(Past Chapter 42) Grand Mal
"Weiss..."
"Weiss!"
"Can you hear me? Please..."
The Sage sighed. It had been a few years since Discord had shown up in his room, and, after tightening his security, he hadn't seen the spirit again.
The reason, of course, was obvious. Discord had been busy.
Busy turning Equestria into the Chaos Capital of the world, that is. In the time since their meeting, the spirit had quickly taken over the entire country. The princesses fought and kicked and screamed the entire way there, but when your opponent was more powerful, more slippery, and in possession of greater cunning, there wasn't much that could be done.
Ponies wondered if their princesses were dead, without a doubt, the two were gone, at some point during Discord's takeover, they had disappeared without a trace, some believing the two were destroyed, others seeming to think that they fled in cowardice.
Weiss, of course, had the pleasure of knowing the truth. They weren't dead, and they hadn't given up. Annoyingly, they instead saw fit to begin calling on him of all ponies, nearly a decade and a half after Discord's takeover.
'Well, it looks like she's in deep, this time. I can't keep pretending that I'm missing her calls,' the sage thought to himself, as the murky smoke around his dream began to shift and shimmer, a low pounding slamming into it from the outside. Luna was trying to break in, and if he resisted at this point, she would likely realize he didn't want to help.
"I don't want to do this... But in this line of work, I must do many things I do not enjoy," he said, opening a hole in the virtual dream to allow her to enter.
"Weiss, thank the stars," she said, collapsing to the ground. Her body in this dream looked haggard and exhausted, weakened from whatever struggles she was facing in the outside world.
Weiss formed two large couches, and a table between them. Food and drink meant nothing in a dream, but two ice-cold glasses of juice kept their flavor nonetheless, and so he set two of those on the table, watching as Luna guzzled it down, taking sustenance from it in a way he couldn't perceive.
"You warned us, you told us and I did not pay it the attention it deserved, D-"
"Don't say his name. Thermal scans from a golem I have watching him show his ears raising in temperature when it's said verbally," Weiss interrupted.
Luna paused. "Surely, in a dream he couldn't?"
"It's risk. I hate risk," the sage frowned. He had injected meaning into his words, and Luna saw the unease that this conversation was bringing him.
"Why are you here?" he asked, knowing full well the answer.
"You told us. You told us that we defeated him with a set of magical relics. The Elements of Harmony," she admitted.
"We have searched, we have scoured Equestria, and the lands beyond, but no place possesses anything by that name. No books speak of it, no tales by Zebra, Griffon, Yak or any other! I..."
She looks down. "I do not know who else to go to. I do not know what to do."
The sage took a deep breath, and slowly let it out.
"I can't. If you seek the Elements, if you fail, and he discovers my part in it..."
He grimaced. "Look, I already tried that. I tried making things better like that, and you know what happened? It made everything worse. That's my destiny, Luna. I've tried to defy it, and now you're asking me to try again? No."
He snarled at the princess, standing up and sliding the table aside with a loud squeal.
"Give up on this, Luna. Go home. I'm no Starswirl, Luna, I can't give you the Elements of Harmony."
He stomped, and the dream began to collapse.
"I'm a villain, Luna. My weakness is here, in the seat of my power. That's why I can't help you, and that's why you need to go. Do you understand?! I can't let what I've created be destroyed again!" he demanded, as black fire hesitantly consumed the last dregs of the dream.
The world was awash with a bleak lack of color, but as the dream reached its end, two vivid green eyes opened in the dark, each one larger than Luna's entire body.
...
"Go!"
She woke up in the middle of the deep jungle the two sisters had been searching through. Her sister, of course, was already awake. She didn't sleep anymore, not while Discord held Equestria in his impish grip.
Despite the intensity of the threat they hid from, and the harshness of their living situation outside of Equestria, Luna and her sister didn't roast some disgusting meal over a fire, skewered on a comically apropos machete, nor did they drink dew from some sort of improvised rain collector.
Being alicorns, they didn't eat or drink at all. Such things were luxuries, and while Weiss may have insisted to the contrary, food and drink weren't critical to an immortal ruler's effectiveness.
She felt incredibly sad, that the sage had truly abandoned them to this pointless search, worse, then, that he urged them to give up on it, but as she thought more critically about it, things began to seem... Off.
Off about the way he spoke, and the things he spoke of. Why did he bring up Starswirl? Why did he insist that they go home, now of all times, when their home was the central nexus of Discord's chaotic reign?
