Queen of Storms

by Via

[14] Queen of Storms

Queen of Storms

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I am magic.

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I had thought that I had seen him at his weakest. So frail that a mortal mage had been able to bring him closer to the brink of death than any Spirit had before or since. So weak that had I been the slightest bit stronger - he would've been dead.

"DISCORD!" The Storm Queen howled.

I had thought that I had seen Discord as his strongest when reality itself churned in his presence when air that wasn't quite air seemed to bubble and pop around him. The glow of pink, red, and yellow - the destruction of mountains as old as the ground and the slaughter of dragon-kings far older than the mountains.

"Tempest," The Trickster God answered.

I had seen neither of these things.

The gift of the elements, giving me form. The power of three Spirits. Air, rolling around me with the might of the Storm. Order, calming my thoughts and focusing my memories. Harmony, flooding my bones with strength - so much strength that I could feel my cells beginning to decay, one by one, slowly.

Discord was nearly as strong as me - no. Just as strong as me. Maybe even stronger. The world itself seemed to ripple and distort around him in a much more violent fashion than normal; my eyes began to burn as he wriggled and coiled with a non-euclidean movement that would've driven any lesser being mad. My claws planted down. The Storm grew more violent. Wind pelted his coat as I mustered up all of myself - every inch of me, and channelled it into one word.

"Why?"
Discord regarded me coolly. He dropped down to the ground - not floating, instead choosing to walk on all fours. He was strangely slow, strangely still. Not the fear that he had shown at the Horseshoe Bay - but rather calm, calculated caution. Circling me, inspecting me.

"You've changed," he said softly. "You're new. An amalgamate of a dozen different things. It's beautiful. If you ignore all the Order and Harmony," he waved his lions paw to the side - as if the two-thirds of my being were something that he could ignore that easily. "It's almost impressive. Almost."

"Why?" I repeated. I pushed everything I had into that word. I had to know - I had to know why. Why did he do this? Why did he fight? Why did he want to? Why?

Discord's eyes narrowed slightly. His lips drew back into a thin snarl, and the ground began to distort with his every move - waves of chaotic energy pulsing out from him and changing the landscape into something different with each step. "You've done something no one else has done. You've made me afraid. You truly do have a talent for finding me at my worst, dear. Not anymore." His eyes locked onto me.

"Why?" My stance hadn't changed. My eyes had moved - the rest of my body was still, eerily so. Order was keeping every one of my muscles still, primed and ready for his inevitable attack.

"Are you broken? Did coming back from the dead make you unable to say anything other than why?" He snarled. "You're beginning to bore me. I don't enjoy being bored." He said dryly as he reared himself up to his full height. He looked at me as he looked at everything else - with hatred, and nothing else.

"Why." I repeated a fourth time, defiantly.
"So be it," he spoke, and our battle began.

Discord struck first. He cut space between the two points - not a teleport, not a blur of movement. There was simply space between him and his destination, and then there wasn't. It wasn't accompanied with a pulse of magic, but rather a sort of...vibration. One that only the fine-tuned senses of a Spirit could detect. My eyes followed him along with his instant travel, and I saw three spells whistling towards me.

Starswirl had sent these same spells after me, I had noted. Death magic. Although, Discord's was significantly more lethal - imbued with so much force and power that the air itself seemed to rot and bend in its presence. They were deeply layered. I caught glimpses of force, ice, pain - a thousand different glyphs, all forced into a space so small that it should've been impossible, by all rights.

Fear. Intimidation. Make a display. Order suggested. I agreed.

A web of magic tore up from my antlers and dismantled the spell into its basic components mere moments after it had formed. I removed all aspects of the spell aside from the fatal component of it. It wouldn't actually be lethal to me - it would simply necrotize my scales and flesh. Instead, though, I let a web of Harmony form around my body like a skin-tight suit. The death magic splattered against my scales harmlessly. I spread my wings and let them beat.

