torment all of the town's females, and that would raise more than enough power to replace what they lost with the brainwashing... especially since brainwashed males would then come out from under the spell one or two at a time, and could be taken individually and killed or converted into new slaves. Sometimes they used magical artifacts to support the brainwashing.
I found this behavior distasteful, but since they'd obsequiously suck up to me, as the most supremely powerful male in the world, I found it vastly more entertaining to sic Celestia and Luna on them. Doing terrible things to someone who is bowing and scraping and singing my praises really leaves a terrible taste in my mouth, unless I'm incredibly angry, and most of the time I find caribou more disgusting than enraging. Also, I don't like killing, but most caribou that you don't kill will end up, sooner or later, raping somebody, unless you hit them with a permanent mind whammy, and chaos doesn't like permanence. Celestia and Luna, on the other hand, have no problem with killing when it needs to be done. And I must say, while the blood was unpleasant, the bonfires and explosions were beautiful.
And the truth is... all of this is possible because they are holding the Element of Cruelty.
That's the key. It's passed down from king to king, tied into the spells that generate the pool of magic that the caribou use. The first such king might even have been a designated bearer – Mayhem was still the chaos avatar when the caribou first established their philosophy of violent male domination, and while it makes sense for the Element of Hatred to have split what was one harmonious species and one culture into two warring factions, it's a little bit bizarre that one of those factions promptly took up treating their own cows like disposable handkerchiefs. If they'd had a leader who had the idea, and who was an official Bearer of Cruelty and therefore had the power to inspire others to cruel acts, though, then it makes sense. The entire society is organized around sadistic sexual domination, and it's hard to imagine how it got that way without a legitimate Bearer of Cruelty in the mix.
However, the artifacts of Disharmony are not hereditary any more than the artifacts of Harmony are (actually probably less so), so when he died (or was killed) and his office passed to his son, that king would not have been an authorized Bearer. I'm guessing Mayhem actually handed it off to the first caribou king as part of his plot to poison Yggdrasil and cause worldwide strife, and then never bothered to take it back or assign it to anyone else. So for more than two thousand years, the ruler of the caribou has invariably been a bull who wields the Element of Cruelty without the protection of being an authorized Bearer.
An authorized Bearer of Cruelty would be given keen insight into the weaknesses of others, and the ability to manipulate others into being cruel, which is part of why I suspect the first king was a true Bearer. Holders of Cruelty who aren't Bearers don't get those abilities, and they themselves are compulsively sadistic. But anyone who carries the Element gains power from the suffering they cause, or the suffering they inspire (it's not as if creatures in leadership positions have ever needed a magical item to get their followers to be cruel; it's just that it helps. Besides, using the Element as a component of a ritual spell, like the caribou kings are doing, can allow it to affect others even if the user is not a Bearer, depending on the spell).
The caribou philosophy of rigid hierarchy, worship of the alpha male and brutal domination, plus their skill with harnessing runes, has led to a complex magical construct in which their brutality to their slaves (and to each other) feeds the power of the king, who with the Element of Cruelty is the centerpoint from which the pool of mana that the caribou use radiates. It's as if they've created their own ley lines, except that instead of running through the air or the ground in parallel to the planet's magnetic field, the lines magically connect from the king to each individual caribou bull... which is part of why it's so easy for them to turn on each other, and why none of their slaves can tap into that power. (They make extra sure with the ponies by breaking horns and plucking wings, and with reindeer and transformed, intelligent caribou, they remove the antlers... but reindeer and transformed caribou with experience in rune magic wouldn't need their antlers for casting if they could tap into the available mana. They can't, because caribou get access to it by swearing fealty to the king, and the moment the king decides they shouldn't have it anymore, they don't.)
I knew all this before I left. I knew the caribou would never voluntarily give me the Element of Cruelty because it's the cornerstone of their entire corrupt society, and without it, they'd be powerless. What I sort of forgot was how weak I am in the Frozen North. I mean, I didn't really forget, I just... didn't think about how that was going to affect my ability to march right in there and steal their most precious item of power.
After I found Loki dead, I realized... these bozos could, potentially, actually kill me. If they turned me to stone and then used runes fed by their power to keep me that way, I'd bleed out magically the way Loki did. In theory, no set of runes could hold me captive; it takes the power levels of one of my fellow avatars, Order or Harmony, to bind me permanently. In practice... all it would take would be caribou mages to frequently re-apply the binding every time I managed to weaken it, and they could outwait me. In Equestria, being turned to stone could never have killed me – it was actually something I tried to avoid contemplating while I was trapped, because every time I thought about the fact that I was immortal and my bindings were never going to kill me and nothing else was going to either and I had no reason to think Harmony would ever relent... let's just say there were lengthy periods of time when all I did was scream mentally for I have no idea how long. Days? Weeks? Years? I'd go down into black places where I stopped thinking and all I could perceive was fear, despair and helpless rage, because I thought I was going to be there for a literal eternity. I'd sleep, and dream I was free, and then wake up and start screaming again. It turns out that when you don't have an actual voice, nothing prevents you from screaming the entire time that you're awake, every day, day after day...
Okay, enough of that! Brr. At least I know better now. Harmony can't bind me forever. Neither could the caribou, but they wouldn't need to do it forever, because the Frozen North would eventually suck me dry, as it did to Loki. So my original plan, which was basically to go in there and turn their world upside down until they surrendered, like I did to Winnie and the changelings, was not going to work.
None of this would be a problem if it weren't for those damn ley lines draining me. At my full power the entire caribou nation isn't a match for me, because at my full power I could break the runic connections that allow any of them to tap the magic they've harvested. The thing about runes, see, is that they have to be very, very precise. They're the closest thing the world has to order magic. Ponies maintain their harmonic constructs through intelligence and willpower; their spells usually break apart when they hit me because their constructs can't stand up to my field of chaos, but I can't permanently mess up a pony's spellcasting ability just with chaos. I'd have to take their horn or something. Runes, however, aren't intelligent and have no willpower; they're simply symbols that channel and control magic into very, very specific and predictable patterns. And the thing about symbols is that when you mess with the symbols, tsuj a ynit egnahc to the symbol and it becomes unreadable, or it becomes something completely different. Think of a kit, and then think of a kite. Very different, wouldn't you say? Or consider the prints you hang on your wall and the prince who just acquired his title by marrying the Princess of Lurve. For that matter, take the L out of love and it's ove, and I'm really not sure what an ove is but I'm sure I'll think ove something.
Anyway! Wandering again. I swear sometimes I need a leash for my mind. At my full power, a simple flick of chaos and I could have destroyed the pattern of runes that give the caribou usable mana. But right now, I was having a hard time summoning boots. So I needed a new plan. Thus, devious mastermind that I am, I devised a clever plot which consists of "show up, something something, cause chaos, profit." Yes, my talents at being a Machiavellian long-range chessmaster are honestly somewhat overstated. To be fair, I like it better this way. Chessmasters don't do so well when half their pieces spontaneously turn into broccoli with wings and fly off. I'm much better at coming up with plans on the fly, based on the information I'm getting then and there, than I am at plotting out all the possible ways something could go wrong and countering them. Among other things, when I plan really carefully and I think out all the possibilities and I'm confident that I can handle whatever direction the encounter goes in, I have a bad habit of not noticing that things just went radically off-plan until it's too late. I do a lot better when I know I'm depending on my observational skills and my ability to roll with whatever life throws my way.
Fortunately for me, when I finally found a caribou encampment, the day after that conversation I had with my tooth that's recorded above, it took very, very little to prove to them that they should give me every hospitality and immediately take me to the king. The caribou still remember Mayhem – not literally, none of them have been alive for two thousand years, but their culture legends tell them that the god of chaos is to be respected, feared, and honored. (They'd have a different opinion if the god of chaos they were dealing with was Ar, or Eris, but then Ar would have murdered them all in moments, and Eris would have probably murdered them all too, just in slower, hilariously cruel ways. Or she might just have removed all of their male organs for giggles.) I remember this behavior from when I used to rule Equestria. As I said, they used to suck up to me when I encountered them, because I'm the most powerful male being in the world and by their laws and culture that meant they owed me worship. Which is why I used to sic Celestia and Luna on them, because when an angry god you worship starts attacking you, your response is generally to kneel and beg and cry for mercy and be too pathetic to keep hurting, whereas when you're obsessed with male dominance your reaction to angry female alicorns attacking you is to keep saying things that rile them up and make them even more willing to break every bone in your body.
They gave me hot spiced wine, berry pudding, and fried fish. I actually took the fish for once – I don't usually like to eat meat that was once alive, even if someone else killed it, but after marching around in the cold for so long and losing so much magic and being so tired, even after making camp and getting some sleep the previous day, I needed every advantage I could get. I denatured the alcohol in the wine, which was easier than conjuring a hot drink for myself, and drank enough of it that it impressed them, as I should have been weaving and slurring and telling everyone how drunk I was and instead I was stone cold sober. (Well, warm sober. That term "stone cold" is actually one I'd like to avoid when referring to myself after what I saw in the North.)
They also tried to have a bevy of slaves give me more personal favors, but I told them their slaves – all red-collared sacrificed cows, placid and stupid – were the ugliest creatures I'd ever seen and if they wanted to offer their guests a sex toy maybe they should try having some higher quality ones around the place. When they attempted to punish the slaves for this, I slapped several of them with dead fish (large dead fish. We're talking salmon here, big ones.) I told them it was disgusting how they tried to pass off the responsibility for offering me ugly slaves onto the slaves, like it was the slaves' decision to be substandard and not the caribou's decision to offer them to me even though they were substandard that I was offended by. Then I demanded that they propitiate me to apologize, and thus avoid my wrath, by sending all their slaves away and dancing for me while singing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat". They didn't know the lyrics, so I made some up.
While they danced and sang, badly, I ate the dead fish I'd just conjured – I'd wasted a bit of magic in making them, and while I couldn't get the magic back, I could get some nutrition out of the deal. Also, prey species tend to be disturbed when they see me eat meat, even if they eat meat themselves on occasion. I think it's the teeth. Something in an herbivore's mind winces in fear when they see sharp pointy bits in someone's mouth, slicing up dead animals.
They wanted to bring me to see the king in a chariot drawn by shaved female reindeer. The territory the caribou lay claim to isn't all warmed and cozy by their dark magic rites; they keep their actual towns, villages and cities warm enough, but the roads between their outposts are as ice cold as the rest of the Arctic, when there are roads at all. The reindeer were black collars; being forced to pull a chariot through the regions of ice, without fur, was intended as a form of torture. It wouldn't have killed them, but the ladies would have been in terrible shape at the end of the journey. I declared, two minutes after we'd started on our journey, that I was cold and wanted cuddly females as blankets, and insisted that my hosts pull the chariot while I piled the slaves on top of me. When one of the girls, hesitantly, offered me sex – they were black collars, but that didn't mean they hadn't learned any survive-in-slavery skills – I expressed dismay and shock that they thought for one moment I was willing to expose my sensitive, precious malehood to this kind of cold even for a single second, and then told them that when I said I wanted blankets, it wasn't their job to second-guess me, and they'd better shut up and keep me warm or I'd turn them into actual blankets. Of course, I have a thick fur coat, so I was warmer than the shaved ladies... which was the point.
Lest you think I'm going soft, no, I wasn't keeping the slave girls warm out of chivalry or even compassion. They were black collars. Potential rebels. Sources of potential chaos. I didn't have much of a plan, but I did know I wanted to have as many black collared slaves in my general vicinity as I could get the caribou to give me. The very fact that these females actively hated their enslavement and still had the strength to want to rebel meant they were generating disharmony – not enough to compensate for the magic I was expending in warming the air around us so they'd still be in good fighting form, or as good as anyone who'd been abused like they had could be, but once we got where we were going I wouldn't need to keep them warm and they'd still be hating their captors.
Once we got to our destination, I told my escorts to set these particular cows aside for my entertainment later, after I'd met with the king. This ended up even being technically true, as what I eventually used them for entertained me greatly, though at the time I wasn't quite sure of how I'd use them or when. After I'd gone to all the trouble of keeping these particular rebels warm and cozy on our trip over here, I didn't want them being taken away for private punishment sessions or something, or for my escorts to take it out on them that I'd spared them the punishment they were supposed to have gotten. I might possibly have implied that what I intended to use them for would most likely permanently damage their minds, to ensure that their sadistic captors thought that saving them for me would be a greater punishment than anything the caribou themselves could dish out.
And then I let two of the caribou escort me into the castle.
