Ordo ab Chao

by Integral Archer

Chapter VIII: Miserabile Visu

“The Military of the Union, or its Laws, shall have no Jurisdiction inside the borders of the Union, unless on Order from the President through his Powers of War.”

—Amendment IX to the Constitution of Meeting Tribes of Immediate Siblings

On December the twenty-sixth, the president’s scheme was implemented.

The Department of Magic and Defense was skeptical about it, but they surprised themselves and the country when the spell was successfully cast, effectively abrogating reality and causality in Los Pegasus and Ponyville.

It had taken a few days for the press to notice, but eventually they became puzzled at the fact that the front line of the war was deathly quiet. Upon reaching the vicinity of these cities, their mouths had dropped in confusion and disbelief, and they immediately started writing about the terror and pushing their frenetic scribblings to their newspapers as fast as they could.

The president never saw the magic himself; and, to compensate, for around thirty-two hours after the first articles had been published, he had read their reports gleefully from behind his desk in the Horseshoe Office—a stack of which stood two feet high beside his chair.

It was here that Princess Luna found him, still glued to his chair, his eyes riveted on a newspaper.

“I thought I said that I did not want to be interrupted,” he said, not deigning to take his eyes off the newspaper to look at her.

“Mr. President,” she said, her voice and expression completely placid, “Enforcer has informed me that the Union Army has their latest figures, if thou would care to read them.”

“Have thou seen this?” said the president, finally looking up, and he extended the newspaper toward her with both his forward extremities. “Look, look: the idiots over at the Department of Magic and Defense actually did it. To make it even better, I’ve never seen the editorialists so angry in their entire life! They’ve never been more entertaining to read or to see! Just to spite them—or, rather, to show my love for them—perhaps I should have them arrested for sympathizing with the enemy. I can do that now, thou know; Congress said I could.”

Princess Luna said nothing, as her eyes wandered aimlessly around the room.

“Hmm, perhaps I won’t,” the president continued. “They’re actually getting very clever now. Thou know what they’ve started calling me? It’s hilarious, honestly; it’s the best thing they’ve ever done in their entire careers.”

“Thou shouldn’t be reading them; thou know how angry they make thee. Didn’t we both agree to stop listening to them and taking them seriously?”

“They’re calling me ‘Discord, the spirit of chaos and disharmony.’”

“‘Discord?’”

“Usually, their juvenile insults and names are ill thought out; there’s no effort in slander these days. But ‘Discord’? How clever is that! I rather like it, actually; it makes me seem like some sort of crazed maniac who sits in this office grinning menacingly out a window while watching his torment unfold, all the while petting a purring white cat.”

Princess Luna glanced away as soon as she saw the president try to make eye contact with her. “Doesn’t it bother thee that my sister hasn’t been in the congressional sessions ever since we declared Ponyville and Los Pegasus in rebellion?” she asked, looking at the ceiling.

“Really? I hadn’t noticed,” the president replied, making a weak attempt to sound remotely surprised. “No, that’s not true. I have noticed that it’s been a lot quieter recently.”

“I just . . . I haven’t seen her at all. Ever since the war started, I haven’t been able to get in contact with her.” Princess Luna looked at the ground, digging her front hoof in to the carpet absentmindedly.

The president could see that she desperately wanted to elaborate, to cathartically pour her stresses and plights into his ears, as he was so eager to do once before, but all he had to say to her was: “Thou said that Enforcer told thee something for me; well, get on with it. I’m very busy, and I can’t allow thee to waste my time.”

“I know only what Enforcer told me.” And closing her eyes, trying to recall the assistant’s rapid-fire speech, she recited: “Military intelligence is ambiguous on the actual damage done, as you no doubt would imagine given the circumstances of the besieged cities; but rough estimates are that, in Los Pegasus, one hundred twenty rebels are dead, with an additional eighty in critical condition, and three thousand civilians dead. In Ponyville, estimates are forty civilians dead, eight in critical condition, while twenty rebels are confirmed dead. In addition, they estimate damages around—”

“What about Union Army causalities? How are my colts and fillies holding up?” the president interrupted.

“Well, a few hours ago, Corporal Cupcake, a filly from the Thirty-Eighth Manehattan Volunteer Infantry Regiment tripped and fell over a rock while getting coffee for a few of her colleagues. She’s being treated in the hospital here in Canterlot for a sprained ankle.”