I didn't waste a moment before retaliating with a blast. It was, frankly, a work of art. It was beyond glyphs - it was the air itself, weaponized. It was a web of Order and Harmony formed tightly around a single point, coerced - not forced into a spear. The air itself rippled and rolled as a crack of thunder accompanied my attack. It sent Discord sailing backwards into a hill, kicking up a gauge of dirt and rock-like shrapnel as he slid through the ground. He stood up a few seconds later, inky black sludge trailing from his mouth as he inspected me with a new expression. Anger.

Harmony broke the millisecond of silence. Pain. He's not used to this.
Advantages. Physical superiority. Numbers. Counteracting magic. Power of the storm.
Disadvantages. Magical superiority. Lack of experience. Broader sphere.

An even fight, then. I beat my wings, and our fight began in earnest.

In a fraction of a second, I crossed an unfathomable distance - moving at speed so fast that the air itself broke around me. Gryphus had been as fast as Discord, if not faster - and I was much faster than Discord. Unfortunately, the ground was split underneath my arrival, and I summoned up all of my negative emotion and channeled it into a single spell. My warspell struck the ground and caused havoc, the ground rippling out like water around its impact point. Waves of rock splashed over Discord and would've lacerated his skin had he not teleported around behind me. My tail was already moving to intercept, but he had already countered with another teleport - one that I didn't track quite fast enough.

I found myself struck in the side by a strange mechanical device. It ran on rails and was shaped almost like a spear, crashing into my side and sending even me sprawling. I quickly beat my wings and threw myself up from the ground - only to find that I immediately crashed into a stretchy filament that started closing around me. The air began to crush down, weigh down around me.

We don't want this, my air screamed. I drew my wings into myself - and summoned up every ounce of air within the bubble...and let half of it explode out. A sound more violent than a thousand thunderbolts tore the world apart. The rest of it followed suit so that the shockwaves were layered. The blast tore any organic creature around apart - even my organs beginning to liquefy and burst from the sheer amount of force.

The storm parted for a moment before I recollected it, my wings fading from existence as I fell to the ground. They reformed moments later. I drew the storm within myself, my internals beginning to repair themself as power flowed through them. I cast my senses out for Discord - and blanched as I couldn't find him.

The most powerful being on the planet had just disappeared from my magical senses. Something was wrong. I didn't quite know what was wrong - but it was a good thing that I had brute force on my side. I drew every ounce of Order and Harmony into myself and sent it out in a pulse. The world rippled away as Discord's illusion broke - and I narrowly dodged a bolt of blue energy that threatened to vaporize me.

"Enough," I spoke, and I sent another pulse of harmonic order washing over the surroundings. Discord's chaos faded slightly - normality reasserting itself. More importantly, Discord's entire body began to wriggle and writhe as his magic disrupted for a few precious moments. I fluttered my wings and grabbed onto him - and began to crush him with raw physical strength.

His eyes popped out of his head with a torrent of blood - and then the blood disappeared, and he squeaked like a squeaky-toy, then shattered into shards of volcanic glass that dug into my scales. He teleported above me and planted a claw on the back of my neck. I reared backwards and sent him flying off of me but didn't let up as I turned around and followed his flight through the air. I grabbed onto him and slammed him into Mt. Draelos. I squeezed tightly, my claws digging into his flesh and drawing blood. I pounded him into the mountain again, and again, each impact created a larger crater until the mountain gave way.

I threw him into the broken side of the mountain, his broken body slamming against a pillar. Already, his bones and flesh were cracking back into place.

Follow him. End this. Order spoke. I agreed.
I wove a net of magic around myself and donned a smaller form. Instead of my equine form, I had taken the form of a smaller version of my true form - and teleported into the Hall of Names with a soft hiss of air.

Discord's laughter radiated around me. I couldn't sense him - instead of an illusion like last time, though, he was all around me. There was no specific location he was in.

"You're something, aren't you? But you have no idea how to fight." His voice was dry. "You fling your power around in waves, torrents - imbue it with concepts."
"Do you?" I retorted.
"Do I- do I know how to fight? The oldest creature alive, and you ask me if I know how to fight?"
"When was the last time you fought an equal, Discord?" I walked through the Hall of Names. I inspected where King Bellum had once lay - where I had once stood, where the names of my people were carved into the walls. "The last time that you couldn't win through dominating force? Through overpowering someone's hold? That's what you did to Bellum, wasn't it? And it was what you did to me. And everyone else - they weren't close. You toyed with them, and then they snapped. You did that to me, as well."