Equestrian palaces tend to be confections of crystal or smooth, shining stone, all spires and crenellations and polished surfaces. Reindeer don't have palaces, they have mansions, made of stone but with elaborate wooden decorations providing color contrast, looking cozy and warm and as nauseatingly small-town-charming as Ponyville. The castle of the caribou king was neither a palace nor a mansion; it was a fortress. Large, with evenly shaped, dull grey stone bricks, its windows long narrow slits, its turrets and parapets plainly serving military purpose rather than being decorative like the same sorts of features on Canterlot Palace. (Not that Canterlot Palace can't be a fortress. It's halfway up the side of a mountain for a reason – no army can even try to invade unless they can fly, because earth ponies in Canterlot can just throw rocks down the side of the mountain to crush most earthbound armies. There's a reason Equestria's wars have generally been with griffins, changelings, dragons, and other ponies, not minotaurs, centaurs, zebras or yaks.) The stone bricks were not polished, and appeared rough-hewn, but were actually most likely concrete or some sort of magically carved granite bricks, because they were too even in shape and size to be actual rocks.
Inside, however, it was as opulent as a sultan's palace in Saddle Arabia, though with a barbarian aesthetic. Thick bearhide rugs on the stone floors, and in some rooms, wall to wall carpet woven from yak and reindeer fur, most of which probably came from slaves. Tapestries on the walls, showing caribou military triumphs, also woven from fur. Natural sunlight shone down through a glass dome over the top of the entire castle, so thick it was probably as strong as stone itself. I noted that there were lines etched through the dome, slender filaments of metal, running down to crystals all along the edges. A moment's glance at the pathways of magic and energy told me what that was. As I'd observed the day-ish before, the sun never sets in the summertime up in the Frozen North, and never rises during the winter. So the caribou were collecting sunlight in the crystals, harvesting it through the dome. Presumably during the winter the caribou would then light the interior of the palace all day with stored sunlight.
So there was no real need for torchlight or lamps. Despite this, there were poles, every ten pony lengths or so, on top of which there were torches inside protective glass. And on every pole, there was some female creature or another – most of them sacrificed cows – sliding her body around the pole in a lewd dance. They were generally leashed to the poles by long, slender metal chains attached to their collars on one end and a ring around the pole on the other. The poles were sturdy enough that even if a caribou was behind a cow who was pressed against a pole, taking advantage of her – which there were, at least two of them on separate poles—the poles themselves didn't move at all.
There were bulls standing along the walls with weapons at the ready in the kind of formal, at-attention posture you see in the Royal Guard, except in most cases it was totally a joke because they had slaves under them or behind them applying mouths to sensitive locations. To some I suppose it could have been intimidating or impressive – a statement that either caribou soldiers are so good, they can remain alert and jump into battle at any moment even if they're enjoying intimate pleasures, or a statement that caribou guards don't need to be any good and that the king's fortress was so safe and impregnable that the guards could occupy themselves with sexual pastimes instead of actually staying alert. What it told me was that they had no defenses that could handle every slave in the room suddenly getting an urge to chew. Not that I was certain I could manage inspiring such an urge – I don't do collective actions very well – but it was an idea.
Really, caribou culture's obsession with sex is ridiculous. I'm not a fellow who's bothered by public displays of, shall we say, overly affectionate behavior, but the fact that there were slaves servicing bulls in such a matter-of-fact, passionless way, no more connection between the bull and the slave than there would have been if she'd been pouring him a drink, offended me. Sex is supposed to be fun, and exciting, and either arousing or hilarious (or both) to watch. These guys were making it every bit as exciting and enjoyable to watch as public urination would have been. Actually, I take that back; there are some ponies who would find such a thing titillating to watch. This was as much fun as watching ponies do paperwork.
Anyway. I was brought to see the caribou king, Dainn, who was seated on a large throne with a cow at his feet and two others at his sides, petting him. At least he wasn't actively engaged in anything overly risqué – I was actually starting to find the sight of sexual antics boring. The bull was as respectful and polite as I'd expected him to be, but it was obvious that he thought something was fishy about my sudden appearance, and he asked me, respectfully and politely, what on earth I was doing here.
"Oh, you know," I said airily. I burned a bit more magic than I honestly wanted to, levitating and lying flat on the air above him, because I didn't like the dynamics of him sitting and me standing. Sure, when I stand I'm impressively taller than any other creature in the room as long as there are no dragons around (or long-ma, quetzalcoatls, or other draconic relatives of my kind), but it's still got that "called on the carpet in front of the principal" flavor to it. It was making me slightly dizzy to use enough magic that I could levitate, but when you're weak is exactly when you need to put as much energy as you can into pretending you're strong. "I was in the area and thought I'd drop in. See what use you're making of the gifts Chaos gave you, all those centuries ago."
Dainn nodded sagely. "Of course," he said. "We honor the old bargain, Chaos Lord. We continue to fight the weak, decadent reindeer, and expand the territory we have claimed for the rule of the strong. Weak creatures learn to serve their stronger masters, regardless of whether they are outsiders or our own sons."
I was slightly surprised by this, though in retrospect I shouldn't have been. We Chaos avatars instinctively understand that nature isn't created, isn't a nice orderly well-shaped package like the things ponies and other sapient beings make. Nature evolves, creating itself as it goes along, and even life that's been created by minds, such as the various chimerae I and the other chaos avatars have created over the years, is still subject to the same rules. Things that are well adapted to living in the place they find themselves, feeding off the food they eat and reproducing in the way that they reproduce, continue onward, generation after generation. Things that are not well adapted, don't. It's the constant struggle to live, the effort to find food and to not be killed by other things that consider you food, to find a mate and make enough young that they'll grow into a next generation and find their own mates, the conflict with your own kind and with other creatures around you, that shapes life. Stable systems arise out of chaos and disharmony, and then destabilize, change and stabilize again as the chaos of the natural world continues.
This is the thing ponies keep trying to stamp out, everywhere they go, so I can understand why Mayhem tried to actively indoctrinate the culture he created into preserving it. But they got it wrong. Every creature we try to teach this to gets it wrong. It's not the strong that survive and the weak that die. It's the well-adapted that survive. When strength is what's needed for survival, then yes, the weak die. When flexibility and adaptability are more valuable than strength, the strong often stay rigid, and break, like oak trees in a storm, while the weak learn to bend. Besides, caribou were missing the point even if strength itself was the trait to breed for. By taking their "weak" and mating with them, by making themselves so appallingly unattractive to any kind of consensual mating that they'd ensured the strongest, fastest females would never be their mates and only those weak enough to be captured would be the mothers of their calves, they were breeding what they called "weakness" into their population with every child they conceived. And then letting four fifths of them die. Which was one way to weed out the weak, I supposed, but more realistically it meant the children of the well-connected and wealthy survived.
I didn't point out the errors in his species' philosophy to him. "I'm pleased to see it," I said. "I'm also bored out of my mind. What do you creatures do for entertainment up here?"
"I would not question your decisions, Chaos Lord, but it does seem to me that if our realm bores you, wouldn't it be sensible to travel back to a more entertaining realm? We caribou are serious bulls, prepared always for war and for life in our harsh lands. There's little of decadent amusement and silliness here, not like what you'd find in pony lands." He pulled one of his slaves closer by her mane, smiling at me thinly. "Though we do have our pleasures, and I invite you to partake if you like."
"That word." I shuddered. "Sensible. No, of course I'm not going to do something sensible! What kind of lord of chaos do you take me for?" I landed, an indignant expression on my face. "I didn't give you the means to survive up here and fight off your enemies just so you could ignore me to my face when I tell you I want to be entertained." Of course I hadn't given them those things at all, but after two thousand years no one could tell the difference between things Mayhem had done and the things I had, and it was easier just to claim his actions as my own.
"Ah. Well, I can have one of my advisors show you around our capital city, to see if anything strikes your fancy. After the business of the day is done, we will have a feast in honor of your visit, and any entertainments that we caribou can provide you shall be yours if you wish."
"Delightful." The more I saw of this place, the better I'd understand its weak points, and the more ideas I'd get for how I could exploit them to take back what was mine.
I'm not going to go into any details about what I saw on my tour of the caribou's city, largely because I'd rather my audience didn't run off retching and refuse to return to read another word. Suffice it to say... that obsession with sex I talked about earlier? Yeah. Imagine a society where the food, the advertisements, the entertainments, the shops, everything is organized around sex, and specifically, around displaying females as objects to be purchased or used. The Element of Cruelty had been corroding caribou minds for centuries. I could see very, very little of their original culture – some artwork glorifying their current king had some mythological referents calling back to the Aesir, and some of the men's clothes were vaguely reminiscent of things reindeer might wear, except made with materials like leather and bronze. The leather probably came from males from other nations that they killed in combat, which was a fairly brutal statement to make with one's choices in couture. Other than that it was all about sex and degrading females and degrading females with sex.
Oh, and they had a painting of a bunch of caribou bulls stabbing Ar with spears. She was painted to be both devastatingly ferocious, which she had been, and exaggeratedly feminine, which she hadn't been – I mean she was hot stuff by dragon standards, don't get me wrong, and I'm plenty dragon enough to appreciate the charms of a beautiful lady dragon, particularly one who was dedicated to Chaos. But full-size female dragons look to most prey species like, well, dragons. No pony or reindeer ever dwelled on how sensually attractive a dragon was while running for their lives from her.
I was fairly sure the painting depicted someone's fantasy rather than anything that had actually happened, but after finding Loki's body, it disturbed me a great deal. The expressions on the caribou, the positioning of their spears against their bodies, the specific way they'd painted Ar writhing in agony, the places they were stabbing her and the way they'd painted her face – honestly it looked disturbingly like a gang rape. As far as I know Ar went to sleep before Mayhem came into his power, so I wasn't at all sure how the caribou even knew who Ar was.
Though if she'd woken up, her power drastically reduced because it had passed on to Mayhem or me, and she'd found the caribou... everything about their society would have been everything she took on the mantle of Chaos in order to fight. Ar came from a society of patriarchal dragons, not nearly as bad as the Caribou but bad enough that she spent much of her career trying to overthrow any society that wasn't outright matriarchal, let alone a brutal patriarchy. It was her greatest failure as a Chaos avatar, of course; Chaos loves bloody revolution, but not ideology, except the ideology of Chaos itself. Her dedication to female dominance rivaled her dedication to Chaos, so of course Chaos punished her for it, as some of the most brutally patriarchal regimes our world has ever seen rose in direct response to her activities. There are to this day patriarchal dragon societies who refer to a female who leads as "a servant of Chaos", as if they're synonymous (and as if serving Chaos is a bad thing, but really I'm used to that.)
I tried very, very hard not to think about the possibility that a weakened Ar had tried to destroy the caribou and had actually been brought down and killed by them. Obviously it was someone's masturbation fantasy on canvas and they probably knew about Ar because they had had dealings with the Dragon Empire before I destroyed it. Bad enough I'd found evidence that the Frozen North had killed Loki after Harmony had paralyzed him; the thought that these very beasts I was dealing with now might have killed a chaos avatar themselves, even a former chaos avatar, was making me seriously consider whether or not I just wanted to go home and give up on this particular Element. There was no way I was going to get this job done if I let myself believe the painting might have depicted reality. So I decided it was fiction, and focused on something else.
I'm good at that. It's when it comes back later, when I have nothing readily available to distract myself, that I have a problem.
From a more practical standpoint there were runes everywhere. Rune circles surrounded buildings, runes were carved into rocks, runes were tattooed on shaved slaves or branded on their skin. I don't like runes. I believe I've mentioned that. If there was such a thing as order magic it'd be runes. I can't read them, but I can usually decipher what magical effect they are supposed to have if I have some time to study them. These were mostly maintaining the weather and temperature, gathering dark magic and channeling it back to the king, or feeding magic back out from the king into the environment for the caribou to use.
Magic in the form of tactile telekinesis is even more important to caribou than it is to ponies, or should I say, ponies cheat. Pony hooves are flexible, and soft in comparison to their horse ancestors, and project a small field of tactile telekinesis that enables them to grasp things almost as well as those of us with fingers. Caribou and reindeer, not nearly so much. Their hooves are stronger, tougher, and much less flexible than pony hooves – not as tough or inflexible as my goat hoof (not that any part of my body is inflexible, but I actually need to use magic to make my goat hoof do anything that my leg didn't do first), but better designed than pony hooves for the ice and cold of the North. This makes them more dependent on magic to do pretty much anything an earth pony would do with hooves. They do have some tactile telekinesis – every hooved sapient species does – which is how de-antlered cows can do, well, pretty much anything aside from walking, rearing, kicking and other leg-locomotion activities. But it's not nearly as powerful, flexible or dexterous as pony tactile telekinesis. They can't, for instance, tie or untie knots with it.
So caribou and reindeer rely on magic projected through their antlers, much like unicorns do with their horns. Having an antler myself, and having shapechanged into the form of a unicorn on occasion, I can tell you that antlers are tougher, less sensitive, not covered with a thin layer of skin like unicorn horns are, and worse at directing a precision magical field. That's part of why they have two of them; there's no precision in their fields but they can overlap the fields and when they do that, they can be precise. They can also combine the magical field generated from their antlers with the weak tactile telekinesis of their hooves, greatly strengthening the hoof tactile telekinesis into something as strong and capable as any earth pony's, and they can do this at the same time as they're using the antler magic directly, say to fire force bolts or somesuch. So they can hold spears, and throw them, with their hooves, while also defending themselves from other thrown spears, with telekinesis from their antlers. On the second hoof, reindeer and caribou are a lot less capable than unicorns of channeling their magic into anything but telekinesis – the condition of being unable to perceive magical patterns and therefore being unable to actually cast spells, regardless of field strength, is rare among unicorns, and more common than not among caribou and reindeer. Plus, there's those ley lines, making natural, environmental magic incredibly difficult to use.
