Love Is...?by ambionChaptersFunReflectiveIntoxicatingInsanityFunThe desert sand was soft underhoof, while the sun above was harsh and absolute. The dunes stretched in every direction as an ocean of colour untouched by water, with windswept ripples and swirls all its own. Luna’s hooves sent little slides of sand in motion as she crested a dune. Celestia landed softly next to her, the last few sweeping strokes of her wings sending a blast of sand out into the still air. “Good timing sister,” Luna said as she unslung a sadle bag. “I admit I had entertained some small worry that you wouldn’t be able to attend. Or wouldn’t want to...?” Celestia scoffed. “And miss this? I’m not that uptight. Everything went well with your half of things, I take it?” “Naturally,” said Luna, giving the bag strapped to her side a hearty thump. “Everything we need is right here. And your end?” Celestia stretched with a deep bow. “Canterlot thinks we’re on sabbatical. A relaxing break with sunshine, peace and quiet.” Luna grinned, so Celestia added with a pout, “It’s not entirely a lie.” “Only mostly a lie,” Luna chuckled. “Peace and quiet would quite undermine the whole point of being here, don’t you think?” She batted her sister with a blue wing. Celestia took a haughty stance. “I’m in this for the academic interests.” “So you keep trying to tell me, not that I believe it for a second. Come now, let’s dig up this tomb already. And then bash mummies.” It started with the twinned glows of alicorn magic, a crackling line of sparks that sank into the quiet sand. Something shuddered through the ground, and a wind picked up, swirling in on itself with arcing bolts of magic zapping across it. The flurry rose, in height, in sound, sand content, until it was scooping up the desert by the tonne, lifting it in a storming fountain of which the two alicorns shared its eye. With a thunderclap and a flash the whole thing exploded, spreading the sand outwards in every direction for a thousand paces. Fine grains fell sparkling through the once again still and quiet air. Luna sneezed, brushed the particulate from herself hastily and rummaged through the bag. “Ah, yes. Here we be. The lost tomb of Tooty-Fruity the Uncommon. Oh Celestia, do look at the pictures on the door! Very exciting! Shall I shatter this timeless find to untold pieces so that we may begin the fun, or would you like to? Celestia shook sand from her wings as she approached the door. It was greatly exaggerated in size, even for an alicorn. Neither her nor Luna could actually read horsey-glyphics, but the skulls, spears, monsters and other pictographs of the like spoke on a very international level. The door, of the sort likely to hold untold horrors at bay, could easily have weighed several tonnes. Eons had added everything of mystery and majesty to its image and taken nothing from the granites strength. Prying it from its hinges took some small effort. Frowning with concentraion, Celestia levitated it gently to one side, laying the giant door neatly into the side of a dune. “We’re not vandals,” she explained with a smile. “It is an artifact after all.” Luna only huffed. “Spoilsport.” She could not tarnish her enthusiasm for long though, and as they left the world of light and heat behind she grew ever more excited. “Perhaps there’ll be bone wraiths!” she said hopefully. “Mummies go without saying, but bone wraiths add an element of speed and danger that I really find quite exhilerating. Or sphinx golems! Oh, sister, look at my shillelagh. Studded with moon-chaste silver no less for that little extra something.” The short club indeed shone with a slight silvery luminescence of its own, just barely visible against the light spells both alicorns had conjured. “Planning ahead,” Celestia said gravely, “that’s unlike you.” “They passed deeper into the necropolis, passing collapsed corridors and trivial dead-filled dead-ended antechambers along the way. “Well yes, I wanted to make sure this went off well. It’s been very long since we went raiding together.” “An age,” Celestia agreed. “Do you have an extra one of those, by any chance?” Luna beamed. Not literally, which would have been magical and explosive, but the expression, which can have almost the same effect. “That I do, which I had crafted knowing you’d ask just that!” One in blue magic, the other in white, the twinned beat-sticks hovered like vanguards ahead of the alicorns. “Let’s keep score!” “Luna, no, I don’t want to.” “Oh surely you do!” Luna sidled up to her sister. “Or are you hesitant, thinking you are going to