The president winced. “That sounds rough. Make sure that she gets sent my regards. Other than that, what other casualties has the Union Army suffered?”

“None. Thou ordered them to stay well outside the cities and the spell’s radius; they’ve been there ever since the operation started, awaiting your command.”

“Good, that’s what matters,” said the president in a brusque manner, while turning back toward his papers. “I’m glad to know that no blood is on my accord.”

She shivered at the coldness in his voice. In an effort to cut the uncomfortable silence that ensued and to perhaps stir some emotion in the president, she said: “Do thou remember General Hoop?”

“I do believe so—the former general of the Air Force? The one that deserted?”

“Today, the police obtained a warrant to enter his home, as he had not appeared at his post for three days, making him officially absent without leave. When they entered his house, they found him dead on the floor. They think he had committed suicide a few days earlier.” After she said this, Princess Luna walked at an angle toward the president, such that he did not notice she was coming closer, but that she could see his face more clearly.

“Ah, that’s a shame,” replied the president, in a disturbingly nonchalant tone. “He was a fine stallion, and he seemed rather enthusiastic last time we spoke. Who knows what could have driven such a proud and distinguished military officer to such extreme ends? Such is the question of these times, really.”

Princess Luna stood there for a few seconds with her jaw slightly ajar, as if trying to elicit something else from him, while the president pretended not to notice. “Aren’t thou even the slightest disturbed? Thou just spoke to him recently, and now he’s gone, a speck of dust in the wind that thou are just flicking away.”

The president turned his head slightly toward her but still did not look at her directly, on the pretense that he was busy shuffling through the mound of papers on his desk. “What do thou want from me?” he said, keeping the same monotone he had sustained through the entire conversation so far. “I didn’t know him that well, and I’ve only spoken to him a few times. I’m surprised nopony saw this coming earlier: what self-respecting officer deserts his post on the eve of war? I’m not going to waste my time trying to understand his struggle; a problem to which a definitive solution can not possibly be found doesn’t interest me.”

Princess Luna, dejected at the fact she saw no reflection of emotion in his countenance, walked back toward the door, preparing to leave this unsettling room. Before she left, she turned her head such that she did not have to look at him, but the sound of her voice could still reach his ears. “Is that all, Mr. President?” she said.

The president was surprised at her tone: it was slightly louder and angrier than she had ever spoken to him before. “Well, they should be here soon,” he said. “Would thou like to come with me?”

“Who?”

“My convoy. I’m going to go visit the troops in Ponyville—moral support, and all that nonsense. They should be here, right about—now.”

On cue, Enforcer came flying hurriedly into the Horseshoe Office, nearly running straight into Princess Luna. His mane was drenched in sweat, and his face twitched involuntarily when he spoke.

“The president’s convoy is here,” he gasped.

“Ah, yes,” replied the president. “Thank you, Enforcer!” He got up from his chair and made toward the door. Turning back to Princess Luna, he said: “Ms. Vice President, would you care to join me?”

“I will come. They will appreciate my presence,” she said. The president was shocked when she walked right past him without even giving him a second glance. He gave a sly nod with an equally sly smile to Enforcer after the princess walked by. Enforcer, like the vice president, did his best to avoid the president’s stare.

They walked through the long twisting hallways of the Presidential Mansion. Princess Luna led, with the president casually strolling behind her; and Enforcer, hovering a few feet on the ground, kept a slow pace behind the both of them.

Enforcer put his hoof to his neck and found that his pulse was reaching upwards of one hundred beats per minute. He rubbed the knee of his left foreleg with his right forehoof; he had bumped it two weeks ago on a table, and it still had a dull ache.

In truth, Enforcer knew the cause of his stress: In all his years of service, he had never found the hallways of the Presidential Mansion in this condition. What was usually a bright, cheery, active establishment now felt cold, dead, and anxious, as if the building were reflecting the feelings of its occupants. The few ponies they did pass felt devoid of life; ponies who he once saw walking down the corridors with a grin on their faces, who would jump at the opportunity to shake his hoof and say, “How are thou doin’, Enforcer?” or give a polite curtsey to the vice president saying, “Top of the morning to you, Your Grace!” would now avert their gaze as he walked by, worried that they would no doubt see in him what they themselves felt.

Only the president still walked with a smile, but it was hardly in the same spirit and the smiles that Enforcer used to see.