This means the caribou are absolutely dependent on the magic generated by cruelty and channeled through the king. One of the reasons that warrior reindeer cows, experienced in battle, ferocious, and capable of battling creatures native to Tartarus, can be enslaved at all is that a de-antlered caribou or reindeer is very close to helpless, especially if they've been boosting their hoof dexterity for grasping with antler magic for their entire lives, which most of them have. And even a caribou with antlers can't use them to do anything if he's been cut off from the supply of magic, because there's nothing in the environment he can grasp, which is how the caribou are so easily able to subdue their own bulls if the king decides a particular male is a dissident and should be arrested, turned female and enslaved.
I think you can see why this was highly relevant to me, and what I was thinking about doing. The trouble was, it was a very complex web of magic woven throughout the city, strong and redundant. There was no one point of failure I could pluck and disrupt the whole thing. Not even two or three. Unless you count the Element of Cruelty itself, and I'd have to use a metaphysical saw to get through the metaphorical vines of magic twining all around it. I couldn't pinpoint the Element itself through the tangled confusion of connections that led to it, and when you consider that my specialty is confusion and chaos, that's saying something.
On the other hand, any connection I did break would spill magic. The magic transmitted outward from the end point of the web of runes was tuned to a very specific frequency, unusable by anyone who wasn't a male caribou who'd sworn fealty to the king. But break one of those transmission lines, and raw magic would pour out, too fast and pure to be immediately pulled down by the ley lines.
All for me, in other words. And any black-collared unicorn or reindeer in the area, if I managed to repair her horn or antlers. Chaos isn't about repairing things, but I had some ideas about how I might do that, if I had enough magic to spare.
When I returned to the castle for the feast that was supposedly being thrown in my honor, I had a bare skeleton of a plan, which is honestly all the plan I generally need.
Ah, the feast. Words cannot describe how tempted I am to skip over all this and get right to the action, but Future Me will need to know my weaknesses so he can avoid them (or slap himself in the forehead and wonder why he fell for that again, like I would have done after being turned to stone the second time if I could have moved my paw.) I don't like thinking about what the caribou tried to do to me – and came close to succeeding at – because... well, because it says things about who I am, my innermost thoughts and beliefs, that deeply embarrass me, and also because I'm supposed to be the one altering the personalities and desires of others, not the target of alteration. Chaos is supposed to make me immune to mind control. Not that Chaos ever promised to make me immune to drugged smoke in the air unless I caught onto what it was quickly enough to eliminate its effects on me... as I said, most potions and concotions don't work on me because I'm a draconequus and they're not designed for my biology.
I suppose I don't have much of a choice. Onward, then.
The parade of disturbingness began with the table. She was a sheared, black-collared yak whose forelegs had been amputated at the knee. Ponies, being small and light, can rear up on their hind legs and walk around on them for a short while; it's hard for ponies to maintain their balance that way, but they can do it. Yaks are huge. They can't do that. So this poor lady had to walk on her stumps, with her backside higher than her head and neck because the hind legs were still intact. Her back legs were shackled together with a fairly long chain, so she could walk, but couldn't kick. This made her steps short, mincing and delicate, like no yak I've ever seen move ever. She wasn't shaved down to the skin, but her thick yak coat had been sheared down to the thickness of my neck coat, or an average Equestrian pony's coat – more smooth and suede than furry. Although the room was plenty warm enough for me and the caribou, she was obviously used to more body covering than she had, and was shivering. And even with all that had been done to humiliate and hurt her and make it impossible for her to fight back, they still had to drag her in on a leash, because she kept balking, trying to use her body weight to keep the caribou from being able to move her.
I actually felt sorry for her. I don't do empathy much, but I remember what it felt like to be a captive, in restraints, ordered to do degrading and humiliating things and being treated like an animal. In my case it was because they thought I was an animal, or were pretending they thought so anyway, and nothing sexual was involved, but that didn't change the fact that I knew what it was like to be hobbled and mutilated to keep me from fighting or running. I couldn't do anything about it yet, of course, but hopefully enough time sitting near her and maybe I could; she was a regular furnace of disharmony, emotions like rage and despair positively boiling behind her eyes.
We had been seated in a roughly oval shape, on cushions on the floor in a large stone hall, with Dainn and myself at the two ends of the oval and a bunch of caribou advisors to the king along the sides. The yak was forced to lay down within the oval so her head was facing Dainn and her backside was facing me. They then put – I'm not sure how to describe it. Imagine pliers. Imagine the kind of pliers where the business ends bend toward each other in an arch, leaving space in the middle. Now turn them upside-down and make them large enough that a yak can fit in the arch, but with the "handle" side short enough that it sticks up from the yak's back only about two hoof-widths. They then had wooden table slats, on metal bars which ended in a piece that bent down at an angle and then ended in a ring. They slid the rings onto the handles of the clamps around the yak, so that sticking out from either side of her was a shelf-like wooden ledge similar to a picnic table, though narrower. The clamps weren't tight enough to hurt her – in fact it looked like they were wide enough that they were barely touching her – but they would effectively keep her from moving side to side, and with her legs pinned under her she wasn't going in any other direction. Two more slats, only the width of her body, were placed on, and these were laying directly on her – one fastened over her lower back, the other over the top of her head, forcing it down. (Yaks have horns, but with no magical power in them; they're just used for fighting. Hers had been removed anyway.)
The slaves who brought out the food put plates and cups in front of me and the caribou seated around the yak, onto the wooden slats; the food platters themselves were laid on her back, with cloth bags filled with what seemed to be beans or tiny stones on the bottom of the platters, so they'd balance properly on any creature's back whatever the size and width. They filled everyone's mugs with mead; I drank mine like it was water (which it practically was, after I denatured the alcohol), and they immediately refilled it. I decided to wait until the caribou were paying attention before doing it again. Male caribou came out and replaced the torches on poles with something smokier, with a scent I couldn't quite place, but it smelled sweet and significantly improved the ambience of the place.
The second thing I found disturbing was the food. The first course was a meat stew, with onions and hardy root vegetables. It didn't bother me that the caribou ate meat; this far north it was almost necessary. Even the reindeer eat a lot of fish. What bothered me was that it was caribou meat.
See, female caribou don't get much in the way of medical treatment. And they're pregnant a lot. Not that this results in a high birth rate – caribou bulls resent allowing infants to take their slaves' attention away from pleasing them, so most infants who aren't a first born son are handed over to overworked elderly nurses, who don't have enough resources to keep them all alive because not many female caribou actually live to get old, due to the aforementioned lack of medical treatment. Bulls don't kill their females, generally, but as soon as one is old enough that some of her appeal has worn away, they get neglected, fed less and kept locked in cages more. Those that manage to transition into some other kind of work – child care, or menial service in places where bulls won't see them, like dishwashing in restaurants – are more likely to survive, but sacrificed cows are stupid, learning new skills is hard for them, and generally at this point in their lives they have never done anything other than provide sex. So most of them don't manage to make this transition. They grow weak from being fed less, and become much more vulnerable to dying of accidents or illnesses.
But why waste good meat? A cow who's just dropped dead wasn't treated like a sapient being in life, and they don't treat her as one in death either. Dead cows are butchered and stewed, with enough heat applied to kill whatever they might have died of, and then caribou males eat the meat.
You may recall I have issues with eating sentient animals. Sapient animals are beyond the pale. I took one bite of the stew, identified it as caribou meat, spit it out, and then pretended I was utterly disgusted by how bland and devoid of spices it was. What followed was a procession of increasingly anxious slaves bringing out pretty much every kind of spice the caribou actually have on hand, which isn't a lot of them, until I got ostentatiously frustrated and made the bowl explode (in air, because I tossed it), spattering caribou stew all over the various caribou at the table, who I then laughed at, a lot. Then I conjured myself a bowl of chocolate soup with gummy worms, and complained loudly about the quality of hospitality that forced me to bring my own food. Oh, how I enjoyed the gritted teeth and forced smiles of the various bulls ranged around the table.
The second course was a bit better. They had something very much like sushi – hardy Arctic grasses rather than rice or hay, marinated in vinegar, wrapped around raw fish, berries and cheese, and then all of that wrapped in seaweed. You may not be aware of this, given that the Equestrian version of sushi is always vegetarian, but in Neighpon where the dish originated, raw fish is actually a staple of it, so the caribou version was almost closer to the original than the Equestrian version is. For the same reasons as the last time the caribou gave me fish, I ate it. There was a haunch of polar bear, roasted. Polar bears aren't sapient and are perfectly capable of killing a caribou or two, so I decided for the sake of my cover that I'd partake in that too. However, I drew the line on the platter of scrambled eggs; one bite, and the metallic undertones told me this was most likely dragon egg.
Anarchic dragons – the kind who live alone, like Winnie, except during mating season – don't guard their eggs; they lay them in Arctica, burying them underground in the direct path of the ley lines, where all the magic being pulled down toward the pole runs through their egg on its way. This is why there's a periodic dragon migration; young dragons are born in the North and make their way down through the Frozen North, past territories like Yakyakistan, Griffonstone and the recently restored Crystal Empire, down into Equestria, and then every twenty years or so they gather together and fly south toward the dragon lands. The thing about laying your egg in the path of the ley lines, of course, is that anyone magically sensitive enough to know where the lines are can find them. Dragon eggs are very, very hard to crack by force, but not impossible. Since dragons are most decidedly sapient, I didn't eat more than that single bite of egg; instead I claimed the eggs were bland too, manifested a bottle of hot sauce, covered the eggs with the entire bottle until no egg was visible under hot sauce any longer, and then surreptitiously teleported the eggs to the bottom of the egg platter while slurping the hot sauce off the plate with my tongue.
Also, the cheese and the fermented milk I was offered came from caribou milk (I did mention that bulls are jealous of the resources their female slaves give to their own infants.) I don't have any personal inhibitions against drinking the milk of any creature, though, so I had no issue with that.
At the beginning of the meal, I was asked if I wanted the shaven ladies I'd had reserved for my pleasure to attend me, and I said yes. A soft, plush cushion on the ground might be just the thing for a caribou tushy, but I'm a biped and needed somewhere to put my legs, and some back support. So I had two of them kneel on either side of me as footrests, one lay down behind me to give me lumbar support, and the fourth to give me a backrub. Her hooves weren't all that dexterous, of course, given that she was a de-antlered reindeer, so first I demanded a black-collared pony to assist her, and then I wanted to know if there were any black-collared griffins available to preen my wings with their talons, and got one.
During the second course, as the bulls got more mead into them and wanted some female entertainment, I managed to acquire a dire wolf who could play a lyre and sing (I happen to like the way dire wolves sing, all right?) Of course, they made her sing a song about how much she loved to be degraded and treated like an object, which infuriated and humiliated her, but they'd declawed her and she was on a leash fastened to a ring on the floor, so there wasn't much she could do about it. I demanded that the most acrobatic pony black collars come and dance for me. Then I wanted a few more reindeer, to wash my feet and tail. By the time I was done making ridiculous demands, I had about a dozen black collars around me, hating me and the caribou profoundly, sweet sweet disharmony churning in their hearts. Also, by mocking bulls who had red collars attending them, I managed to get all of the bulls there to have black collared slaves brought to them. The only exception was Dainn, who had the only red collar in the room – a young red dragon, barely older than Spike, who was looking up at him worshipfully.
Well. That was going to be a problem.
See, the thing no one realizes about dragons is that they imprint. Anarchic dragons lay their eggs in the middle of nowhere precisely so that their young won't imprint, because anarchic dragons want total freedom to do as they wish without the control of other dragons. In matriarchal dragon societies, the females hatch all the eggs, and in patriarchal ones, the males do, because whoever hatches a dragon egg, that dragon will imprint on, love like a child loves a parent or a dog loves a master, and want to serve. If they're mistreated, they'll grow out of it by the time they're adults, unless the society is actively oppressive – the one Ar came from did its best to beat any resistance out of young female dragons. But if they're treated well, they will probably be loyal to the one who hatched them for the rest of their lives. This is the main reason dragons can even have a society.
Being the centerpoint of the entire caribou society's magic, Dainn had more than enough juice to hatch a dragon egg, something that history suggests only two unicorns have ever done ever. (They used to use dragon eggs as a test to get into Celestia's school for magic, to see how the young unicorn handled failure, because no unicorn since Starswirl had ever hatched a dragon egg. Then Twilight Sparkle hatched one, so they stopped doing that test.) Apparently, he'd hatched and raised himself a loyal dragon love slave. Who he hadn't done anything to declaw or otherwise weaken; she was every bit as strong and equipped with sharp claws, sharper teeth and fire breath as I'd been telling Spike he was, some time ago.