'I'm a villain, Luna. My weakness is here, in the seat of my power. That's why I can't help you, and that's why you need to go.'
Why did he word that so awkwardly? Normally, when Weiss wasn't simply stating a direct quotation, or cursing loudly in that strange way he did, he at least had an air of ease to his manner of speech.
It dawned on her as Celestia stared into where a fire would be, if either of them needed such a thing to survive in the jungle.
That was the mistake they had made. The Elements of Harmony weren't something unknown to them, or rather, the elements did not come from an unknown source, in an unknown locale.
Weiss had inadvertently told her, no... Secretly told her what she needed to know. Starswirl could have given them the elements, he implied. Their quest to find the elements was hopeless, he insisted. They should go home, he demanded.
He was a villain, and his weakness was in the seat of his power.
"Sister, I know where we must go," Princess Luna said with newfound confidence, standing up to her full height.
Celestia gazed up at her sister, rising to her feet. No questions. No curiosity.
How odd, that her sister didn't doubt that she would succeed on her dreamwalking quest for knowledge, when even she had felt that doubt before realizing the truth.
"Lead the way," the solar diarch said simply, shaking the mud from her body. The two had taken to not speaking aloud anything they wished to communicate, knowing of Discord's preternatural ability to somehow know plans hatched in such a way.
With a mighty flap, the two alicorns burst from the foliage of the dense jungle they had been scouring for signs of an ancient temple, and disappeared into the morning sky.
To the forest of Equestria's Capital. To the Castle of the Two Sisters.
To Castle Everfree.
'But first... A distraction,' Princess Luna thought, veering to the right, towards Peace Country. Discord's latest acquisition on his quest for widespread chaos.
"Hmm. Perhaps a mountain here? No, no, flip it around. Gah, shading is so difficult," Discord murmurs, rearranging the broad and flat plains, turning them into a checkerboard mosaic of shifting earth and soil.
The deer living there, of course, were swept aside to get them out of the way while he did his work, not that he didn't endure they had some grass to eat. He had it growing up over their ears in fact! For good measure, some magic-induced agoraphobia would help ensure they didn't miss the lack of land to roam around on. He certainly didn't see any of them complaining.
...What with the grass growing up over them and all that.
"Oh! I think I've got an idea!" he said, clapping his hands merrily. Why bother trying to use mountains and canyons as a medium for art when you can simply change the color of the soil and rock itself?
He felt a ticklish feeling emerge as he snapped his claws, and in a moment, Peace Country was now one gigantic self-portrait of the draconequis.
He framed it with a portrait made of his own paws, staring out at it with one eye to make sure he got it all correct.
"Well, a single country can hardly capture my full majesty, but it'll do for a start," he smiled.
As he cracked his back with a job well done, he saw storm clouds begin to approach from the north.
"Oooh! Now that's interesting," he mused, waggling a talon and hastening its approach.
Of course, what he only saw moments later was the twin princesses pushing the storm along, standing atop the largest and darkest of the clouds. They held gleaming thunderbolt-shaped javelins in their teeth, and behind them, thousands more floated behind them in an unshakable grip.
Discord's lips pursed, and he slipped over behind them in some sort of indiscernible movement that defied space.
"Ahh! Just the two I was hoping to see! Celly, Lulu, It's so good to see you. Have you been well? Oh I do so hope you have. I've been keeping the thrones warm while you're gone!" he said, draping an arm over each of the alicorns as though they were best friends.
He puts a talon to his chin. "Oddest thing, though, your guards seem to love throwing spears at me when I do! You really should let them know about the change in management, so I can let them out of time out," he chortles, walking on air away from the two, who stand there on a large storm cloud.
The two sisters share a blank look, before, with a whip of their heads, they prepare to throw their javelins.
Discord snorts. "Come now, I would normally never say this, but for the sake of brevity, let's be realistic for once, a few little toothpicks aren't going to-"
He blinks as, instead of flinging the humming yellow weapons at him, they hurl them at the ground, dragging with them the full might of an alicorn stormfront.
Discord's smiling face on the landscape below suddenly sprouts an unsightly pimple as the twin javelins cause a titanic mountain of molten rock and lightning to erupt from it.
With a hasty snap of his fingers, Discord banishes the mountain, and whirls around to glare at the princesses.
"Now look here, just because I saw fit to change things around doesn't mean you can go and throw a tantrum like this, I've got rights you know, artistic license!"
