> A Thany-Mendored Spling
>  by Baal Bunny
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

> Or is it a Splany-Thendored Ming?
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Just look at yourself." Each word popped like a balloon filled with rotten milk. "It's disgusting!"

"Hey!" The second voice in his head gave off the aroma of freshly cut grass: sweet, clean, and refreshing—unless one happened to be allergic. And judging by the slack-jawed and bulging-eyed stares that the ponies in the town square were focusing on him as he stepped around the corner of the quill and sofa shop, Discord thought it might very well be allergy season. "Maybe instead of grousing," this second voice was going on, "you could help us come up with a way to fix this?"

"Help?" The first voice rose like startled eyebrows. "Have you met me?"

"Doomed," tolled a third voice. Except 'tolled' wasn't the right word: the voice sounded less like a bell and more like one of those dogs whose face seemed to be made entirely of melting ice cream.

Not that dogs could talk, of course. That would be silly.

(Note to self: when next out at Sweet Apple Acres, give that dog of theirs the power of speech. And a top hat. All talking dogs should have top hats.)

"Nothing can be done," the third voice continued in doleful tones. "Too far gone. Too far gone!" The words crumbled like cinnamon coffee cake and became a howl echoing through the spring evening all around, the twilight—

Don't use that word; don't use that word; don't use that word!

—wrapping around the houses and shops of Ponyville so contentedly, Discord could almost forget that each step he took carried him another decimeter closer to dissolution.

Or rather the howl would have echoed through the et cetera et cetera if Discord had chosen to let any of these non-existent nincompoops use his larynx.

"Larynx?" The first voice, lacking eyeballs, rolled its 'r's. "Really? Is that today's entry on the word-a-day calendar your precious princess gave you?"

(Note to self: change every word on the rest of the calendar's pages to 'eleemosynary' and give it a different definition each time.)

The second voice sighed a flowery sigh. "She gives the most thoughtful gifts, don't you think?"

"I don't think," a fourth voice piped up as pink and strawberry scented as a wad of partially chewed bubblegum. "At least, I don't think I think. At least, I don't think I think I think. At least—"

"My point is"—the second voice spoke over the splat of a custard pie squishing into something roughly the size and shape of the average party pony's face—"she's always taking time out of her busy schedule—"

"To destroy everything good and proper in the world!" The first voice began bubbling with the half-masticated remains of the soap that had formerly filled the soapbox the speaker would have been standing upon if the only legs it had access to hadn't been currently dragging themselves along the road between the various baffled ponies in the center of town. "This isn't who we are! And by 'we,' I mean 'you'! And by 'good and proper,' I mean 'oblong and obsequious.'" A scritch-scritch-scritch as of claws scratching a scalp rustled forth. "Don't I?"

"Hmmph!" The second voice's snort gusted like a dust devil. "I'll tell you what you mean! You mean that hope springs internal!" Another spate of claw scratching. "Or is that external?"

"Lemme tell y'all what I reckon," spoke up a fifth voice in an accent as thick and phony as the eyelashes certain ponies insisted on—

"Now see here!" The sixth voice had an accent as well, but this one was as sharply arched as a perfectly applied crimson gash of lipstick. "I'll not have you saying such things about me behind my back!"

"Simmer on down, cugar shube!" The fifth voice would've shaken its head if it had had one. "Ain't no pony insulting anypony 'round 'bout these here parts!"

"I am," the first voice muttered.

(Note to self: See if that carrot growing pony would consider planting a field of yams next fall, then pluck them early from said field and send them dancing through town singing, "I yam what I yam.")

"Oh, you," the second voice said more sweetly than a sweet potato. "Besides, none of us here has a back behind which talking might occur."

"Yeah? Well, how 'bout this?" The first voice had added an extra note of peevishness to its tone. "None of us here are ponies!"

"Technically," piped up Her voice, every other sound snapping off and falling away like the twisted branches of a diseased elm tree, "the 'equus' part of 'draconequus' refers to—"

"Silence!" Discord shouted in his actual exterior voice while shoving his claws and talons so deeply into his ears that they mooshed clear through and began thumb wrestling somewhere in the middle of his head.

The ponies that didn't scatter squealing at this point glared at him in that special way ponies had: hotter and more bracing than any cup of tea could ever be. He'd often considered bottling it and selling it back to them on cold winter mornings.

But that was neither here nor there, one of his favorite pony expressions. So he wrenched his arms back out and began trudging again, not particulary looking forward to the time when he would reach either here or there. At least the menagerie of his mind had stopped spouting such—

"Yep, yep, yep," an eighth voice said—or was this the seventh? Discord couldn't remember at this point and didn't really care anymore. "As awesome as it's gonna be to read about all this in the paper tomorrow, there's really only one question you need to ask, champ." 

"Oh, good." The first voice dripped so caustically, acrid smoke tickled Discord's ear hair. "By all means give us the pep talk, coach!"

The second voice snorted again. "I never was any good at team sports."

"You need to ask," that umpty-umpth voice repeated more strongly, "who you're gonna listen to: yourself or your lying brain?"

"Neither one," Discord muttered, and that was when the impulses that raced along what he was calling his optic nerves at the moment informed him that he'd finally arrived at both here and there. Raising his gaze to the gold and purple arched doorway at the top of the steps, he couldn't keep his wings from shuddering at the towers and looming parapets—

(Note to self: parapets? Has she gotten herself another owl?)

"That's not a note!" He stomped a hoof. "And I'll have you know that none of you is being at all helpful!"

Another moment of silence, then, "Fine," the first voice whispered somewhere beneath his antelope antler. "My advice? One word: run."

"Agreed," the second voice murmured from behind his left eye. "She'll only think it's a trick, you know. Or a joke."

Snapping his claws then would've been the simplest thing in the world: spin himself away and perhaps spend the next few decades learning to yodel like the deep sea tube worms did. He even went so far as to lift his lion paw, but—

"No," his one quiet voice said, the first voice he'd added to the multitudes already jammed up inside him when he'd begun trying to live among ponies. "You deserve to be happy," this voice went on just like its original owner had back in her cottage at his first mention of this whole insane idea. "Let her know how you feel, be honest and real with her, and what happens next might just surprise you."

Discord sighed. "No help at all." Shaking the flowers he had clenched in his eagle talons in an attempt to straighten their broken stems, he changed his tuxedo from purple to orange, drifted as light as dandelion fluff up the stairs, and knocked on Twilight Sparkle's front door.