Zeitgeist—the Spirit of the Times

Feelings. Bah. Discord liked to think himself above such things. The problem with being an embodied spirit of chaos, however, was that he very much wasn’t. Bodies came with minds, you see, and minds had the unfortunate tendency to think.

He found the chink in his stone prison early on, and exploited it ruthlessly as soon as he did. The Elements were clever; the only way to escape was to change his mind. To regret, and to want to be better. Anathema, for him, but he was Discord. He was good at lying to others, but he was the master at lying to himself. No truth spell could entangle fact from fiction when pointed in his direction. Anything he wanted to be true, he simply believed to be.

So he wormed his way out of Harmony’s prison before even a day had passed, keeping the stone facade in place for just the right moment. Whenever that would be, because he suddenly had quite a lot of trouble deciding what exactly he even wanted.

Toss things about, shake them up, rattle them loose and have fun with it, sure, but now he wanted more than just the usual mainstays to keep him occupied. Because of course he did, because he’d changed his mind on a whim to escape a stone prison. Except now that he had, he lacked the want to change it back.

Oh, the hilarity of it. His plots and plans foiled by none other than himself, all because he’d inflicted himself with empathy. That was a clever ploy on the Elements’ part, he had to admit, especially as he saw no way out of his current plight. All his careful setup as he arranged the game to his liking upended in one fell swoop, paradigm shifted in a single move. He could do nothing but applaud. After all, there wasn’t any fun in only playing a game you were guaranteed to win.

Still, the current state of play left him much more restricted than usual, and that never sat well with him. He’d give it an honest shot, until he got bored, and then he’d rejiggle some neurons and set himself free, no matter how much that thought currently pained him. He’d get frustrated, fling up his paws, and give himself a good old wash in the noggin eventually.

Until then, what to do … he sent his senses snaking outward from his prison, finding ponies plodding about, minds full of shock, surprise, relief, boring, boring, boring. Organization was already in place, crude diagrams carved with hooves in stone pointing the way to structure, homes, gardens. All of that planning itched at him, even haphazard as it was. He boiled with the urge to upend all of it, held back only by the thought of how upset they’d be at the destruction of their hard work, so much done in so little time. Rather inspiring, if he tilted his head and looked at it in just the wrong way.

Quickly enough, however, the little ponies were surpassed. Two presences sat not too far from his stone facade of a prison, alicorn sisters quietly whispering at each other. Celestia, a hair larger, outwardly calm and in control, inside a tempest only the barest margin from collapse. Sitting next to her, Luna, great shuddering sobs wracking her frame, yet if Discord manifested before them he knew it would be Luna who’d react that very instant with a killing spell at the tip of her horn. He lingered intangible about them, watching the way Luna leaned into her older sister, whose wing wrapped comfortably about her, a sight which had jealous hateful bitter angry vindictiveness coiling through him, the bite of the usual set of emotions this time blunted as a wistful longing haunted him, the emotion resonating oddly, similar to the disquiet of order, yet with a different tone and bite to it.

He drew his senses back, unsettled, the odd feeling still sending a pang through his entire being. This was new, and thus interesting, worth exploring, and yet it hurt, a sensation he usually avoided like ponies avoided the plague.

If … if, not saying that he did, but if he wanted something like what the sisters had between them. What could he do to get that? Clones, he immediately knew, wouldn’t do any good in that regard. They were him, when it came down to it, and anything involving them only served as a play for those who weren’t him.

He immediately disregarded any of his usual creations as candidates, as well as all the ponies swarming about like prickly little ants, minds bright with potential and wonder. None of them could be to him what the alicorns were to each other, they lacked the depth and capability and understanding Celestia and Luna showcased with their simple actions, a nuzzle here, a quick pat with a wing there, glances filled with hidden meaning.

He dithered over these little exchanges, something he’d gloss over with barely a thought now a subject of utter fascination, mind cataloging everything, everything that happened between them, shaded through a backdrop of naked longing that made him want to reach out and capture the essence of that love and trust and take it for himself.

If only.

In a corner of his mind, there was a faint awareness that this wasn’t alien to him. He’d had that, or something like it, and purged it from memory so that it no longer troubled him. Funny, that the world would conspire to peel back that hidden layer of his mind.

Sad, that he couldn’t think of a way to satisfy that uncovered want.

Troubled, he sank back into the sensation of stone as skin and fur, hiding in it to shield himself from those feelings, centering himself in the roar of rushing hooves and clashing voices, mind circling in on itself anyway, persistently dragging his senses back to those two despite his efforts.

They spoke in soft tones, ostentatious formality gone now in private, the older chiding the younger for a misstep made earlier in the day with one of the workers. Yet even that was done in a way that was so obviously caring, it brought that jealous want surging back as strongly as ever. And when the younger brought the moon cresting over the horizon, and the two huddled close, heads resting on each other, and lay peacefully under a starry sky, the want came on so strong he nearly blew his cover then and there to demand how and why and—and he’d get nothing from that, so he subsided, and didn’t.

Instead, he waited. Watched. Bided his time as the pangs grew stronger, waited ever more resolutely as he looked for a way to parlay sheer unmitigated power into the kind of bond they had.

The more he looked, the less certain he felt that he could engineer the outcome he wanted. Creation was out, as that was only him, and steering any of the ponies wandering about into the kind of bond he wanted wouldn’t mean anything if they didn’t have the power, wit, knowledge, and willingness to enter into it of their own accord.

As desperately as he searched, he could only find two candidates, and neither of them were on particularly good terms with the entity who had ravaged everywhere he could reach and taken glee in tearing down any efforts to build something lasting despite it all. It was a tricky conundrum to puzzle out, and he was struggling to find some way to play this new game he found himself in.

It was, by the time he found a play, years past the day he’d freed himself that Discord finally chanced upon a scheme that bore some real potential. Really, it was simplicity itself, the same strategy he’d used to free himself of the Elements’ hold, with just a little twist.

He warped space and matter at the edge of the Princesses’ domain, a careful eye nudging together pieces to build a gloriously chaotic whole, something alien and unbalanced in a way that pleased his soul, while being conceptually divorced from his own persona.

Discord ended up with something sinuous and shadowy, draconic in its general outline, bestial while bearing a contradictorily aristocratic slant to its features, a colorful scattering of frills and antennae trailing down here and there, form amorphous and dreamlike. It was something that could easily have escaped from some pony’s dream, or nightmare. Perfection.

He sunk himself into his creation, the fluidity of a dream seeping into reality in a perplexing twist of nature that sent a delightful thrill through his spirit, opening five eyes, then none, then two, then seven, stretching shadowy limbs, flexing them one moment and allowing them to discorporate into nothingness a tick later.

Finally, he found the mix of magic and matter that made up the brain, and wiped it clear of any association with the spirit of chaos known as Discord.

And a nameless creature found itself staring warily from the border of a pony civilization into something that filled it with a multitude of emotions, too complex and varied to immediately untangle.

After some time, it came to a thought.

It wanted friends.

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