He was silent for a moment. Then, his laugh echoed throughout the hall as sickly crimson fluid began to drip from the ceiling - floating mid-air as it formed the shape of a draconequus.

"An equal? Is that what you think you are?"
I shut my eyes. I cast my magic senses out, keeping the full brunt of my awareness on him. He wouldn't be hiding from me again. "Let's find out."

Knowledge flowed through me as Harmony divulged the flow of my memories. Knowledge flowed through me immediately - the feeling of blood in my mouth, of tearing flesh, of spells to destroy and tear cities apart. The power of utter destruction and how to use it. My wings faded out of existence as I cast my first spell.

Aerut. Destrum. No, there was no Mys in this spell - for this was beyond the mortal form of glyph magic. I told the very air itself to destroy, and so it did. The wind began to howl within the Hall of Names as the Air-That-Ate lashed out at Discord, tearing at his chaotic hold and his physical form - gauging away chunks of flesh with each bite. The air rippled as Discord countered - Dis. Fyrd. And the air began to burn. A surge of fire that he shaped like a gigantic draconequus head formed, lashing out and biting down at me - its flaming teeth digging into my midsection. With no air inside of the cavern, I had to rely on my purely physical speed - and it wasn't quite enough. Chaotic flames washed over my hind legs, their heat so great that even my scales began to melt and fuse together into a goopy mess.

I lunged towards Discord and slashed a claw at him. He teleported, as I expected - but I denied that. It was a simple spell, one that I had used on Astrabelle before - but now, it was much greater with the power of Order. Dos. Apstra. I denied his cutting of space, and I grabbed onto him through the teleport. I yanked him out and sent him flying into the wall with a slap of my tail.

Discord stopped his momentum and wove through the air with sickening fluidity. His claw, arcing with chaos magic, dug into my face - and tore. More than half of my face was torn off with a surge of chaos magic, a spray of energy sending both of us flying backwards. My blood oozed out onto the floor, but Discord didn't let up his moment of slight advantage. He cut space between us again - avoiding a teleport that I would be able to cancel. Instead, I grabbed onto his throat and dug a claw into it, pressing down in an attempt to draw blood.

"Monster." I snarled. "Why?" I pinned him down to the ground and planted a foot on his chest in an effort to crush his heart under my paw.
"Why what?" He hissed, his eyes wide and feral.
"Why are you doing this? WHY!?"

A wave of force broke the space between us. It sent me flying upwards, slamming into the cavern so roughly that my scales began to crack. It sent him flying down into the ground, a crater forming within the Hall of Names. He snapped his fingers and with a pulse of Dis that I was too slow to stop - he cut the space between the walls and me.

The Hall of Names was crushed into a singularity as a cavern of rock was locked tight around me. I dug my claws into the ground and began to fight, reforming my wings of the storm and beginning to tear Mount Draelos itself apart in my struggle. He spun his eagle's claw around in a lazy pattern as the mountain-top was torn into shreds, all the rubble coalescing into a strong, earthen prison - that slowly began to fill with water. He was trying to drown me.

No- he was trying to bind me. Earth to block off my connection to the air. Water to destroy my connection to Order. And I could feel it - I could feel both these things beginning to wane, slowly.

A good thing, then, that I was not just a Spirit of Air.
I was the Queen of Storms.

Once, I was barely able to summon a storm.
Once, I had needed physical components and hours of preparation to summon a storm.

But now?
All I needed was my mind. My mind, which began to race as Order and I worked together - and Harmony kept us...well, in Harmony. We knew what components to work on. We knew the glyphs to weave together - a sequence of hundreds of glyphs, the most intricate magic that I had ever weaved. So we created lightning; we created the wind; we created rain.

"Why?" Discord mocked. "I could ask you the same thing. Why do you all do...this? You run around; you kill and murder each other over nothing. You treat me as if I'm a monster - and then you embrace my sphere whole-hearted me. If I am a monster, then what are you?"