Well, I'd cross that bridge when I came to it; she wasn't much bigger than Spike and there was no telling if he'd given her any combat training, or if he just used her to look impressive because see, that manly male over there tamed and enslaved a dragon! After all, I had my own lovely ladies and the lovelier disharmony in their hearts. Plus the absolutely amazing backrub and preening job I was getting from them.
Sometime during the second course, I conjured a great quantity of hot spice – I think this was after the dragon egg – and poured it into my mead. Dainn noticed.
"It seems our food doesn't agree with you, Chaos Lord," he said.
"Oh, there's nothing wrong with it, it's just bland," I said. "Needed a bit of spice." I took a drink. "Ah, that hits the spot. Would you like to try some?"
"We are all but mortals," Dainn said. "I wouldn't presume to challenge a god."
"Don't worry, it's not poisonous to caribou. Just a bit of hot spice." I grinned.
He reached out with his magic and took the mug. "Well, then I accept."
To his credit, he managed not to scream, cry, or spit it out, though he couldn't really control how his face turned red and he started panting. He set my mug down. "That was... an experience," he gasped, and took a drink from his own mug.
"You can have more if you want."
"To drink more of a god's brew would be hubris. I'm not sure more of this drink would be bearable to a mortal bull."
One of the younger advisors slammed his own mug down. "Or perhaps some mortal bulls are softer than others."
There was a sudden tension in the room. My grin got even bigger. This young upstart was challenging Dainn. One thing I've noticed about any society that values "toughness" of any kind, and has any hot spices on hand at all... the ability to tolerate hot spices is considered a proxy for how big of a badflank you are. Kind of like alcohol tolerance. I always win these games, for obvious reasons, but neither of the caribou were actively challenging me... yet. This was an internal affair.
"If the Chaos Lord permits it, I'm sure you are willing to test yourself by taking a drink of your own," Dainn said, sounding more amused than angry.
"Oh, feel free. I'm in a generous mood today," I said.
The upstart took a deep swig... and bellowed, spitting out what was left in his mouth. Tears welled in his eyes. He hastily drank more than half of his own flagon. All of the caribou burst out laughing, as did I.
That broke the ice, so to speak. After that they were all laughing and joking and telling stories, and including me. I thought I was playing them, biding my time to build up my energy. I thought I was sharing a meal and a few pranks with them to set them at ease, make them think I was on their side. But it felt surprisingly good to be included. And it never occurred to me to wonder exactly who was being played, here.
Whatever they had in those torches smelled sweet, and felt relaxing. I'd been afraid for so long—afraid of Anon, afraid of failing. Afraid since I'd found Loki's body, that I could possibly share his fate. The tension in my belly and the cold in my veins were loosening, warming up, and it felt good. There was food, and some of it was good, and a drink that warmed me up inside – not from alcohol, which I was still turning into not-alcohol, but from the hot spices I was putting in it – and the backrub I was getting felt incredible. At my club I was never in my true form, which always produces a slight bit of detachment, a kind of disassociation where things just don't feel as... immediate. Sex still feels good even in another form, but non-sexual touching can't quite cut through the haze that makes sensation seem removed. I hadn't had a backrub in my true form since getting out of stone, and let me tell you, being a stone statue does a number on your back.
And these guys respected me. Feared me appropriately, not by running away and screaming or attacking me, but by tolerating antics I'm sure they would have preferred to slap down, because they knew what I could do and they were properly cautious. It had been a long time since I'd gotten respectful fear. I enjoyed that.
A few of the bulls started to tell war stories. Dainn asked me if I had interesting stories of my own. Did I! I recognized what would entertain my audience, and told stories of some of the most humiliating and silly things I did to Celestia and Luna, and the caribou were properly appreciative and amused. It'd been a long time since I'd gotten that, either.
At this point in my story I have to make a confession.
I'd really rather not. I'm ashamed of this. Ponies won't understand why, but Future Me probably will, on reading these words. Of course Future Me's the one who most needs to hear it. So I'm going to brace myself and tell the truth.
When I said the reason I don't like or approve of rape is that it's the cheapest, easiest means of generating disharmony and therefore it's beneath me... I lied. I'm perfectly capable of going for a cheese move. I've gone and riled up yaks, and I think I pointed out before how very easy it is to rile up yaks. My reasons aren't nearly as appropriate, for the Lord of Chaos. And, you know, I try to convince myself, what does chaos care about appropriate? And why do my feelings have to have a reason? Doesn't chaos mean I can have a whim and follow it, no matter how senseless? The trouble is, I do have a reason, and I know what it is, and that bothers me.
I legitimately believe that killing should be a last resort because dead bodies don't cause chaos; I'm okay with that. That relates to my mandate. I'm not ashamed of that, in fact I think I'm a better chaos avatar than most of my predecessors, because of it. But my feelings about why I don't like rape have nothing to do with chaos.
I have the memories of the prior chaos avatars. But before I spent a thousand years in stone, the only ones I could pull back strongly and clearly were the ones that belonged to Mayhem. And those ones, I couldn't stop seeing when something triggered them. It's not as if I can't tell they're not mine; they don't feel like me, they feel like... like when you have a dream where you're a completely different being with completely different thoughts and attitudes than you really have, and when you wake up you can remember the dream, but you also know, that's not who you are. It's like that.
But that doesn't mean some of those memories can't disgust or horrify me.
I can remember Mayhem raping my mother. From his perspective.
You have to understand. My mother was the only creature, ever, in over two millennia of my existence, who loved me unconditionally. I was only four or five when she died, but I remember her far better than I probably have any right to. Even now, sometimes, two thousand years later, I dream that I find her, that somehow she's alive, that she's been alive all this time but trapped and unable to come back for me... and I won't lie, waking up and realizing that it isn't true has been known to moisturize my eyeballs. And pillows. And Mayhem had the same powers I do... so he could feel the suffering he was causing her. I remember his memories of her pain (psychological pain; he didn't physically harm her. He didn't have to.)
I remember his memories of enjoying it.
And even if I managed to solve the problem of traveling to a specific moment in time and yet being able to change the past – generally you either can't change anything, or you can't control where you end up, even with chaos involved – I couldn't do anything about it. Even I'm not immune to that level of paradox. Because that's how I was conceived. Mayhem is my biological father.
She was in heat, and because she was the Principle of Motherhood, she was the only draconequus in our tribe allowed to go into heat, because they were starving and they couldn't add additional mouths to feed but no draconequus could be prevented from acting on their Principle. So the rule was, she'd offer any male draconequus who wanted a chance to father her child. She had no problem with that – we weren't a monogamous species and she liked her tribesmates well enough, and if several males mated with her, then her child could plausibly be any of theirs and all of them would be looking out for the kid. (Traditionally, fathers had next to nothing to do with draconequus cubs, but we thought we were the last tribe left, that all of the surviving draconequui in the world were right there in our little group, so a lot of traditions weren't in play anymore.)
None of them remembered when they made that rule that technically Mayhem was a draconequus.
When he showed up out of nowhere and demanded the same right that she granted the other male draconequui, she said no. He'd wiped out our species, reduced us to tiny scattered starving tribes, almost all of whom remembered barely surviving the cold. She hated him. It didn't matter. He said that if she wouldn't play fair and treat him as a draconequus, then he'd play by the rules of Chaos... and locked all the other draconequui out of her lair so no one could even try to help her. Not that they could have; your average draconequus wasn't much more powerful than your average unicorn.
She didn't know, afterward. The last thing he did was to wipe her memory of it, so she thought I was just an ordinary draconequus cub, not the son of the Spirit of Chaos. It haunts me, to think – if she'd known, would she still have loved me? Do I owe Mayhem for that? Not that he did it out of any love for me, but he was trying to create an heir; the power of chaos usually goes to an avatar's child when the avatar dies, if there is a child. He wanted to die, but he wanted the power to go to a draconequus, out of the guilt he felt that he'd gotten nearly all of us killed. It would have been deeply inconvenient for him if she'd abandoned me to die because I was the son of the creature she most hated.
But I'm pretty sure the others remembered. The leader of our tribe – I can't remember his name, just that his Principle was something opposite to mine, like Order or Control – named me Discord, Principle of Chaos and Disharmony, right before the ritual that killed all of them. I was being pretty hyperactive, because preparation for draconequus rituals has to be one of the most boring things in the universe even to an adult, but I'm also pretty sure I didn't earn my name and my Principle just from being an unruly little buzzbomb.
So, you know... I admit it. I like humiliating and psychologically tormenting ponies. Or, well, anyone. And I like to touch, and be touched, and I'm not always all that concerned over whether the pony I am petting actually wanted to be petted. In fact, sometimes I scritch their ears or hug them or pick them up and dance with them precisely because my touch makes their skin crawl, and I'm angry that they're disgusted by me and I want to punish them for it. But I draw the line at anything sexual. The closest to that I've ever done to a pony that wasn't Celestia was a chaste little smooch on their cheek. (I did, one time, make Celestia forget she wasn't in love with me anymore... but even then, I didn't let her take me to bed, because by the time she started coming on to me, I'd realized what a hollow travesty of the love we'd once shared this was, and I didn't want to let her start anything that she'd look back on after I let her go and feel like I'd violated her. Also, I stole her tail on more than one occasion, and occasionally dressed her in lingerie. But come on, she was my ex.)
But I shouldn't be drawing a line anywhere! I'm Chaos! Objectively, what is the difference between juggling a pony when they're shrieking at you to put them down, and having sex with them when they're telling you to stop? Aren't they both basically the same thing? But one of them's hilarious and the other disgusts me. In the eyes of Chaos, though, they aren't any different. I've been cut off from a potential weapon in my arsenal, chained down to pony morality (well, or draconequus morality, but same difference), because I have empathy for a victim. Empathy is terrible! I'm supposed to be causing disharmony! You can't do that if you feel sorry for your targets!
At the same time... I can't stop feeling empathy for my mother. She's my mother. She loved me. Mayhem's parents never really gave a damn and Loki's family life was outright abusive and so was Ar's and I'm not even going to get into the things that were done to Eris before she became the avatar, but I had a mother who loved me, and she was a rape victim, and it makes me sick that that happened to her even though I wouldn't have existed if it hadn't. So okay, maybe this is a weakness, maybe I'm falling down on the job and being a bad chaos avatar because I find that tormenting creatures with sex is appalling even though I'm okay with tormenting them with virtually anything else. (Also, I really do like to be wanted and I really do feel like ponies who can't see how attractive I am don't deserve to have sex with me and I really feel like using mind control to make ponies want me would be like saying I'm too pathetic and ugly to be wanted any other way... but if that was all it was, I'd just feel distaste for the notion of personally committing rape. Rather like I don't personally want to eat dead animals, and avoid it most of the time, but I have nothing against Gilda eating an actual chicken if she can catch one.)
The reason I have felt the need to explain all this, right at this moment, is because something in that smoke started making me forget any of that.
I knew the smoke was drugged. Something has a strong smell and makes you feel warm and floaty and eases your tension when you breathe it in? I'm not stupid. But in my experience, alcohol's the only thing I ever encountered that works on a draconequus the same as on a pony, caribou, griffin or anyone else, and with no other draconequui in the world, drugs tailored to my biology are rare. I can get a little bit buzzed and a little bit high from a few things that also affect ponies, but generally speaking the ponies end up a lot more impaired than I do. So I didn't think the drug could possibly have more of an effect on me than it had on the caribou, and... I've been afraid for a long, long time by my standards. I'm not used to living in fear. I've been trying to pretend it's not there, but when I felt it leave me, there was no way I was going to counter the effects of the drug and make it come back.
Maybe if it hadn't made the fear go away, I'd have been more paranoid and protected myself better. But then, that's probably why they used a drug that would relax me and make me less afraid.
So as the night went on, my contempt for the caribou started fading, and the various attractive ladies on display were seeming much more appealing. There's a fine line between finding someone extra attractive because their lust for you is combined with fear, anger or hatred, and enjoying the disharmony therein... and finding someone extra attractive because their heart is churning with an assortment of negative emotions, none of which are lust. That's a line I don't normally cross. I enjoy any sort of disharmony, but unless there's lust in it, I don't get a sexy sort of vibe from it... normally.
By this point I was lying on top of my various footstools, using them as an impromptu massage table the way the poor yak was still being used as a dinner table, and I had four or five different black collars working on my back, wings and tail. One of them was an earth pony, and she was amazing. I wouldn't have been shocked if she'd been a professional masseuse before being enslaved. So here we have me pressed up against the warm, furless skin of several rather silly-looking but still attractive shaved reindeer, who hate me and everything about this situation, with pegasi wearing bizarre wing sheaths dancing lewdly for my entertainment (and the bulls, but I didn't care about them), and other beautiful creatures of assorted races doing very, very pleasant things to my body. And the disgust I'd been feeling with the fact that none of these ladies actually wanted to be here had faded out. I challenge you to find any creature who finds the female form attractive to not start responding to this.
