The New Gods

The next day there would be whispers.

“Did you hear the news? The princess found a draconequus in the woods yesterday!”

“A draqonequus, my plot! By sweet Aeon’s left teat, those things were meant to be extinct!”

But the princess, for once, had nothing to speak of at dinner that night. She barely ate, in fact, and the King and Queen passed concerned glances to one another with the salt. They put it down to exhaustion, and the princess was exhausted: Her first day interacting with her subjects was straining, not least because their constant looks and sounds of terror got to her quickly, or because her guards were so edgy with the vast honour of their tiny charge of responsibility that they were ready to overreact to every slight sound as a hint of possible danger to their princess.

Her sunset that evening was half-hearted. A dark, hollow feeling, unlike any she had felt before, had crept upon her heart.

Her handmaiden, a lovely young filly named Softhorn, had chattered away happily while she soaked and scrubbed the princess, about how she had felt just the same way when first meeting other foals when she was but a yearling, and how it was perfectly natural to feel a little put out after such a big new experience, and oh-my-goodness-wasn’t-it-exciting-you-discovered-a-species-in-those-old-woods-that-noone-knew-still-lived-there-weren’t-you-always-such-a-clever-one. Philomena flew over to nuzzle her sadly when she came to her room.

She ached all over as she stepped out onto that balcony, and didn’t feel up to her usual artwork. The sun slowly turned a dull and dirty orange as it slunk down against the horizon with an almost audible sigh. The sky turned a pale, sickly greenish, then yellowish, then sandy orange.

Across the city, the newest arrival to the orphanage sat at the window of his new attic space, licking the dregs from his bowl of thin, grey oats with his long pink tongue. He watched. The clouds slowly faded from dark pink to bruise purple. He wept.

For all the excitement the next day, the ponies of the capital would quickly forget their little monster.

The workers at the orphanage, so caring of their small foals, found the ugly new arrival to be feral.

He squirmed and kicked when they tried to bathe him, leaving a deep cut across the matron’s face with his sharp talons.

He chased the other foals and tackled them roughly when they ran away from him.

He bit the caretaker that tried to clean out the space in the eves where he had hoarded a pile of half-eaten fruit that was beginning to smell.

He violently crashed into the other Pegasus children when they enrolled him in a junior flying class to learn to fly properly.

He excelled only in language, learning the speech of his fuzzy carers quickly, but didn’t seem to understand how to fit his new words into a kind sentence to the other ponies, only communicating commands; such as yelling at the other foals to come here at once! when he wanted to join their games; and making up words and sentences to refer to groups of concepts that made no sense to the ponies.

Worst of all, the creature, which seemed instinctively to refer to itself as “Discord”, would laugh. When a filly fell over upon her face, he would rush over to her, but instead of helping her up or comforting her, he would stand awkwardly for a moment as if unsure what to do, and then laugh. He would stand over crying children and laugh, of all things!

Finally, when the matron went to aid a weeping colt in finding his lost rabbit, Discord was caught, looking fatter than usual, licking a sticky red liquid from his lion’s paw. After shielding the eyes of the traumatised child, the matron kicked her difficult charge onto the street, and was to hear no more of him, gladly forgetting the odd creature.

Of course, he hadn’t had a very hopeful start with making his way among the ponies.

“Now, please, subjects, do not cry out! We must not disturb the forest creatures, or we will not find anything that fits the description of this monster you speak of!” Celestia was getting desperate. She had thought it would be easy to find an animal sitting on some oddly-shaped branch and shine her light upon it to show the children that it was easy to mistake such a thing for a monster when one’s imagination was hyperactive with fear. She had read all about these wild woods and seen the illustrations, so where were the vines like mighty serpents, and trees like twisted towers? She could understand the children being afraid of even the small vines, but was thoroughly disappointed by the complete lack of monstrous ones. They had been searching for hours, now!

How strange, she thought, that the creature they described added up to something resembling a draqonequus! But then she laughed at herself. She was not dismissing anything as impossible, of course, but it was clear that these children had all seen completely different animals, and simply put them together when collating observations. This was most clear when they compared the size of the beast. Some children could have seen a dragon. One account sounded like an antelope stuck in a bush. Two accounts sounded like a disturbed wildcat had hissed at them, with its eyes glowing in the darkness. One child had clearly seen a smallish spider. The princess had read up well on this forest. But she had not as yet been able to convince the foals of any of these things.

Discord sat on a branch, watching as that shiny, shiny yellow orb crossed over the sky once more. The little white clouds scurried over the blue expanse in haste as the winds picked up to rock the draconequus into a light slumber. He dozed, and in his sleep he dreamt the strangest of dreams. The clouds were pink, the sky was green, and the rivers tasted like the dripping juice of wild fruits, sweet as anything. He was standing atop one of these clouds, and looking out over a wide, flat plain, which was covered in straight-lined shapes of vivid colours, rather than grass. A small, purple specimen of one of those velvet creatures wept on the ground before him, and something of her tears seemed so ironic to him that he simply laughed. Something was very off about this world, very wrong, but in this dream, he laughed. In this sleep, one ear twitched, and a small, light voice was carried to his ear with a word he had known before: “…monster…” He awoke, shaking, from his dream, as if it had shown him being eaten or pounced at by manticores. And there, below him, stood something wondrously, gloriously new.

Celestia sighed. She felt her sunrays begin to reach so that they touched a space of the world that lay just beyond the horizon. It was well past its zenith, and she was ready to call off the search and give the results of their monstrous description and no official sighting to the mages to help her collate a report to give to the villages tomorrow. She lifted her head and breathed in to announce this, when something, or two things, suddenly caught her eye: two enormous eyes, fiery red and yellow, glowed down at her from the darkness. Here was what had frightened the foals. “Ah!” she exclaimed. “Look here, my subjects!”

The fillies and colts, upon seeing the enormous eyes, shivered, and squeaked, trying not to squeal again after the princess had exasperatedly warned them not to do so one more time. The smallest, grey filly even grabbed Celestia’s Royal Tail, and attempted to hide behind this much smaller and more regal foal, a motion than won her a solid glare for the right-hand guard, and an embarrassed golden hoof of support on her shoulder from the princess herself. “Let us uncover this cause of your fear for and for all.”

She calmly cast her spell of light, showing the face of the eye’s owner up in vivid violet glow. Her eyes shot open. “OH.” She said. The foals screamed and bolted. The princess stood stock still, shocked, as her guards rushed past her, horns glowing, and dragged the offending creature down form the branch with their magic, pinning it to the ground. “Wh….” Stuttered the princess.

“What should we do with it?” cried the guard, rather dramatically, over his shoulder to the princess, about the petrified creature between his great hooves, a dagger hovering just above its shaking face.

“Wh… w…” stuttered the princess helplessly.

Seeing that the creature’s eyes were locked firmly upon their precious and beloved little leader, and not the dagger at all, the commander growled viciously. “You do not dare to look upon your princess with such disrespect, beast!” he cried. Same commander as earlier. He looked set to kill the monster, though it was barely any bigger than the princess herself.

“WAAAIIIT!!!”

This scream, extremely unroyal, came from the princess herself. She was but a child, after all. And she saw the same of her prisoner. The guard shook, fearing punishment from the little master.

Discord shook, but more than the fear surging through his body, he felt something new and enormous stirring deep inside his chest... a warmth… and a light.

“It is… just a child!” stated the princess.