"You're justifying genocide with conflict?" I spat out, my eyes glowing with rage as I struggled against the ever-squeezing rock binding. Even so, my mind was still forming the spell.

"CONFLICT?" He snarled. "I'm justifying freedom with genocide. I'm liberating everyone." He hissed. "No more conflict. No more rage. No more darkness. No chance of oblivion. I'm bringing the world into an age of freedom! Where you can do whatever you want! Where your filthy dragons won't come and tear this land apart because they feel like it. Don't you understand-?"

I decided that he talked too much, and the storm struck.

It was beyond words. It was the perfect embodiment of the Storm itself. The world was obscured by a thick haze of wind so violent that it seemed to bat away the light itself. Lightning tore through the sky in esoteric patterns and struck down - targeting exclusively Discord. Through the blur, I could faintly see his form wriggling and writhing as it dodged bolt after bolt - moving in patterns that I didn't quite think were physically possible. Not that Discord had ever stopped in the face of physical rules before.

The surge of power the storm brought with me allowed me to overpower the chaotic bindings instantly. I teleported behind him - and now, with my full size, I brought all of my power into my horns. The air began to crackle and burn with the smell of ozone. An orb of energy formed in the center between my antlers, and a torrent of lightning struck out from it - carving a pattern into the ground, arcs that lashed at Discord and forced him to be constantly on the move. I attempted to teleport his head to the side - causing one of my bolts to strike him as he focused on dismantling that spell. Not that it would have worked, but it would have teleported his entire body to the side instead of just his head. I teleported to another side and struck at him with a spell of Order's suggestion. Harmony offered some improvements.
The storm was obliterating the Chained Forest. The wind was violent - so violent that the trees were being uprooted, the chains flying off of them and shattering as they broke into shards of Order. But, of course, the shards of Order were equally charged with Order and Chaos, as the destruction of Order was inherently chaotic, and so both of us gobbled them up greedily - I could feel Discord's magic beginning to swell even as mine did.

It sounded like a whip, tearing through the air. But a thousand times louder - and it was followed by the sound of the Earth splitting. The spell struck, and with it followed destruction. The sound was so violent that I could feel my intestines liquefy from the force of it - and I knew that all the world had heard that sound. The mountain split in two, fragments of rock falling down and barraging Discord's free-falling body: the air pressure too great to allow him to fly away, my constant monitoring preventing him from teleporting or cutting space.

My magical assault ceased, and I continued a physical one. I began tearing apart Mount Draelos with my bare claws, barraging Discord with sections of rock the size of houses and attempting to bury him underneath the mountain. Stone was the opposite of a chaotic element - just as it could bind me, it could bind him.

Harmony yelled something out. Order moved to react. It was too late. I was too slow. There was a crack like a tree trunk shattering - and I felt a mess of gore tear from my eye as the orb was decimated by a bolt of something. My skull broke and fragmented, shards of my skull digging into my brain and what felt like my own brain beginning to droop from my ears. It was immediately followed up by another surge of raw chaos magic - thrown at me haphazardly, violently. It was the lashing out of a feral animal, and even as my wings dissipated, my skull shattered, and I fell down to the ground - I knew that Discord was afraid.

My confirmation came with my continued life. Instead of Discord following up on this - I saw him teleport up into the air, his form broken and battered, blood oozing from him and fragments of the rubble of what had once been Mount Draelos digging into his flesh. And then he began to flee.

I had never seen Discord flee before. My vision blurred, and I felt Harmony's power course through me as the Storm began to repair my broken skull. I stood up and leaned against the broken stump of Mt. Draelos like a crutch, waiting for my wings to reform.

After what felt like hours - but must have been maybe a second at most, I broke the sound barrier from a standstill and went flying after him. I kicked up a storm of dust and rubble underneath me - and the storm followed right behind me. My wings spread wide as I let out an earth-shaking roar, letting my tail and claws cut into the ground itself as I flew after the faint squiggly shape in the edge of my vision that I was slowly gaining on.