Before my audience declares me hopelessly depraved and loses all sympathy for me... no, at no point during the evening or at any other time did I have sex with any of them, and my definition of sex is rather broad. I never lost that much of myself. I did, however, listen to the caribou's stories of sexual conquest with rather more intense interest than I would have earlier in the evening, and I joined in with stories of my own, telling them about things like the time I had sex with five ponies at the same time. (I left out the part where three of them had been stallions.) Or making multiple copies of myself so my worshipful chaos groupies could each get some personal attention from me when there were too many of them for just one of me. They laughed, and praised me, and I... sort of forgot that these guys were enemies and I was here to steal their most precious magical item.
They seemed like fun. They appreciated my stories, laughing at my tales of pranks on alicorns and whistling in encouragement when I told them about my sexual escapades. And after all, the caribou had always kind of worshiped me. Sure, their society wasn't all that chaotic, but wasn't I making friends with their king here? Maybe I could change that. Certainly they were plenty disharmonious. I was getting back a nice charge from the emotions the slaves were seething with – a lot of which I was wasting on party tricks to impress my hosts. They respected me. They liked me. I'd last gotten that from ponies more than a thousand years ago.
So we got to talking about what would be an awesome prank on ponies, and a great way to stick it to Celestia, Luna and the Bearers. Dainn pointed out that the Crystal Heart projects emotion outward to the entire recently returned Crystal Empire, and then picks up the emotion as it's fed back to it from the citizens it projected it to, in a feedback loop. Sombra had used it to project fear and hatred. Cadance, like the rulers from before Sombra, used it to project love and hope. What if it was projecting lust instead?
I thought this was an absolutely hilarious idea. I could cast a spell on the Heart to change what it was "feeling", using a similar principle to the plunder vines I designed way back when (the ones that never sprouted... thanks, guys, a lot of help you were.) The plunder vines had been designed to drain the Tree (and alicorns, and any other source of major league magic they encountered), not modify it. But what if? I admit I'd had thoughts, in my stone prison, of altering the Elements so that they contained other principles – for maximum disharmony, probably their opposites, particularly because Magic has no opposite the way the others do, so it would bollix them from being able to harmonize together at all – and the main reason I hadn't tried it was that it was a lot easier to invert the Bearers than mess with the fruits of Harmony directly, and then I'd ended up in stone. What if I did that to the Crystal Heart, instead? Lust isn't even the opposite of love, just a distortion of it.
We could make all the Crystal Ponies, the entire Crystal Empire, obsessed with sex. Bring everything to a grinding halt, as ponies dropped everything they were doing to bang each other instead. The chaos would be incredible. And because the things the Crystal Ponies feel fuel the Heart, the enchantment would keep going. Indefinitely, maybe. Chaos magic would only be required to start the cycle; harmony magic would make it persist. Oh, take that, Harmony! I could corrupt Yggdrasil's fruit and once harmony started fueling the corruption, the Tree and its Bearers would be able to do exactly nothing about it.
They suggested that the enchantment could make stallions want to dominate mares, and make mares want to submit. That's actually not hard. I've cast spells like that before. It doesn't cause mass rapes, not when I've done them anyway; it affects heterosexuals, making one gender of heterosexual ponies want the other gender to sweep them off their feet and take them to bed (or, sometimes, take them right there), and the other gender want to reciprocate. Homosexual ponies are generally not affected, and bisexuals only to the degree that if they naturally had such tendencies they'd be enhanced. But it works by altering love into lust, so it mostly affects married couples, special someponies, and pony couples who haven't worked up the courage to admit to their mutual desires yet and are still pretending to be just friends, or perhaps that they don't notice each other at all. I've done it with the sexes in both positions (in fact on one occasion I flipped who was dominant and who was submissive five times in one week). So this suggestion didn't manage to trip any red flags, not with me fairly stoned at this point and giggling at absolutely everything.
Cadance was an alicorn. Her hubby was a mere unicorn. The thought of such a powerful entity panting at the hooves of her significantly less powerful and more mortal boytoy really appealed to me. I love such inversions of power. (I may have been a lot less powerful than I am now, but I was still a lot more powerful than Celestia all the times I let her tie me up and make me beg. I was just a mortal chaos mage, but she was still just a unicorn then, so I still outclassed her.) Oh, and what if I could entice Celestia to come visit the Crystal Empire to investigate? Since if she sent the Bearers they'd just all end up having an orgy with Anon, like they do all the time anyway. Maybe there was still some deeply buried part of her, suppressed by Anon, that still had feelings for me... feelings that would immediately turn into an overwhelming desire to beg me for sex.
(Like I said. I really don't like what they altered me into, even temporarily.)
I was already planning out how, exactly, I'd structure that spell (for some reason being stoned doesn't actually affect my ability to either do spells or figure out how I'd do them, probably because most of my spells are more about convincing magic to do what I want it to do than building mental structures to force it.) Dainn was painting mental images to sweeten the deal and convince me, and I was most of the way to convinced. Cadance submitting to Shining Armor? Hot. Celestia submitting to me? Hotter. Luna submitting to me? Gross. I still think of her as a little sister and incest isn't my thing. Besides, Luna's as bi as the moon has phases. Luna utterly horrified because Celestia had surrendered willingly to my desires? Yes, ok, that was a good one. Then I'd turn her into an adorable blue parrot and give her to her sister as a pet, and make Celestia my Queen of Chaos.
Then Dainn suggested that I could get revenge on the Bearers who'd turned me to stone a year ago by making them submit to me as well.
Except the spell doesn't work like that. The way I was planning on doing it, a mare would already have to feel desire for a male to want to submit to him, and I was fairly sure none of the Bearers were interested in me. What it would lead to was them getting even kinkier in their games with Anon. Disgruntled, I said that if the Bearers got involved, the spell would only end up with my worst enemy getting lucky. Then I started giggling at the notion of inverting the spell for just the Bearers. "I could flip it around for them – but not him. Oh, he's happy to have them as his girltoys right now, but I'll bet he'd be singing a different song if all of them wanted to be on top!"
The fantasy of the six Bearers treating Anon the way the waitresses at Something Different had treated Twister amused me far more than it would normally. (Though, to be honest... I still think it's funny, just not funny enough to overcome the general nausea I feel when I think about Anon having sex with anyone. Sure, rape jokes generally just come across as boorish, but when the victim's a rapist and his rapists are his former victims, then it's kind of hilarious.) Dainn and the other bulls were not impressed, however. Dainn scowled. "You want females to enslave a male? That isn't the way it should be."
"Disgusting," one of the other bulls said, and burped loudly. Apparently he was too drunk to remember to be afraid of me.
"I don't recall asking you," I said, took his mouth, and put it in a mug that had been empty until I conjured it full of spit. The mouth spluttered frantically while the caribou's eyes went wide and his nose flared, his hooves going to his mouth. I turned to Dainn, ignoring the rude bull. "Spirit of Chaos, remember? It's fun to do things the way they shouldn't be!"
"What if instead you turned him into a female? You could have him for your own slave, and teach him the impudence of challenging the Lord of Chaos!" The other bulls nodded, a few chiming in with lewd suggestions for what I could do to a female-bodied Anon to put him in his place.
I'm sure this was supposed to be persuasive. It was just nauseating. I would rather have sex with a snapping turtle who does oral than touch Anon with someone else's penis, let alone my own. Nothing against humans, you understand; they're incredibly weird-looking, with pony-like heads on bipedal bodies that are covered in such a light sprinkling of fur it might as well not be there, but weird is almost synonymous with sexy in my book, and the thought of how sensitive they are, with all that bare furless skin... mmm. (I didn't actually do anything with one when I went to Anon's world and adopted their form, unless you count my old friends with benefits, Me, Myself and I, but let's just say the art of the lift-etching is one they are enormously experienced with, except of course they don't have tails so there's no lifting involved. Some of the imagery I found was downright inspirational.)
No, it's specifically Anon that disgusts me. Having seen what the others of his species look like... he's so boring! Yes, on our world he stands out, but over there, he's almost the scientifically derived average of what they think a normal citizen of his nation looks like. His face and body are as dull as his personality and imagination. He could be Everyhuman, except that I feel positive that almost any other random human I picked would be more interesting and attractive than he is.
I'm no stranger to the intersection of hate and lust; it's not often that I desire someone I hate (though desiring someone who both hates and lusts for me, that was actually the majority of my sex life when I unruled Equestria), but it has happened. (There was a supercilious, protocol obsessed long-ma once who kept putting me down for being a draconequus, and oh how I enjoyed tearing his aloof façade to bits, turning his world to chaos, and making him beg for more. Making bigots who look down on you for your species beg for your supposedly inferior, unattractive, lowly body is one of the best things ever. But I digress.) However, there is not one single tiny speck of lust for Anon within my heart, and merely contemplating the possibility long enough to refute it makes me want to brush my teeth because I think I just threw up a little in my mouth. He's a stupid, unimaginative, brutal lout with no class, panache or style, and he has more power than me, and he doesn't deserve any of it.
I said so. "The only place I'd like to squeeze Anon is around the neck."
"Of course, that's always the way," Dainn said. "But once you have your enemy defeated before you, naked and female, I'm sure you can find some far more delightful things to do to her than simply kill her."
No, if Anon were female, I'd still want her to just die, I thought. I don't discriminate on the basis of gender in my attractions; turning someone who disgusts me a different gender isn't going to change my opinion any more than turning someone who attracts me a different gender would.
This was the part where it suddenly occurred to me that Dainn couldn't comprehend that.
Bisexual and homosexual male caribou are closeted to the point where caribou in general think they don't exist, because any male who ever expressed sexual interest in another male – aside from perhaps sadistically dominating a recently overpowered enemy before being able to cast the rite that turns him female – would end up being turned female and enslaved himself. And Dainn couldn't imagine a world where females could take the lead or be sexually dominant; or rather, he could, but it disgusted him at a very visceral level. He couldn't tolerate the simplest amount of variety in existence – all creatures had to have sex the exact same way, with brutal male overlords degrading helpless female slaves. The only variation that was permitted in his world was whether or not the females pretended to like it or not.
Like someone had just dumped cold water on my head, I woke up, my head clearing. My magic was kicking in, rejecting a foreign magic that in my relaxed, accepting state, I hadn't noticed or resisted. I was still kind of high, but as I remembered that Dainn was my enemy and wanted a world far more regimented and rigid than any pony had ever dreamed of, and recognized that there was a fog of mind control magic woven around my thoughts... well, have you ever taken a drug that's supposed to relax you and reduce anxiety and fear, and then discovered something that made you suddenly terrified?
It was like a switch was thrown in my brain, turning me from giddy and stupid to paranoid and panicked. And being paranoid and panicking, I magicked away the drug as well, frightened enough despite it that I knew I needed a clear head.
I felt a sudden overpowering rage at Dainn, at all of his society. I looked at the magical patterns around him, once again, to see if I could see where they linked to the Element of Cruelty, because right then I was extremely tempted to just grab it and teleport off with it. But no, the dense tangle of magic was still too thick to see through. I'd have to start cutting threads, and the moment I did, the caribou would know their ploy hadn't worked.
I started laughing like I was still high as a kite. "No, no, I've got a better one!" I said, chortling loudly and giddily. "This prank's much better! You could even call it noble!"
"Noble?" Dainn frowned at me.
"That's right, because no bull has antlers!"
But cows, they sure did. Because I'd just taken all the antlers off the male caribou and put them on the females – who, you will recall, were all black collars, none of them sacrificed cows. Well, except my joke was a bit ruined by the fact that it didn't work on Dainn. Another case of my magic resisting my magic. If I survive this whole thing with Anon, I am going to have words with my Elements after all this is over. And by "words", I mean I'm seriously considering melting them down and recreating them, without the corruption of a thousand years out of my control.
I leapt off my massage table ladies as I did it, teleporting into the air and out of the reach of said antlers, since it might take them a moment to process that I was helping them. Caribou howled. Reindeer immediately tried to cast – and, of course, could not, because there wasn't nearly enough ambient magic to fuel a casting unless you were tied to Dainn, and they weren't. Which meant they were still sitting ducks for Dainn, who still had his antlers, plus all the magic. However, I'm a master of multitasking. At the same time, I was breaking all the bonds on the yak – so the table fell apart, dumping food and drink all over the caribou – and growing two big, thick, wooden cudgels out from her amputated stumps. Yeah, I could have given her back her actual legs, but trying to use chaos to heal a creature back to normal takes more energy than transforming them into something strange, unless you use this one weird trick that caribou hate, and I didn't have time to do that to Ms. Yakky McYakface.
It is relevant here to point out that caribou bulls sit in a way that is positively lewd by pony standards. They keep their forelegs spread out wide and their butts scooted just a bit forward, so their entire underbelly is visible. Of course their poky bits are in a sheath, like nearly every male creature native to our planet that I can think of, but their testicles are not, and let's just say the position leaves nothing to the imagination if one is inclined to glance down. So I was expecting the yak to headbutt or bite Dainn in the balls. She surprised me. She went for his belly instead, butting him hard enough to make him oof.