Before they exited the mansion out onto the street, Enforcer, for a brief moment, caught the eyes of a pony in a business suit standing near the door. In that second, Enforcer understood the tacit explanation that those eyes said: something in this administration is an emotional black hole, gravitating all the happiness and pleasure that they all had once felt unto itself and only growing bigger, hungrier, and more powerful the more it destroyed. Enforcer looked away, but the pony he passed knew that Enforcer, as much as he hated to admit it, agreed with him.

The carriage ride to Ponyville was no more cheery. Through the entire ride, the president sat there, gazing wistfully out the window, while Enforcer and Princess Luna stared at the carriages carpeting and its seat cushions. For the first time in a while, she had nothing to ask of him and he had nothing of which to inform her. For a second, they looked at the president, content to look at the countryside, and they envied him; they envied his ability to drown out all the cries of dissent and the discomforting air which emanated from the strange and disturbing events in which their lives were enveloped.

Enforcer pulled a pen and notepad out of his jacket pocket and closed his eyes in sorrow when he found that his mind could not will his pen to write. He rubbed his face, trying to smooth out a few wrinkles, which were now starting to appear on his cheek.

When they reached the outskirts of Ponyville, they were shocked by how much the scenery had changed: even ignoring the socioeconomic differences between Ponyville and Canterlot, it was as if their carriage had driven through a portal and into a world where nothing had any meaning.

The clouds were a bright pink; houses levitated upside down with no visible means of support, and the once crystal-clear blue ponds were now a dark, syrupy brown. While only farmers lived in these outskirts, they observed a few in the mangled fields: some were prancing lively through their old crops, which turned into popcorn or cotton candy when they touched it, and others were lying down, while the grass that encircled them began to rip themselves out of their soil and fly off into the sky.

Princess Luna closed her eyes, and held them firmly shut for the rest of the ride.

Too soon after she had done this helpless protest against the unknowable and the unthinkable, the carriage came into a halt. With her eyes still closed, she heard the door closest to the president open. It was not until she heard General Sherbert’s voice that she opened her eyes and looked in its direction.

Through the door of the carriage, she saw the president standing fully erect; General Sherbert was standing to his left and giving him the military salute. Behind the both of them, she saw a blur of unrecognizable motion and color, and she stepped out of the door on her side to look.

The first thing that struck her was how warm and humid it was, despite it being the end of December. Then, she noticed that, despite it being midday, the sun had gone down, and the moon had taken its place. But after she looked at where Ponyville once was, the heat and the time of day were the last things on her mind.

The once beautiful rolling hills where the grass grew full and thick, and its pleasant aroma carried itself on the breeze to delight the noses of everypony in the town, were now impossible to locate. In their stead, lay an abhorrent pink texture that spanned the length of the city with its misshapen form, as if it were suffocating the life and serenity out of the magnificent grass that once assured its visitors of order and serenity. This new texture was repulsive in its aesthetics, but also in the fact that it was nothing like Princess Luna had ever seen before: it was unusual, strange, unsettling—and, most disturbingly, it was implicitly cruel.

The sight of this demon’s carpet made Princess Luna shift her eyes upwards, in an effort to not torment herself any longer by its sight, but the sky was no less unsettling; for, at this moment, the moon plunged with a startling rapidity out of the sky, and the sun came out again.

In the light, she could see that the great, old trees—that the residents of Ponyville were most proud of for the virtue of their age, their shade, and their delicious fruit they consistently bore year after year—were floating, unattached to anything on the ground, above what remained of the infrastructure. In the sky, they were oriented in a multitude of different angles, and their thousands of twisted and helpless roots twirled in the sky, looking desperately for their cause and purpose in a world where those concepts did not exist anymore.

The buildings were not immune to this spell either: they, like the trees, arranged themselves in the sky, in the grass, and everywhere except in their foundations. Looking at these great structures, that were now nothing more than detritus, and looking at how they settled impossibly in the air made Princess Luna continually question as to what direction was the sky and which was the earth; and this caused the her to only become more aware of her nausea, as she stumbled on her own hooves, trying to regain her balance and, at the same time, trying make sense of this dichotomy.

The somber mood of this gruesome scene was supplemented by the fact that the sun now went behind a dark stratus cloud, casting the earth in an ugly pink shade of light.