He was flying towards Olympus. A snarl split my face as I doubled, tripled, quadrupled my speed - my flesh and scales beginning to burn as I pushed past the sound barrier - and past the magic barrier.

An explosion of Storm energy came flying out from my wake. A swirl of white that brought Order and Harmony in everything in its path - eradicating Discord's magic where it flowed. I grabbed onto Discord with both of my claws and dove both of us through the top half of Olympus.

The mountain was sheared in half, its top fragment flying with us as I sent it crashing down into him. He had dropped a mountain-top on me. I suppose dropping two mountains on him was a sufficient degree of vengeance.

I threw him from my hands and increased his speed with a spell that removed his friction, sending him hurtling down into the ground as a fireball. I came crashing down above him and channeled a raw beam of force from my antlers as I began barraging him with the equivalent of a tantrum. My size gave me a strength advantage, but actually hitting him was strange - it was the equivalent of stomping, slamming, jumping up and down. Shards of the mountain fell around us - none had hit the floor before Discord formed his counterspell.

Deflect, Order spoke. And I barely found the time to manage to dismantle a spell that would've increased the gravity of my organs so that they had come tearing out of my own flesh. In the time it had taken me to dismantle it, though, Discord cut space - and floated above me, blood oozing from his mouth.

He laughed. A bone-chilling laugh that once sent shivers down my spine. He laughed uproariously; he laughed so violently that a thick stream of blood ran from his mouth, turning into swirls of syrup, saliva and water as it dropped onto the ground. The spray of moisture stung the ground and tainted it.

"Oh, dear Tempest." He said in a soft, feral growl as he began circling above me in loops. "You really are special. You hurt me as a mortal. And now - you nearly kill me as a divine. You - hurt me. In a way that only a drakon ever has."

His eyes shifted as they became pure black voids. "Allow me to retaliate in kind."

With a speed that he shouldn't have had, he moved through the distance between us. It wasn't a teleport or his usual cutting of space - it was simply raw, blinding speed. I didn't have the time to react as he struck me with the full force of his Sphere. His arm shattered into fragments from the strength of his blow, the fragments turning into shards of light that lunged at my stomach. My head snapped back, the muscles in my neck tore as the blow pushed my snout into my face - my bones shattering and my face rippling like water. A spray of blood came from me. The shards of light pierced into my stomach and began to pull in every direction - attempting to tear me into shreds.

Had my sphere not included Air, I would've died. Instead - I split my form into the air itself and reformed in the clouds, far, far above. Discord launched from the ground with such force that it split underneath him with a sound like a thunderbolt.

Adapt. Order demanded. Harmony agreed.

Discord disagreed. He struck me with an uppercut even as the storm reformed my face, with physical strength disproportionate to his size that sent me wriggling backwards. My wings flared as I steadied myself - and from the storm around us, I called lightning from all its corners. A thousand lightning bolts struck Discord at the same time - but they froze.

They turned to grey sludge that seemed to droop into the ground as they neared him. Then, thee clouds rippled, and space was cut between us again. I only narrowly managed to dodge his blow and retaliated with a devastating tail-swipe.

The tail was a drakon's strongest part of the body. With a sharp blade at the end, semi-prehensile, to say it was lethal would be an understatement. But it was the strongest, and it was the fastest. It struck Discord with so much force that I could feel his bones splintering even as flesh was torn from his body - leaving him as a skeleton, connected together by pulsating and wriggling pink sinew.

There wasn't a drop of blood in his body. Just sludge that dripped from the faintest cracks in his bones.

No, I whispered as the realization clicked. I knew where his strength came from.
Discord drew the Storm into himself, and he surged with power. A torrent of black lightning came from his open maw - tearing his teeth apart as it forced its way out of him violently. His bones cracked, more sludge and gray mist oozing out as the lightning inched ever closer.

We trust you, they spoke as I explained my plan.
The lightning struck my chest. I died instantly as my body was vaporized.
My heart stopped. Order's voice dimmed. Harmony's strength faded.

And within the infinitesimal moment between death and life - as my bones had begun to disintegrate...I drew on the world.