Immediately I saw the tangle of magic around him shift. He had a semi-permanent knot of magical energy around his boy bits, which in retrospect was probably the reason the yak hadn't butted him there – she must have known Dainn had spellwork to protect his precious from anything a rebellious slave might try to do. The rest of the energy was in a loose web around and through him, rather like an alicorn mana field, except that I could plainly see that the magic wasn't actually his, personally. It did, however, mean he'd heal like an alicorn, so that headbutt wasn't going to provide much of a distraction.
So I grabbed one of those lines of magic around him, and with all of my strength, I pulled.
For a frightening moment, I thought I didn't actually have enough juice to break one of those mana lines. They were hardened, old, and heavily protected by runes – not runes I could see, either, or I could have erased them. Rune magic's extremely vulnerable to me when I can see the runes, and extremely tough for me to handle when I can't – the runes tie down the structure of the magic to symbols, and without being able to disrupt the symbols, I can't redirect or repointer the magic. All I can do is the most basic application of chaos – cause disorder where there had been order. Break bonds.
It snapped, of course, because I am awesome, and spilled usable magic everywhere, which was good because without usable magic to grab and bolster myself, I might have fainted from the effort. Also, it made Dainn scream and go back to his knees, which was pretty funny because he'd just gotten to his feet. The yak didn't waste time. If she was puzzled at having cudgels for legs, she didn't show it. Yaks don't think much, they just react – at least in combat. She'd gotten to her own feet after the headbutt, and she started swinging her hard wooden legs at Dainn's head, with a lot of force.
In the long run it wasn't going to help. It doesn't matter how much you whale on an alicorn's head, you can't kill them or cause any kind of permanent damage. In the short term, you can actually knock them unconscious, though, and certainly you can distract them and make it impossible for them to cast.
However, the red dragon slave then snarled and leapt at the yak. So I swapped her place with the dire wolf. There are a lot of things I can't do to dragons, particularly adult dragons, but teleporting a dragon child is not outside my range. The dire wolf had had a leash attached to her collar; now it was on the dragon, and the dire wolf was free. She didn't waste any time, going for Dainn's throat right away. Dainn blasted her back, but focusing his antlers on the wolf meant they weren't focused on the yak, who smacked him a good hard one in the back of the head.
Meanwhile my reindeer ladies now had antlers – which weren't theirs, and which were generally oversized for their heads, but an antler's an antler – and their caribou tormentors did not. They were still weak from poor nutrition and general misuse, though, and the caribou were trained fighters, with protective clothing and weapons. Not that reindeer cows aren't frequently trained fighters themselves, and at least a few of these were, but they were naked and the only weapons they had were their antlers.
The earth pony masseuse had jumped into the fight, delivering some magnificently powerful bucks to some caribou, and I don't mean the sexy kind. The griffin had charged in as well, but she was getting her tail handed to her because she obviously didn't know how to fight without wings, and caribou pluck the feathers off captives with wings and make them wear stupid looking wing sheaths. There were the pegasus acrobats (complete with stupid wing sheaths) and a few unicorns with broken horns, hanging back against the walls. I decided to fix that.
Remember that one weird trick I mentioned? If I take a unicorn's horn, say, and I keep it lying around as a physical object, eventually either I'll put it back on her or the enchantment will wear out and it'll pop back onto her head. But if I turn it into something else, it converts into pure magic for a moment before being reconstructed into the new thing I want. And unless I'm focusing a lot of my attention on making sure magic gets all the details right and records perfectly exactly what it was like before I changed it... when I change it back, the magic will take shortcuts. Off her head, the horn will be an ur-horn, more of a magic placeholder that says "INSERT HORN HERE", a representation of the Platonic ideal of a horn. Usually in the color it used to be in, because that's easy, but it won't be genetically her horn, or anypony's; it'll be a magic construct of pure horn-ness. Put it back on her head, and harmony takes over, remolding the horn into her horn.
Except it'll be her horn like she was just born and then instantly aged to her prime. It will be a perfect version of her horn, regardless of how imperfect the one I took off her head was.
I can't keep a pony immortal and eternally young this way. I've tried. They eventually get cancer, and cancer is chaos in cellular form. I can't cure it. I can't keep healing an injured pony this way over and over either; same reason. But the odds of a pony getting cancer from me doing it once are pretty low, and the odds of a pony preferring a horrible and degrading life as a slave to the tiny chance of getting horn cancer that might even turn out to be curable if caught early enough are about zero. I think. Anyway if I was a pony the slight risk of cancer would definitely be my choice over a life in slavery.
So I popped off all the unicorn horns, and wings of any species, and dropped them into a top hat I'd conjured for the purpose, then turned the hat upside down and put it on my head to demonstrate that the wings and horns were gone. Then I pulled them out of my ear (feathers are very ticklish on the inside of your ear. Who knew?) and popped them back onto their respective owners.
And then I sat down against the wall, because it was more dignified looking than collapsing there and I'd just used a lot of magic, to watch the chaos unfold.
Dainn had managed to summon reinforcements, because of course he had, and the red dragon had just bitten through her leash. The yak was in a frenzy, stomping and slamming her cudgels against anything she could reach, and despite the fact that there were at least two caribou with horns trying to hold her back... there's a reason that ponies, despite being a nation well supplied with combat-trained magic users, take yaks seriously. Telekinesis doesn't do much to a frenzied yak unless it's very powerful. Twilight Sparkle, babysitter of Ursa Minors, probably could hold back several yaks, but very few caribou are in Twilight's class as telekinetics. Two of the reindeer were actually spellcasters, not limited to telekinesis, which was a very good thing because the caribou kept trying to use runes, and the reindeer, being specifically trained in fighting caribou, had rune erasure spells.
(If you're curious, and I know you are, Twilight, rune magic doesn't involve throwing around little pieces of parchment that have runes scribed on them. It generally involves crystals or polished rocks that have had runes carved into them, and just a tiny bit of magic funneled into them activates whatever spell is scribed there. So if you scribed runes for a spell that makes a cookie appear into a stone, and gave the stone to Pinkie Pie, Ponyville would be completely covered in cookies in approximately half a day, because even the magic of tactile telekinesis can activate the damn things. Eventually they run out of energy, depending on how much magic was stored in the stone to begin with, unless they're also scribed with runes for drawing magic from somewhere else. Eris got some minotaur catspaws, back in the day, to make some truly nasty little booby-trapped items that would grant you a material wish, like I wish I had an ice cream soda, every time you touched it... but would draw from your own magic to do it, in a way that you wouldn't notice the drain until you toppled over, magicless.)
With their horns and wings fixed, the rest of the ponies entered the fray. They weren't trained fighters. The pegasi were trained acrobats, at least, but the unicorns had no idea what they were doing; they were just firing bolts of pure magical force, easily countered by the caribou reinforcements. The griffin wasn't a trained fighter either, but considering that she probably came from Griffonstone, she knew how to fight dirty, as long as she had her wings to work with. The dire wolf was downright terrifying; she'd disemboweled one caribou with her teeth and ripped another one's foreleg off. I decided she needed her claws back, and made them grow back as steel razors. The screams of injured caribou filled the air. Dainn was ignoring the dire wolf, focusing his attacks on the reindeer spellcasters, but the red dragon was heading straight for her, and in a contest between an adult dire wolf and a barely-adolescent dragon, I wasn't sure who would win. Normally I wouldn't take sides, just a seat and plenty of popcorn, but the dire wolf was generating a lot of chaos. Not the tastiest kind, since caribou were ending up dead, but I've said before that death produces a nice strong burst of chaos, once, and right now I wasn't worrying about the long term.
So I teleported over, grabbed the dragon, and pinned her arms behind her back while I leaned my head over her head and gazed into her eyes. "All those reindeer are trying to take your master," I whispered into her mind. "Your master. Your very own master, and they're trying to steal him when he's yours."
She'd had enough of the concept of personal ownership beaten out of her that it was hard going, but no matter how you raise a dragon, deep inside, they're greedy. And while you can induce greed growth in a young dragon by giving them a hoard they're not strong enough to defend, triggering their biology to make them go super-sized... you can also do it by convincing them that someone is stealing their hoard right now. And dragons think of the ones they love and feel loyalty to as their possessions. As a slave, the red dragon had no hoard, no possessions at all – except her Master. Who would probably never have imagined that his dragon slave saw him as her possession, and to be honest, I had to peel away a few layers of trained inhibitions to get at that dragon core. But once I did...
"THIS SLAVE WANT!"
The ceiling was actually tall enough to accommodate her, but the walls weren't. Caribou, reindeer and unicorns alike had to shield themselves and others from the collapsing chunks of transparent dome, once the walls had been knocked out by the sudden enlargement of a small teenage dragon to giant-size. The dragon lunged at a very startled Dainn. "THIS SLAVE'S MASTER! THIS SLAVE WANTS! NO TAKE THIS SLAVE'S MASTER!"
(In the interests of verisimilitude, I have to say: she wasn't saying slave. I'm censoring this a lot. The caribou hardly ever miss a chance to use incredibly degrading and insulting language to describe or address their slaves, and many of the red collars use the same language when referring to themselves.)
So now Dainn had to fight off a possessive giant dragon who thought she loved him, the room had been reduced to rubble, and there were a lot more guards coming into the battle. The problem here was that the palace was full of guards. It was also full of slaves, and a good number of them had black collars, and probably some of the red collars would fight back if they thought they had a chance, but the only slaves I'd managed to restore to fighting condition were the ones right here. This called for a very clever, devious plan, something as trickstery and easy for me to accomplish as turning the dragon had been.
But I didn't have time to think of one, so I did something stupid instead, and used brute force.
Identifying every black collar in the entire castle, breaking any bonds that restrained her, disabling any caribou bull who was extremely close to her, finding out if she was maimed in any way, and then pulling my trick on her where I'd remove the maimed part, dissolve it into magic and then put it back... most of the time, I'd call that a Tuesday. To use that much magic, I had to open my channels up fairly wide, though. It wasn't that I didn't have the magic – I'd pulled even more complex and larger stunts than that, in my day. It was that opening my channels wide enough to use that much magic was going to expose much, much more of my mana pool to the drain.
To top it all off, I sent a message to all of them. "IF YOU WANT YOUR FREEDOM, JOIN THE FIGHT. TAKE OUT ANY CARIBOU YOU'RE ABLE TO! SET FIRES, DESTROY FURNITURE, RAISE CHAOS ANY WAY YOU CAN!"
Oh, and then I passed out.
Stats
Page generated in 0.066 seconds
Total duration
898 users online
1,198,118 hits today, 2,314,256 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
I'm tempted to read this but I'm a touch too wary of that Tragedy tag, since you can't ever tell when people are using it correctly until you read the story... kinda defeating the purpose.
.... The purpose of that tag is to differentiate between, say, a dark, sad story about Pinkie making cupcakes to remember her grandmother and venting to Rainbow Dash, and a dark, sad story about Pinkie making cupcakes out of a dead Rainbow Dash. In short, it's to designate the story is going to have a Bad End.
7594315
Put it this way. There is no way this story has a good end short of resetting the timeline, because if Discord wins and Anon slinks home with his nonexistent human tail between his legs... the Mane 6 will still remember being mind controlled into loving him (or else they'll still love him and grieve for him now that he's gone), stallions who were turned female will either spontaneously turn back into males, thus disrupting their current relationships with everyone they care about, or they won't, but they'll remember having been males. Celestia and Luna will remember how their memories were distorted. Mares who were turned into rapists because Anon believes, not-too-secretly, that mares in Equestria run around raping stallions all the time, will have to live with the memories of what they've done.
So the Tragedy tag does not indicate that Discord is definitely going to lose. It indicates that there is no possible "happy ending" for the story; the best you can get is "yay... we won?"
...Did Discord just do a good thing? I can't really tell....
7594395
Do you consider starting a slave uprising to be a good thing? Then... maybe?
7594369 So... wait. Isn't Discord himself a massive reality-warper perfectly capable of fixing at least the physical repercussions of that? He... also could offer 100% effective brain-bleach. Psychiatrists would be invented and become prevalent, and life would move on. Sure it wouldn't be a sunshine rainbows lollipops ending, but it'd be 'OK, we've lanced the infection, drained it, now we have to start the hard part of healing.'
EDIT: To me, a Bad End (as opposed to just a downer ending) would mean Discord ultimately fails, the 'Bad Guys' win, or stuff of that nature.
I knew it. He can cry about how he isn't soft all he wants, but we know the truth. How absolutely heartbreaking that Madonna was raped by Mayhem. :( What happened to Madonna happened to my grandmother, and I'm here because of it, but FFS I wish the circumstances had been different.
The bedlam he unleashed on these shower of bastards was so satisfying, and I'm sure will be all the more satisfying in the next chapter. You may not be the hero, Discord, but you're my hero.
This made my eyeballs moist. I kind of get the feeling that subconsciously, the reason Discord craves attention and warmth so much from ponies like Celestia and Fluttershy is the lack of a caring female figure in his life. Though I'm guessing this is what you intended to convey all along.
