The Short Story of Coming Forth by Day
From the desert sands rose the temple-lair of Catshepsut, high priestess of herself, the first and only of her name. Hundreds of cubits high it stood, proud and imperious as its mistress. Twin marble sentinels cast in her image flanked the entrance, each animated by the stolen ka of a dozen ponies and poised to pounce on those who were not welcome.
Discord looked the pyramid up and down and stuck out his tongue. “Yecch. Symmetry. What is that girl doing?” A moment’s thought had him inside the structure, surrounded by grain, figs, and dates that he definitely didn’t recall manifesting. (After all, there'd be chaperones if that were the case.) Oh, and the giant purple winged lioness who was… “Oh no.” He facepawed. “Please tell me you aren’t doing what I think you’re doing.”
“I am supplicating myself before my master,” said the sphinx, bowing before him.
Discord took a deep enough breath to inflate his chest to near-spherical levels before letting it out. “Just because I’m the one who made you out of a cat, a blue jay, and a book of brain teasers doesn’t automatically mean I have some right to dictate how you should act. No, that right comes from my being vastly more powerful, more imaginative, and better-looking. Still, I thought I raised you better than that.”
Her forehead still pressed into the floor, Catshepsut said, “My first memory is of you throwing me into a desert.”
“Well, technically, you were a test model I made as I was fine-tuning griffins. But you’re a useful waste product, like Marmite!” Discord looked around and took in all the visible right angles. “Even if your personal philosophy is diametrically opposed to mine, like Marmite.”
Catshepsut looked up, blinking in confusion. “I… What?”
“Look, you’re clearly not one of my better creations. Not by my standards, anyway.” Discord began pacing about the chamber, taking in the statues of ammuts, serpopards, and his other local handiwork. “Still, I must admit, you’ve certainly done quite a bit for yourself. I was just expecting you to take advantage of the giant litterbox.”
The sphinx reclaimed her dignity with feline ease, settling herself in a sitting position as she watched him proceed about her home. “I have asserted your dominion over the ponies in the area, my master.”
Discord scowled down at his now housecat-sized creation. “Call me that again, and I might keep you this way. And yes, you’ve certainly been ruling with an iron paw." He sneered. "Why you think I’d approve of that, I don’t know.”
“But… But I am Catshepsut!” she cried, rearing up and pawing at his scaled leg. “Unquestioned pharaoh of the south, mistress of the dry wastes, knower of ten thousand riddles!”
Discord grabbed her by the scruff of her neck and hoisted her up to his eye level. “Here’s a riddle for you: Why should I care? Remember, I created you. And while I am pleased with how you’ve grown beyond my expectations,” and now Discord paced back and forth upon the unshrunken sphinx's muzzle, “I could be happier with the shape you’ve taken. You’re barely even making cat puns, and what’s the point of being a sphinx if you’re not going to work with the purrfect material your creator gave you? It's a catastrophe!”
He blinked back a few cubits as Catshepsut, bane of all ponykind and eclipser of the desert sun, stiffened and slowly turned around. Her tail, her glorious, lashing tail, was now a cup of brass protruding from her hindquarters. “Ma—!” She caught herself and turned back just as slowly, to where the draconequus hovered with his arms crossed. “Lord Discord.”
“Could do without the title, but better.”
“Why?”
“Why? Why? You ask ‘why’ of chaos? Why live? Why breathe? Why steal the crops of a civilization of herbivores when I created you to eat meat and sand?” Discord paused in his rant, halfway through pacing on thin air. “Actually, why did you do that? So you took their crops. Now what?”
“It, uh...” Catshepsut's claws beat a tattoo against the floor for a few moments, her tail lashing in thought. “It seemed like the thing to do?”
“Exactly! Do what you want because you can and no one can stop you. It’s like the poem goes:
“What thou wilt be the whole of the law.
Rise however high as you can claw.
Never think you can coast;
Devil takes the hindmost
So trip peers ere you fall in his maw.”
“What’s a devil?” said Catshepsut.
“Oh, that’s a whole other kettle of fish.” Discord smiled as he watched the sphinx dodge the tremendous cast-iron aquarium that plunged through the top of the pyramid. “Ah, good, you’re learning.”