Discord was like me. He was an amalgamation. But where Life and Death had asked for the parts that formed up my whole, Discord simply took. He had made the comparison between us again and again - and I don't think either of us knew how accurate it truly was.

He took. I was given. And that was the fundamental difference between the two of us. I asked for the strength of the world. And the world gave it in full.

Two divine skeletons hurtled through the sky in a blazing fireball as I grabbed onto Discord and cut time instead of space. Time rippled as we had crossed a thousand miles in a second, but for us - it had been less than an instant. Discord's skeleton was dragged through the ground, the friction lapping against his bones as I pulled him through the continent.

I sent him flying forward, and he came back at me with his force in full. We grappled in mid-air: no constants there. My size grew. My size shrunk. His size shrunk. His size grew. We moved left and right, backwards through time and forwards through space. In a single instant, we had fought for a thousand lifetimes.

I took the form of a unicorn as he took the form of a hydra. His heads snapped at me as I wove between them, cutting space and inverting gravity to aid in my movement. Finally, I wrapped the World around myself, and I tore a mountain into shreds - tearing up large snatches of ground that I threw at him haphazardly.

He took the form of a minotaur as I took the form of a gryphon. I flew high, high into the air in an attempt to suffocate him - and the ground began to bulge as it caught up to us. It wrapped around the two of us, and he began to choke me - until we both split away as our forms shifted.

The very landscape itself shifted, warped - bubbled and changed. Until it was just us - two divine skeletons, flying through the air at the speed of sound. Hurtling back into where it had all begun - Mount Draelos. Our hearts began to beat in tandem as they reformed. The heart was followed by the muscles, the veins, the sinew, tendons - the flesh and scales came last, and definition finished us off.

He lay against a tree, panting - wheezing for air. I leaned the rubble of Mt. Draelos as I did much the same.

"Why? Why don't you understand?" Discord whimpered out as he stood up on newly formed flesh. "You can't stop me. You shouldn't stop me. I'm trying to save us. I'm trying to free us."
"Through madness?" I hissed. "Through genocide?"
"Better genocide than omnicide," Discord retorted with a growl.

"Oh, you draconics. I've always hated you. Your pride - your level of strength that just happens to be the right level of inconvenience. I can't vaporize you instantly, but you can't scratch me. But you-, oh, you Tempest. There is a special hatred for you in my heart. You call yourself a hero - when you seek to kill me. When you seek to kill us all."

"You are a fool, Tempest!" He roared, the Storm echoing his cry. "Ready your magic, beast. Attempt to strike me down. And fail. Because I am magic."

Every ounce of magic he had left gathered up within him. It burst out of him in an amorphous wave of energy - that ever so faintly looked like a butterfly. Everything in its path was vaporized, and what wasn't vaporized was made chaotic - colors inverted, pockets of chaos energy rippling.

For a moment, there was silence.
Then I spoke a word. "No."

A defined burst of energy came tearing from my mouth. It was accompanied with an echo of every roar that I had ever shown to the land - travelling faster and faster as a bolt of white lightning that was shaped faintly like a dragon moved to meet Discord's wave. But it wasn't enough. Dragon met butterfly - and the butterfly began to push the dragon back.

"You're not."

I focused on them. On the memories that had torn me from the same hatred that had enveloped Discord. I focused on them - and I incorporated everything into my spell.

A sprinkle of blue laughter.
A dash of red loyalty.
A brilliant gift of violet generosity.
A helping hoof of orange honesty.
A flutter of pink kindness.

The beams were equal now. Discord pushed with all of his might, just as I pushed with all of mine. The landscape itself began to warp and distort in our presence - but it was a stalemate.

Two words broke it.

"They are."
Two alicorns began to dance around the dragon. One was fair, regal, and tall - her horn a pointed spear of light. The other was fearsome, imposing, and strong - her horn a rippling mass of darkness.

And with them followed a sparkle of lavender magic.

Fragments of stone crashed to the ground.

-

Author's Note:

The final chapter of Tempest's story - "Aftermath," will be released within hours of this upload.