7594441
Discord can't erase memories if they're older than 20 minutes, and he would find it nearly impossible to grant anyone inner peace -- it's directly contradictory to his nature. So actually no, I can't see Discord being able to help much with the emotional repercussions of anything.
And sure, inventing psychiatry and move on, because if the universe didn't end, the world at the end of a story always moves on. That doesn't make it happy, just happier than the alternative.
I feel as if, if the Tragedy tag is always used to indicate "the main characters lose, or win but die in the process", then the tag is useless because it's perpetually a spoiler. It has to also encompass "we won, but shit do we have a lot of nasty things to deal with in the repercussions of what happened before we won", or else it's a spoiler tag and shouldn't exist.
7594441
Not particularly. Awful stuff like this can have lasting effects. And let's not forget that psychiatry doesn't mean everyone that undergoes therapy comes out of it intact, or even alive.
7594451
Any chances for the Caribou to become better than their current selves without the Element of Cruelty screwing their moral compassses, or will they merely die without its "protection"?
7594451 Understandable regarding the 'spoiler' note, but at the same time, nobody wants to get blindsided and involved in a story like that only to get a massive downer like that. ... Besides, all tags are spoilers, to some extent. Tragedy just indicates that the story is going to be, well, a literary Tragedy.
7594410 So, yes. Discord did a good.
7594475
I'd say tormenting and overthrowing a society filled with rapey, misogynistic bastards can't be ANYTHING but a good thing.
7594470
The reindeer are biologically the same species and quite happy, and the split was a little over two thousand years ago. So yes, if the caribou lose the Element of Cruelty, thus losing their ability to do magic, what would likely happen is that the reindeer would conquer them, deprogram any bull willing to learn a new way of life, provide the cows with gainful employment or set them up with a stipend and have them live under the care of the equivalent of social workers, try to overcome the effects of the sacrifice on the minds of the little girls through special education, and teach the boys and the girls who hadn't been sacrificed yet a new way of life. The worst of the bulls would probably be executed; even the reindeer aren't nice enough to keep prisoners indefinitely, in a harsh climate where feeding prisoners is a burden.
It's also possible that Celestia would send in diplomats to assist, and take the sacrificed cows who would be the greatest burden off the reindeer's hooves, letting them live in Equestria where the food and care is abundant.
A lot of caribou would end up dead, but they'd be the males who are too prideful or too set in their ways to change their outlook on life, who could never be trusted around free females.
7594472
Well, I'm not going to promise that Discord wins, or survives. I have stated earlier that Spike and the Mane 6 will survive the story, but all bets are off for anyone else. So if you're looking for a story without the possibility of a bad end, this isn't the one for you, you're right.
You know, I had a chill going down my spine. That's a wham comment if I've ever seen one, and it was only the middle of the chapter.
That being said, the way you portrayed the Caribou here is...spot on. Disgusting as it is, I've read several canon stories for my own deconstruction project I'm planning for that series, and you've got it right. And what's more, you put in more world building into here than any five multichapter canon FoE stories did, and had more personality on top of it. Hell, this is the first and only story even remotely related to FoE I've seen that actually has a somewhat comprehensible explanation for why Discord would side with the Caribou-this story, where they aren't even the main antagonist. Jesus now I can't stop thinking of all the damn plot holes.
Oh god I need a damn drink. Just, please post the next chapter soon. I need the Caribou being destroyed. Maybe I'll go check out that Doom FoE story-that might help.
Regardless, another great chapter with really insidious tone on the part of the Caribou, especially Dainn.
7594395
I think so. But then, Discord at his worst is only about as bad as the Caribou on an average day, IMO, so ...
7594410 I mean historically slave uprisings have been mostly good, we have a shit ton of roman gladiator movies that follow that plot
And so with this we're at pretty much the end of what I saw on Patreon, aside from what looks like is going to serve as the beginning of the next chapter. Nothing to add except that I really can't wait to see Discord give those Caribou what-for.
7594489
7594472
I agree about this tragedy stuff Snow brought up, with it potentially being a spoiler that all will not end well. After all, we associate Tragedy with the idea of "the main character dies or loses" thanks to some of the earliest forms of story telling. Shakespeare, Wagner, even Greek theater, "Tragedy" was generally defined by the protagonist, despite all their struggles and sacrifices, seeing their effort come to naught and falling to the forces rallied against them.
However, Alarajrogers raises a good point too. A tragedy doesn't necessarily mean that Discord has to fail or even to die. Tragic could mean that the world actually does reset after Anon is defeated, that nobody remembers all the effort Discord went through to save them, that all the good he did in the process of defeating Anon (like recovering the Elements of Discord and destroying the Caribou's empire) is undone. Sure, the world is safe from the whims of an immature godling and all the damage he did is reversed, but it's nowhere near perfect and Discord has been clapped back into stone, trapped in his personal worst nightmare without knowing if he'll ever have another chance to be free again and that's his reward for saving the world.
Or not. That's just an example. Looking at some of the author's other works she doesn't strike me as a "reset button as conflict resolution" type. There's far more tragic endings that let Discord win, though, that still leave Equestria completely devastated.
Just an example from my own personal theories, what if the Plunder Vines awaken early? What if Anon thinks that the Tree of Harmony that they're attacking is the source of the vines and destroys it? Discord could still win in the end, but Equestria is doomed there because Anon removed the source of the Elements of Harmony's power and the major factor that was maintaining Harmony in Equestria (and probably the rest of the world). Now wouldn't that be tragic, knowing that in spite of everything the ponies are going to get wiped out when Tirek comes blowing through because now there's no Princess Twilight Sparkle and no Tree of Harmony mystery box to grant the rainbow power?
The kicker to tragedies is that, while folks can agree on the definition, it's like any emotional state and very subjective. I'd argue this story has already had plenty of tragedy suffered by the characters between Discord finding the only ponies he ever considered family have branded him as a monster, Spike being trapped in a neglectful relationship with his best friends, countless families and loving couples being strained or broken apart due to the sex changes with who-knows-how-many others being kept from embracing those same feelings because their souls or normal sexuality no longer match what's "proper" or "acceptable"...
And... wow, Yggdrasil's drain is NOT messing around. A good insight on Discord's character, as well as the other chaos avatars! I hope we'll eventually learn what happened to Ar, Eris, and - we may have already but I just forgot - Mayhem.
Also very creative uses of Discord's magic. His 'noble/no bull' line was very well delivered, and "It snapped, of course, because I am awesome" is just classic.
Have I mentioned you're the best Discord writer on the site? Pretty sure I have, but it bears repeating.
7594489
media.giphy.com/media/mM2sBYnLYKjew/giphy.gif
I feel like I learn something new every time I read a chapter of yours. That's really swell.
7594761
The real greatest tragedy of Not the Hero is that Discord didn't destroy the caribou nation in the prime timeline as well.
To be honest, I kinda want to read a Fall of Equestria fic just so I can see how bad they truly are.
Um... I don't know about Discord, but I'd consider that rape. Actually, I'd say this is worse than normal rape. I'm confused why he thinks this isn't rape. Could you explain your reasoning?
Anyways, this chapter is pretty damn good. I really hope the young dragon doesn't stay attached to the king forever. Her predicament is pretty damn tragic.
YES! KILL! MAIM! BURN! KILL! MAIM! BURN! KILL! MAIM! BURN!
...Enjoying where this chapter went at the end. Oh, it's good watching Caribou suffer.
Sidenote, as someone who worked on an anti-Fall Of Equestria story - We beat up those fucking motherfuckers - it really is so much worse. Discord and the author are doing all of y'alls a favor by not telling you anything.
That sounds like a really good idea. It also makes me think: How does one create such powerful items? How did Mayhem create them? Is there a price for that sort of thing?
(LIke the whole "sealing a portion of your power into it, permanently weakening yourself"-stick, for example)
We know the Avatar of Chaos and Disharmony, anathema to all things lasting, can create magical trinkets a fifth of their own power.
We know the Avatars of Harmony can grow fruit with nothing short of OP cheat powers.
Point being: what sort of thing can come from the insane, corrupted Avatar of Order who had the means and intentions to literally erase all magic from existence?
(Well, from Elements of Opposition, we know about a "Diadem of Order", but little is said about is apart from Twilight having managed to fuse it with her Element of Magic.)
So, to come back to one of the prevailing theories on Anon's crazy magic powers, specifically the one where Anon uses the Element of Selfishness:
We know that the Elements of Disharmony are somewhat mutable and have somewhat of an own initiative to propagate their own principle. The Element of Selfishness for example, is all about latching onto someone and making it all about them and what they want.
We also know that the power of Order is basically engraving "I want things this way" on a metaphysical stamp and pressing that thing all over reality's sorry backside.
So, here's my pitch:
What if the Element of Selfishness fused with an artefact of Order, like a Shard of Matrisse or something. This would presumably create an object capable of warping reality to the wishes of its users, fuelling itself on disharmony to create the most rigid, ordered magic possible.
Tell me if that doesn't fit what Anon's doing to a T.
Other things pointing towards this:
Anon's Element is white. Matrisse's shard's are described as appearing colorless or white.
Because Order and Chaos cancel each other, Discord's blood and Matrisse's shard dissolve each other. When Anon's sword cut off Discord's tail, it left behind some kind of white, magical fire that ate away at Discord, so he had to lop his own tail off. This theory explains this completely. If Anon's magic is Disharmony corrupted by Order, Discord's magic can't cancel it because it's Disharmony, it would spread on him because he's Disharmony and it feeds on that, and it would kill him because he is Chaos and Chaos and Order don't mix at all.
7595022
He means that these are ponies who would have had sex anyway, or at least wanted to. He doesn't cause ponies who are not attracted to each other to suddenly fall into each other's arms. He causes ponies who want each other, mutually, to act on it, but in stereotypical dominance/submission styles (and even then, nothing he did to anypony would have ever come up to the level of what the caribou do.)
Also, Discord does not recognize "both parties' inhibitions were lowered to the point where they could admit their true desires and mutually act on them" to be rape, whereas I personally think that that absolutely is, though in a convoluted way where the parties having sex aren't raping each other but rather the person responsible for non-consensually lowering both their inhibitions is essentially raping them both. It's pretty clear from canon that Discord does not have nearly the level of objections to mind control that someone who truly understood what it means to take away another person's autonomy would have, though I'm hoping that the experience he just had of almost being mind-controlled into doing something he'd find repulsive will help get through to him why this is bad.
The defining flaw of FoE, in a nutshell.
It's not the fetish that makes them inherently bad.
It's the humorless presentation of an entire world-setting where nothing has any function beyond catering to one very specific fetish.
7595274
There may be a problem with that theory, namely that Anon's reality-warping is uneven; one would think that if any piece of the Avatar of Order was involved in reality-warping they would make even changes to reality. Anon's warping is uneven in that he can't change what actually happened, like with the marriage announcements, the fact that not everyone's memories changed as shown in the case of Blueblood, and the census records.
7595324
However, there are a number of explanations for this, some of them independent of the theory.
First, changing the past is impossible even for Discord, moreso for Order, because changing the past means time paradox, which is something Order will want to stay away from as far as possible.
Second is the problem of power; we know that using Order takes ungodly amounts of energy, which may be the reason Anon only pulled the big changing once (potential differential between dimensions, maybe). We know there is limits to his powers, and even changes may well be beyond their capacity.
Third is the involvement of Disharmony and the fact that the Avatar of Order has not only gone bonkers but is also fragmented; the only thing left of Order in this fusion with the Element of Selfishness may be the power to impose its will on reality – and what it wants comes from Anon, amplified by Selfishness.
Fourth is Anon, who is dumb. Anon's power has been shown multiple times to spare what Anon doesn't know or care about, such as census record (ever heard of a heroic hero doing that kind of paperwork), Blueblood's family history (Blueblood's evil because and that's it) and generally everything he didn't know that existed, such as, as showcased in this chapter, the caribou.
Edit: If anyone else things the black bars of spoilery spoileriness are getting ridiculous, I'll do away with them. Just sayin'.
:objection:
I believe you~
Hm... the new chapter made me think of something, is the only reason we are seeing this diary, is because Discord failed at his final goal...
The editor's note is very interesting. I want to say it's Twilight or Cadence, but it's being written when Anon is still a very real threat. On the other hand, it's not like we've seen Discord interact positively with anyone who might fit this description over the course of the story, so it's possible he breaks Anon's grip on one or both of these two at some point in the future.
Or it's an original character and I'm overthinking this, but I like doing that, so nyeh.
As for the chapter itself, a lot to take in, with a few turns for the disturbing. Very well done all around, and I'm definitely looking forward to the next installment. I especially love how much Discord hates that one compunction. There's so much of his identity wrapped up in the idea of being the Avatar of Chaos and Disharmony that he can't stand a scruple that's completely personal, completely Discord.
Also, lesson learned: Never push your luck if you have the Lord of Chaos playing along. Just hope that what he does vaguely resembles the original idea. Of course, the ruler of a horrific cruel, tightly regimented society isn't going to grasp that idea too easily.