The storm begins to rage, shrouding all of Peace Country, and dropping the javelins in force, magically charged Jupiter Bronze forged by the princesses bringing down the wrath of gods upon Discord's art piece.
Discord, despite his best efforts, is limited in his ability to stop it. Snapping away all the storms and javelins doesn't work when the princesses are only making more of them with the very molten metals and vaporized mist flung into the sky by their rods from the gods, forcing him to put his attention towards trying to fight them while preserving his precious art.
"Now see here! I do not have to put up with this!" he shouts, snapping his fingers and turning the two princesses into cotton candy and fudge ponies respectively.
The two princesses halt, shuffling uncertainly at the sudden transformative magic.
Celestia tests her footing on the storm cloud below her as Discord heaves in the calm created by their attack's cessation.
"Sister, you might note we haven't fallen," she muses.
He couldn't take away their magic, no matter how cleverly he was able to pretend to weaken them.
The twin sisters erupted with yet stronger magic, and Discord pulled at his hair with frustration as, even turned to candy, the twin sisters still held the tireless and inexhaustible spirits they had ascended into possessing.
Above, the storm raged, and below, the draconequis threw up everything he could think of to stop the princesses from simply kicking over his sandcastles. The tactic reminded him disturbingly of a certain pony's threats. Mutually assured destruction of a sort. If the princesses couldn't stop him, and he wasn't quite able to simply stop them instantly, then they could deny him his fun for a time.
Taffy, wooden building blocks, balloons and gigantic anachronistic paperclips appeared from nowhere, attempting to stymie the rain of Jupiter Bronze, and slow the conversion of Peace Country to mountainous rubble.
With a frustrated growl, he realized that much of the power of the javelins was in their drawing from the storm clouds that the princesses commanded. With a snap of his fingers, he realized if he could not erase the clouds, and he couldn't stop the spears, then he could simply render them impotent.
"Why don't we brighten up this dreary weather, dears?!" he shouted from the ground, snapping his finger. A wave of chaos magic flew out, converting all of the water to candy and sweets, a plague spreading from droplet to droplet until the skies were filled, not with blackened clouds and flashes of lightning, but a gentle drizzle of chocolate milk and bright pink cotton candy puffs in the sky.
The javelins, once dragging down building-thick pillars of lightning, were now slamming into the ground feebly, mere enchanted metal that buried itself into the land like drops of soft rain.
He breathed a sigh of relief, and looked around at the landscape. The entirety of the land had been turned to craters, jutting spires of molten rock, and plasma that arced from place to place randomly, like static running over a crackling metal surface.
It would take entire hours for him to fix all of this!
With a sigh, he flashed up to where the princesses were, and sneered.
"Well, you had your fun. I didn't much care for it, but you did, so quit it!" he shouted, but quickly realized something was wrong.
Princess Celestia was the only pony there. Luna had been gone, for who knows how long!
As soon as the draconequis had scurried below the storm to try and manage it, the alicorn of the night had disappeared in a supersonic crack, blurring to Equestria at speeds impossible for any normal pegasus.
She could only pray her theory was correct. Discord, a spirit of chaos, was limited in his ability to actually slow or stop chaos, even when he disliked the results of it, or its source.
She could only hope that what Weiss implied was true, she would have so little time to search, so precious little time.
She landed on the roof of Castle Everfree, and desperately raised her horn, casting a powerful searching spell through the temporarily fudged appendage.
She was in search of one thing, and one thing alone. Starswirl the Bearded's magical signature. If he was responsible for the Elements of Harmony, then surely...
'There!' Luna thought desperately, detecting a vast quantity of magic aligned with his emotions, deep into the forest, at the center of where the Everfree's odd qualities emitted.
The Everfree Forest had been an odd place, even before the princesses had settled there and made it their capital. It was a frightening place, one where the laws of nature seemed to not apply. Everything within it functioned on its own, without the intervention of ponies or magic, the beasts could get along without guidance, the weather could form and develop from mundane temperature and water vapor alone, and even the plants could grow, without a hint of life-giving magical energy!
Luna landed at the mouth of a large cave, from which the strongest source of Starswirl's magical signature lay.
As she walked inside, she saw it...
Standing proudly in the cavern's center, a massive crystaline tree, one that, from what little she could gleam, had been growing and gestating beneath the Everfree Forest for what must have been countless years.
She approached the relic with awe, and no small amount of reverence. Her mentor, hers and Celestia's, he had created this?