That was to say nothing of the residents. For a war zone, for all the disorder and confusion that could be observed in the citizens in light of their situation, it was shockingly quiet. There were no screams of pain, no cries for assistance, no signs of suffering whatsoever; the few citizens they saw behaved as desultorily as their surroundings. One earth-pony pranced gleefully across the pink grass while another walked up the side of a curved lamppost who, either out of ignorance or obliviousness, was unaware that the lamppost had just spontaneously turned into a four-legged chicken.

The other earth-ponies, who were still clinging onto the last of their minds and their sanity, were trying in vain to apply their old concepts and models to survive in their new environment which would only backfire as the outcome of their actions would be the exact opposite of what had been expected: They would touch their hooves to the ground, expecting that their muscles would support their bodies as they walked, but would find the ground lift them high into the air or crumble beneath their hooves; or they would hit, in frustration, the side of a building with their hoof, expecting the side of the building to hit their hooves back with the exact same amount of force that they had applied—but to their dismay, they would find the building would crumple like a deck of card, while feeling no reactionary force against their own hooves or, in the most unfortunate cases, would apply a reactionary force tenfold greater than that they had applied and send them sweeping upwards, every single bone in their forehoof that touched the building shattered.

Princess Luna could see the horns of the unicorns, who did not submit unlike some of their earth-pony siblings, flash weakly, as they were pulled helplessly through the streets, trying to manage the contradiction between their magic and their impossible surroundings.

In the middle of the square, she saw a young unicorn strain with all his might to fight the madness, as he summoned a ball of magical energy that grew quite large, quite quickly. Princess Luna’s heart leapt with hope at seeing the tenacity of the citizens of Ponyville, seeing that all was not lost and Ponyville was not condemned—then, the ball exploded in a bright purple flash. Princess Luna ducked behind the carriage, but not before she saw the explosion send the young unicorn flying into a nearby building, punching through its brick wall, and leaving a hole in the shape of the pony’s body. Immediately afterwards, the building began to evaporate, like steam off of a boiling pot, until it had completely vanished, as if it had never stood.

The pegasi would simply fly straight into the aforementioned improbably placed obstacles repeatedly, like insects, as if their minds could not accept the existence of such an obstacle in that place and in that time—while others would fly loops in the air, taking no heed of their airspeed or pitch while all four of their legs flailed impotently, like an ant that had been cruelly knocked over for a larger animal’s entertainment.

When she looked at where Ponyville City Hall once stood, she fully came to realize the living nightmare she was in. The building had fractured into four pieces: one part lay in the sticky ground—which she now evaluated to be mix of cotton candy and soap suds; two other parts were floating in the air, and the third part was lodged into a neighboring building which had now just spontaneously burst into a wall of dark blue flame.

Princess Luna recoiled, expecting a wave of heat, but what she felt was more painful than a wave of energy: she felt no sensation on her body whatsoever.

She listened for the cries for help, but she heard nothing; the only thing she heard was the president’s raucous laughter. She turned to look at him; and the model of him that she had constructed in her mind, a testament to perfection and justice, shattered into a thousand tiny pieces. He stood facing the cataclysm fully, with his arms outspread embracing it.

“You’ve done it!” he shouted. “You did it! Oh, isn’t this beautiful? Simply magnificent! Such disorder! Such chaos!”

Princess Luna saw him turn his head to the sky, close his eyes, and open his mouth—his ugly and mangled tongue stretched out to the sky. She looked away, feeling nauseated at this sight, afraid to look at him again. She summoned all her courage to look back for a second, hoping for the possibility that the dark magic had deceived her with such a cruel sight, and that it was just a fleeting chimera in her mind.

When she looked back, she did not see the remnants of Ponyville or the president, as if those concepts were just replaced by a single glaring one: she saw a monster that rapaciously fed on the pleasure it received from causing depredation on such an enormous scale in such a small amount of time; she saw it pay homage to the vicious magic that he had used to obliterate all of reality; she saw a being that wanted nothing more but to cause the world he lived in to fall into abject disharmony; she saw the love of destruction for the sake of destruction incarnate in a serpentine creature with antlers; she saw the summation of its life and effort finally being realized, and she saw how dark it was; she saw Discord.

She closed her eyes, as they began to swell with tears. If the world was just and good, how could it ever permit such a creature to exist?

She felt something moist hit her cheek. She brought her hoof to her face, wiped it off, and then looked at it: it was chocolate milk.

Comments

[NormalBipedalHuman]

I supose Celestia is looking for the elements of harmony?

[Oddend]

Discord finally LIVES!