7594761
Hmm. You know, given Celestia's dreams, it's possible that she might see what he did and will do here, and that's may contribute to her thinking he can be reformed. At least, in one timeline.
7595385
Well I suppose the biggest question to this is: Could a shard of Matrisse, the Avatar of Order, actually fuse with an Element of Disharmony?
Fusing and artifact of Order with an Element of Harmony is all well and good and makes sense since they work towards the same thing (sorta). Everything works in a system, everything is organized. Disharmony, however, is all about breaking systems and disrupting Order. We've seen proof that Chaos doesn't necessarily have to lead to immediate Disharmony (All of Anon's changes were chaotic, but the fact that they went overlooked for so long meant there was no Disharmony) so we can assume the same is true of Order/Harmony, but I'm not seeing how applications of Order could cause Disharmony or vice-versa.
Plus, regarding Anon's powers unmaking Discord: He mentions that the sword "disrupts" his magic. Not reorders and organizes it like he describes Harmony magic doing. In an earlier chapter, however, he mentions how he tried to use one of his own Elements of Disharmony and it nearly made his head explode. He's admitted that the fraction of his powers that an Element of Disharmony grants directed towards one goal could be stronger than he himself is. We've seen proof where the Elements of Disharmony and their wielders have nearly managed to defeat Discord (Winny, Phantasma, and now Dainn and his tribe). The idea of Anon's weapon simply being immensely focuses Disharmony, Disharmony honed to the point where it unravels even its creator on contact, might not be so far-fetched.
7594818
Mayhem committed suicide by pony, according to Discord. He attempted a stunt that would have killed all the ponies, ostensibly because their infighting, which brought the windigos, killed his people. (In fact the windigos, and the infighting, were Mayhem's own fault, but chaos avatars tend to be really, really good at displacing the blame.) His stunt would probably never have worked (it involved an in-land hurricane, among other things), but the sisters' mother, Queen Imbrium, a pegasus, had to go and stop him anyway. She carried a torch of the Fires of Friendship against him, and although she was killed by the hurricane, she managed to kill Mayhem. Afterward, the Tree of Harmony sprouted where the Fires of Friendship had been first kindled.
Ar went to sleep. As far as Discord knows, she is still asleep. It is quite possible that she will never wake up; she was in despair when she chose to enter dragonsleep, and slept for long enough that the power of the chaos avatar passed from her.
We have not had it revealed what happened to Eris, yet.
7594535
Part of my intent here was to explain how, potentially, Discord could have been tricked into helping the caribou, as well as how a society that fetishistic and obsessed with sexual degradation could even exist -- they extract magical power from it. It's also part of FoE canon that caribou females are stupid and eager to please, so it never made any sense whatsoever for the caribou to be into violent degradation of women -- I mean, if humanity met dogs that were intelligent and not particularly inclined to be slavishly loyal to humans, would humans feel the need to torture them into submitting to human control? The answer is dingos and coyotes, so no. You don't need to torture and break someone who is already loyal and submissive, so why would they have ever needed to behave that way?
Given that Discord never appears in "canon" FoE, and what happened with Tirek (and the time period of the series suggests that this would have happened instead of Tirek), and how unlikely it is that Discord would approve of a society with such rigid sex roles, I assumed that in "canon", Discord was tricked or mind-controlled, and then disposed of afterward, probably after all of his magic was stolen.
And now that you are thinking of all the damn plot holes, you are sharing in my suffering, so my work here is done. :-) I can't not see the plotholes in crap like this -- it's like that one anime where the kid has glasses that show him the weak points in everything, and every time I read a story I have them stuck to my face.
7595385
7595869
Ah, but the thing about Disharmony is that it can lead to Order, or vice-versa. After all, you can be a slave to someone if you hate them; this would be Order, regardless of whether you like it or not. Also, the Element of Cruelty seemed to do just fine in creating a system of Order with Disharmony, didn't it? Disharmony isn't incompatible with Order. Chaos is about disrupting systems and breaking patterns, not Disharmony necessarily, though they can and often do overlap, like in the case of the riot Discord incited in this chapter. Remember the Elements of Opposition and how they're the Elements of Harmony corrupted to serve Disharmony, brought together by Opposition!Twilight combining the Diadem of Order with the Element of Magic? That seems to point to Order being compatible with Disharmony.
Then again, one would think that if it was an Element of Disharmony fueling the changes, there would've been disharmony caused by the changes instead of just chaos, unless whatever it supposedly combined with (theorized here to be a part of the Avatar of Order) corrupted the element so much that it doesn't matter.
7595869
Huh.
Harmony, in the context of the Last Draconequus continuity means people coming together to form something greater, working together for a common goal. Disharmony, conversely, means breaking apart relations or otherwise disrupting a harmonious, homogeneous group.
Hatred and Rage are pretty straightforward in disrupting harmonious society, what Cruelty can do we saw this chapter, Selfishness makes people only care for themselves instead of others, and so forth. (Or Selfishness makes everything revolve around the user of Element. Probably doesn't help that Anon also seems to think everything is/should be about him. Then again, that may just be the Element's influence.)
Order is about imposing your will on reality to form it in orderly but otherwise arbitrary patterns, and can well lead to Disharmony.
Example: Sombra oppresses the Crystal Ponies. (imposing Order) This makes the Crystal Ponies scared and miserable. (Disharmony between Crystal Ponies and Sombra)
Edit: 7596184 Also what AC97 said.
The way I've been thinking about it (Hopefully as Alara intended) is as four fundamental forces governing magic, which form two pairs of opposites, but are otherwise fairly independent:
Order vs Chaos, Harmony vs DIsharmony.
The opposites cancel each other out while non-opposing forces can mingle, the prime example being Discord, who is Avatar of both Chaos and Disharmony.
While we have seen the other wielders of Disharmony put up some fight, those have been an aeon old dragon with high end equipment, a changeling queen and an asshole infused with enough dark magic to rival the power of an alicorn.
None of them came even close to what Anon does. As soon as Discord comes near Anon, he basically controls Discord's actions. Sure, everytime Discord meets him again, the effect is less severe, but it is still more effective than a combination of drugs and dark magic (powered by the Element of Cruelty, no less), and it's coming from a normally magic-less human.
Regarding the unmaking part, I'll just refer back to this quote describing Discord's feelings while being impaled by a shard of Matrisse:
7596174
Chapter 20 (and possibly 21) are action/battle sequences, but they're in the context of a slave rebellion against the caribou, so if you like the caribou and would prefer not to see them as the enemy army, then you're probably going to want to wait for chapter 22.
7596199
Thank you.
And again, it's not about quality of writing or such.
Addendum: I wouldn't even say that I like the Caribou, honestly. Probably my least favourite part of the setting, which overall I enjoy. And I'm not saying it doesn't have problems, heavens no. I used to be in Post-FoE, but I got burned out after a while.
7596174
Oh, adding:
It also depends on what you like about FoE. A lot of anti-FoE stories take the premise of "hurr durr, we're caribou and we're stupid, we can't succeed at anything and the whole story is just to illustrate what pathetic doofuses we are". I feel like that's the wrong approach. The caribou in FoE canon are an insanely dangerous and intelligent foe who had a clever plan to conquer Equestria and succeeded at it. As bad guys, they are irredeemable but very, very powerful. They're "good villains", in other words -- like Sombra is generally portrayed to be.
In my story the caribou have a logical reason for being the way they are. Their leadership is intelligent, their king is an alicorn-level badass who is intelligent and manipulative and a paragon of martial "virtues" (ie, not the kind of whiny villain who'd kill the messenger for bringing him bad news or a coward who runs away from a fight), and the ground-level troops are loyal and not stupid. They are unequivocally the bad guys, but they give Discord a much, much tougher fight than Winnie did.
So in a sense, I'm taking the FoE premise seriously -- here is this race of serious badasses who hate women for logical reasons (in this case, because doing so fuels their magic), and who could potentially have taken Equestria down if they'd tried, and the story even demonstrates how they could have done so. I'm just not presenting them as justified or "good" in any way, and they're not going to get to take over Equestria.
If you prefer them as the Gary Stu race who cannot be defeated like they are in FoE "canon", well, that's not realistic so that's not what I'm doing. But if you'd like to see them as seriously dangerous and powerful villains, you might actually get something out of this section of the story.
7596239
Heh. Now that's interesting.
Because one of my biggest gripes with FoE is a lack of meaningful, overarching conflict. The status quo they have is kinda boring—I want to see them challenged. And I want to see their culture fleshed out more. Especially interacting with and in contrast to their stallion allies.
If I ever get around to my own project, I'll likely give them the Crystal Empire but have them fail to take Canterlot, along with the rest of Equestria's mainland. Both sides have a base of power, lots of opportunities for any number of scenarios, personal tragedies, all the things that could make things fun besides the sex stuff.
Still, from what I gathered in the comments, they (the caribou) are already doomed in this story, aren't they?
7596300
If Discord successfully gets the Element of Cruelty from them, then their existing society is doomed, yes.
As a people, as a species, they aren't doomed. As a culture... probably, yes, assuming Discord wins.
Love, Love, LOVE your work!!! Found it only this month and I haven't stopped reading it since! Keep it up!
7595858
Wasn't it already mentioned that the editor is Gilda?
Glad this was toned down.
It was awesome finally seeing Discord admit his true feelings about rape, and that we learned about his father.
I'm not sure how much of the actions of the Caribou are their own in this universe versus the Element of Cruelty, but clearly that thing is awful, worse than the Alicorn Amulet.
I feel like the marginal payoff Discord gets from having one more element in play aren't worth how this evil item will probably advance Anon's black and white narrative, and possibly turn Discord's allies against him. I hope he chucks it into a black hole.
7597168
s15.postimg.org/t7m9c0pdn/caribou.png
7597138
I assumed it was Spike.
Mayhem seems like a pretty terrible guy, in more than one sense. Freezing the world over in an attempt to cause Chaos strikes me as a rather big failure in the long term. Plugging Cruelty into the Tree probably would of been just as damaging, if not more, but still, icy wastelands aren't very chaotic. (Least worst Element of Disharmony to spread worldwide is probably Arrogance, since society might not entirely collapse, while not turning it into the Caribou's little slice of hell.)
Prediction: Discord can't find the Element of Cruelty because he thinks it's sitting in room somewhere. But since the Caribou are super into dark magic, it's somehow in Dainn, possible replacing his heart or something. Because why have normal organs when you can cement your superiority by shoving your civilization's evil power source into your chest.
'Element' of Protection stuff: The Order/Chaos and Harmony/Disharmony scales are generally orthogonal to each other in this setting. It's even been mentioned that the Chaos and Disharmony Avatars can be different people. So a fusion of a Matrisse fragment and the Element of Selfishness could be possible. Selfishness drives the Pseudo-Element, while Order provides the heavy lifting when reality and Anon disagree.
Still best story , here's to hoping discord doesn't get as bad end.
7597184 I do like the inclusion of dragons imprinting, it explains rather a lot about Spike.
7596196
7596184
I won't argue the points I see you two make about Harmony/Disharmony and Order/Chaos. But I do have to question the logistics behind how Anon could have both a Shard of Matrisse and an Element of Disharmony.
Thing to consider: We know Anon got his Element during the Changeling invasion (this was mentioned waaaaaaay back in one of the earliest chapters). So could someone have fused these two things together prior to Anon finding them? It seems unlikely, and unwise to do so. I think we can safely conclude that Anon's Element is either the Element of Selfishness or a Shard of Matrisse, but it being both is something of a stretch. After all, if it was in Canterlot then chances are Celestia had been keeping it somewhere like she was the Element of Arrogance. Whatever Anon found, it probably got knocked from its hiding place by the Changelings when they swarmed the palace.
I don't doubt he could fuse two such objects with his powers, but I just can't think of how he'd get both of them without it becoming known that the "Seventh Element of Harmony" had discovered a Super Battilizer Upgrade for his Element (and if either of you get that reference we should really hang out more!).
Now, regarding Anon having more power than Winny, Phantasma, and Dainn, has anyone considered the possibility that Anon could be his world's version of Discord? They have similar powers and the same MO's about using reality and mindwarping to get their way and have little regard for what others think of their idea of fun. Discord admitted a human awakening to magic powers upon coming to Equestria is a possibility since their/our world used to have magic and it's possible the power to use it is hidden in some lost section of the human genome. Anon wouldn't be aware of this since he was born in a world without magic, so why should he thinks he gains the power of it just by crossing dimensions?
Now AC, I know we've discussed this before, but I still think this idea has merit. The moments you quoted seem to be an exception rather than the rule, as Discord himself said that Chaos/Disharmony avatars from alternate worlds or timelines have difficulty getting along. But the biggest clincher is simple human psychology in that it's kind of natural to dislike people who are too similar to us because we see our own faults and weaknesses in them. What Discord is seeing in Anon's behavior is exactly the same sort of s*** he's pulled on Equestria countless times before being stoned. The difference here is that this time, Discord has to deal with it from the point of view of his victims.