“I am coming to understand you, Discord.”
He snickered, then started working the peanuts and nougat out of his teeth. “Careful; I might mix things up just to keep you on your toes.”
“If you did not come here to see how I am enacting your will—”
“Which you aren't.”
“For what reason did you come here?”
Discord clicked his tongue, then spat out the resulting dropdown menu. “That’s 'why’ by another name and you know it. And don't go thinking I'm some grand architect of plans and schemes set to CONQUER THE WORLD or some such foolishness. My foolishness is of a more personal nature, and it led me to check on you when I remembered that you existed. It’s been a few decades. I’ve been busy, but you might make for an interesting afternoon. Not that I'm much of a cat person.”
Catshepsut watched Discord work a bit of purple hair out of his own coat with exaggerated disgust—which was to say a large pair of tweezers labeled Exaggerated Disgust—before she said, “Then what is it you wish for me to do?”
He shrugged. “Whatever you want. I don’t approve of your choices, but every child should rebel against their parents at one point or another. I suppose if you want to go full mustache-twirling tyrant, you should embrace it. See about getting yourself a captive prince, a few worlds’ worth of flunkies to get in the way of any would-be rescuers, some novel power-ups and mechanics...”
“What is the axe for?”
“Hmm?” Discord looked about the chamber, which had developed far more torches as he’d been brainstorming. There was indeed a very prominent double-headed axe on the opposite side of the sphinx’s lounging pit. “Oh, right, narrative imperative. The monster does have a distressing tendency to lose, and if you hew to the script as much as you insist on, then that might not end well for you.”
“Actually, I rather like the idea of kidnapping a prince. Maybe tying him to a railroad track.” Catshepsut blinked and stopped stroking her mustache. “What happened to my whiskers? And what is a railroad?”
“A miserable pile of ironmongery. But enough of that, have a preference?” With a wave of his eagle talon, Discord summoned an enormous book that fluttered open, revealing picture after sultry picture of sapients in various fancy headgear and garments. Peppy, brassy music began playing from nowhere. “Are you looking for something with beaks? Hooves? Both? Neither? I perfected griffins a while back, so I can make one to order for you if you’re swinging that way, and from there hippogriffs should just be a matter of combining tried-and-true formulae in a delightfully novel twist.”
Catshepsut watched the pages fly past. She took in a sharp breath and jabbed a claw into the book just after it flipped past some green-maned and otherwise nearly bald ape-thing. She turned back a few pages and stopped at a blue pegasus stallion, kohl-eyed and wearing a serpent-headed crown. “Who is that? I cannot decide if he looks more handsome or delicious.”
“Tempted as I am to say ‘why not both,’” Discord said from behind her right ear, “I lack your taste in both senses of the word. Still, I’m entirely for going with your gut, or other organs as the case may be. That, my dear, is Prince Hisan, who is fortuitously enough the ruler of one of the villages you've been terrorizing lately.”
“I thought he seemed familiar. Should I—?”
“Never ask yourself whether you 'should' do something; that's the first step to the delusion of right and wrong. Besides, you’ve already taken their entire harvest because reasons. Why not go whole hog? Or pony, as the case may be.”
“I suppose.” Catshepsut slumped down to rest her chin between her paws, frowning in thought. “But how?”
Discord quirked an eyebrow, nearly making it fall off his head. “How? You just do it.”
“I want to make sure I do it properly. He is a prince.”
“All that means is that his head gets wet when it rains. Just find an excuse and swoop him off his hooves.” Discord hummed to himself and tapped his protruding fang. “Yes, I’m pretty sure that’s how that is supposed to go. In any case, we don’t need to go full dragon turtle, but I can at least pull some strings with an old college buddy. I tried to set him up with some demon lord once. Jubilee, something like that? Sad to say, it didn’t work out, but at least Smoozerino got custody of their spawn. It’s a win-win situation; the kid could use some work, and you could use a minion-slash-menacing substance.” He grinned and patted Catshepsut on the nose. “I’ll even throw in a slow, easily escapable death trap for my budding young mastermind.”
She smiled. “Thank you, Discord.”