It was, for lack of a better word, divine. It was a magical relic that defied everything she knew about magic, because, in the most curious way, she could simply tell that it was growing.
As six gems slowly plucked themselves from the tree, and placed themselves within her magical aura, she could feel the tree growing even faster than before. Growing as it learned from her emotions, from her bonds with others.
The curse that had been placed on her by Discord shattered in a moment, leaving her completely free of any sort of confectionery transmogrification.
This was Starswirl's legacy, his last gift to Luna and her sister.
The Elements of Harmony.
Discord looked upset. "What is this? Where is your bitter little sister? Not sweet enough to stay and clean up the afterparty?" he said, growing more irate by the minute.
Celestia felt something odd, an emotional pluck that made her eyes twitch involuntarily towards Equestria. Discord's Chaos Magic shattered from her body, and her true self was revealed from the cotton candy form forced on it.
"That's for me to know, and you to find out," Celestia smirked, before teleporting away in a bright flash of light.
Discord sneered, following the teleport all the way to its destination.
"And find out I shall!" he responded, snapping a claw and disappearing in a loud and mournful honk.
He arrived to the sight of the two sisters, who, while battered and bruised, looked at the artifacts with hope and confidence.
Celestia turned to Discord. "Playtime is over. This ends here, and with it, your cruel reign."
Discord crossed his arms. This? This is what they risked his fury for? A few enchanted trinkets?
"Oh, I doubt that," he said, pulling out a small sack of seeds and munching on a few. This aught to be good.
something's wrong
"Hungry?" he asked, shaking his little satchel around, spilling seeds everywhere.
Their magical aura around the Elements grew.
"Oh, suit yourselves," he shrugged, munching on a few more.
run
"So, then, what have you got there?" he asked curiously, scratching his chin eagerly to see what silly attempt this would be.
Oddly, he felt something he didn't quite recognize.
"The Elements of Harmony!" Princess Celestia answered.
"With these, we will at last defeat you," Princess Luna insisted.
The gems began to turn into a sphere of light and magic, whirling around the two alicorns, and growing greater, and more powerful in strength.
The curious unfamiliar feeling began to grow in the draconequis, and he couldn't help but laugh. What was even curiouser was that, for whatever reason, it didn't seem quite as funny as the laughter would suggest...
"Ohahahahahah! You should see the looks on your faces! All that buildup for this?! It's hilarious!"
He of course, didn't realize it until later, but that feeling was fear, and his laughter, which seemed appropriately hysterical, was, as the princesses touched horns, and with the surge of new magic flowing through them, used the Elements of Harmony to perform an act which was without them impossible.
Two ponies, performing magic as one. Magic cast with this pony emotion called 'Friendship', the first magic of its kind.
A spiraling beam of rainbow light erupted from the sisters and their bond with one another, and flew at the spirit of Chaos and Disharmony, who was laughing helplessly at the sight, even as it turned his body to stone.
His madness seemed to melt away, the most egregious and disturbing changes to their country and their world began to fade, among those that demanded the magic of chaos to continue their function. Much would remain as it was, tainted by Discord's touch, but with him imprisoned, and the worst of the chaos magic banished, ponies in the houses nearby hesitantly, fearfully emerged.
At last, Equestria could begin to heal.
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I take it this Peace Country is what would later become the Storm Country?
Gran Mal, translated from Latin means 'Great/Grand hammer/strike' (been a long time since I used Latin).
In medical terms it's also the name for a
strokeseizure (im a dunce) . The worst kind of seizure, as a matter of fact.Very apt title for this chapter
10915023
Good catch!
10915059
Actually, it refers to the most intense type of Seizure, a Grand Mal Seizure. Other than that, you're absolutely right, to my knowledge!
10916021
I knew that. I came across it during a wikipedia rabbit hole exploration a while ago.
I think it was a disambiguation that went to it from some music themed links.
10916021
Oh right.... A seizure. I completely mixed up the two. I knew it had something to do with the brain and my mind just latched on to it. Thanks for correcting me.
Alright. It took me the better part of 2 days, including the nights, to read this entire thing, but now I’m done. Let me just say, holy shit this story is amazing, this is in the my top 5 favourite stories I have ever read it is genuinely so well written. It’s told in such an intricate way that if you miss even a single chapter you could miss foreshadowing for plot twists 20 or even 30 chapters down the line, I really love this.
Honestly, amazing work here, I couldn’t like this more.
Now, bear with me... is that a Homestuck reference?
10920506
That's a very good question!