“Don't mention it, my dear.” His grin widened. The sphinx told herself it was still warm. “Really, don't. I have a reputation to uphold.”
There is a place deep in the southern part of the continent where none dare go. Mighty Helm explorers took one look at the mad expanse and immediately turned around, swearing to Captain Oresdotter that between the jungles of the sun priests and the isle of the hippogriffs, there stretched only an impassable, storm-wracked sea. Far better, they felt, if that were true.
In that formless land, where up was left and down was strawberry, where destiny tangled and sanity melted, where one could pass backwards through the Gateway of Sundraprisha and abandon all form if one offered it the right flavor of cheesecake, what might be considered a daughter landed before what could very generously be deemed a father.
Discord, lounging on his hornéd throne, looked up from his copy of Chaos Wheneverly. "Well now, this is an unexpected surprise. The best kind, in my experience. To what do I owe the pleasure?"
"No pleasure, my ma— Discord." Catshepsut brought her head low, but hesitated before touching it to the ground once she got a good look at what she'd be touching. "I return to you in shame."
"Shame?" Discord scoffed, wadding up his paper with a sound like a squeaky toy. "What kind of cat are you? And what happened?"
Catshepsut squeezed her eyes closed, not least to block out the writhing surface. "I have been ousted from my rightful place in the ponies' southern sands by a pegasus far more brave and clever than I anticipated."
"A pegasus."
"Yes."
Discord brought the sphinx's head up with a talon, then held his hands apart. "About yea high, tiny wings, fluffier than average for ponies?"
"The same, yes."
"So not some mutated hulk of a winged horse that spits acid and could eat half of your glued-together sandcastle for lunch."
Catshepsut pointed behind him. "You mean like that one?"
Discord's neck telescoped out, allowing him to bend backwards and take in the passing fancy. "Precisely," he said once his body snapped back like elastic.
"Then no."
"I see." Discord's claws beat against his throne's armrest, making sounds like out-of-tune clarinets. "I enjoy a good bit of nonsense as much as the next embodiment of madness, but I must ask, how exactly did a little harmony drone one hundredth your size chase you off?"
"She solved my riddle and beat my challenge. I was oathbound to leave the kingdom forever."
Discord examined her with a magnifying glass. Then he began licking it. "There doesn't seem to be any sort of compulsion magic keeping you away from there. Why did you go along with it?"
"I gave my word," said the sphinx.
"Your word? Your word isn't worth the paper it's printed on! I'm surprised you didn't eat the little hero for her insolence." Discord leaned on an armrest. "Seriously, why go along with this?"
Catshepsut drew herself up to her full sitting height and glared down at her creator as much as she dared. "You ask 'why' of a sphinx?"
Discord smiled back. "Ah. That sort of thing. It's funny; I've never felt pride and pity at the same time quite like this." He chuckled and shook his head, "Very well, you go along with your personal madness; I'd be the worst sort of hypocrite if I didn't let you. Now there's just the matter of what to do with you."
"I..." Catshepsut gulped. "I came here assuming you would unmake me."
"Why, did you bring blackberry cheesecake?"
"I... Given my failure, I—"
"Failure is to be expected when I throw monsters at the wall to see what sticks. If I consigned everything that didn't go as I'd hoped to oblivion, I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you." Discord pulled a lever that hadn't been there a moment before. His throne leaned back, a footstool springing out of its front. "I tell you what; across the ocean, there's a country called Anugypt. I think you'll fit right in there. Plus there's an acquaintance of mine who could use help against a cruel dictator." A sheet of papyrus appeared before him. He adjusted a set of pince-nez, looked over the sheet, then rolled it up and began to smoke it. "Apparently I came by from the future with three enthralled pony foals or something; I wasn't really paying attention to the specifics. Point is, I'm sure Baast will appreciate the help."
The sphinx's mouth worked silently for a few moments. Finally, she bowed. "Thank you, Discord."
He returned it. Shallowly, but he dipped forward as surely as she did. "You're welcome, Catshepsut."
Discord watched the sphinx fly east for a time, collapsing punctuation marks providing some lovely fireworks to send her off. Then he looked north, stroking his beard. "If the ponies can send something like her packing, perhaps they're interesting enough to play with directly."