lose? Which you will, certainly.” Celestia halted and gave her coy sister an eyebrow-envigorated expression of incredulous disbelief. “Certainly?” “Of course,” Luna flaunted. She lunged around a corner ready, finding a complete lack of anything remotely eldritch. Mildly dissapointed, she settled down a tad. “Try to find a trap or some such thing. I was hoping we’d have at least had to dodge poison darts or leap spike traps by now.” “Patience,” Celestia chided affectionatey. “I’m lead to understand this tomb is extensive. We could be here all day, or even get lost. There could be all manner of monsters in here with us. Maybe they’re surrounding us even now, cutting us off from all hope of escape.” “You know just the things to say to cheer me up. I have missed our little adventures.” Luna hugged Celestia. As she did so a stone underhoof shuddered and sank with horrible groaning slowness. In the indeterminate distance in an indetermanite direction, the low groan of something evil and ghastly rose. “So it begins,” said Celestia, smiling. “And fine, we’ll keep score. What’s the prize?” she asked, in a louder voice now because unspeakable terrors from beyond the craven grave were closing in. “How about first dibs on the loot?” Luna shouted over the horrid din. “Fine by me!” Celestia sidestepped a badly sung glaive, bashing a mummy’s head clear off. “First point to me!” she cried. Luna dove headlong into the press of ancient dried flesh and bandages, cackling gleefully as she wrought havic on their rank smelling rank and file. “Oh, oh! There’s my bone wraith! Dibs!” Luna went lunging after the monstrous spectre. “I love it when we go clubbing!” ReflectiveWhitetail Wood could boast in addition to its well known running track a series of meandering trails to walk. The area was much given to breezes and the gentle swaying of stately deciduous trees while the occasional conifer sprinkled throught added a dash of crisp fragrance to the air. The trails had no given name, nor any particular course to be adhered to. Rather, the winding series of pathways intersected, doubled around, and looped upon themselves with all the self-evident pleasure and aimlessness of a pegasus in flight. All throughout the boughs of trees makde for an ever shifting kaleodoscope of green and blue, of yellow and white, of light and shade. Rainbow Dash was aware of the trails. Once a promising slalom course for her training, quickly abandoned in the face of compliants for upsetting the atmosphere of this peaceful place. Crashing into ponies as well as trees had not helped matters any, and Rainbow Dash had been quick to forego the potential here for better pasture. Even now, a faint, acute and lingering embarrasment stirred in her whenever these walkers’ trails of Whitetail Wood were brought up in her mind, leading her to somewhat unconsciously avoid them. As such, she had never actually walked them as intended. And Rainbow Dash never walked where she could run, and never ran where she could fly. Even at that, she flew always faster, the fastest she could go in her ongoing battle to push back the edges of talent and possibility. But today she walked. A strange mood had taken her from the very instant of waking and had been omnipresent in her every thought and action since. Not unpleasent, not anxious, but unusual. Normally one to tear through breakfast like an obstacle, today she ate it in contemplative slowness, as if the assorted letters in her highly literate cereal might spell out to her some deep wisdom if she could but decipher their seeming and obviously feigned randomness. More vowels would have helped, but she was not so eccentric as to go fishing them from the box. She might instead have picked up a book and so wiled away the morning until her usual spirits reasserted themselves, but the high-flying adventures of that arch archeologist Daring Doo - as loved as ever - were quickly set aside after just a few pages. “Tank,” she said as she brought the tortoise his food, “hi.” He smiled slow, and blinked slow. Dipped, chewed, and swallowed slow. Dash watched with absolute and uncharacteristic focus. Slow, that word being such anathema to her nature, more vile an insult and offensive a slander Dash could not imagine, yet that is what she felt today, what this unusual mood was bringing out in her. And it did not feel bad, she was quietly surprised to realize. Surely, if it had been a matter of having to be slow she would have reacted in a most volatile manner, zipping about in a raging bid to prove to everyone and everything otherwise. But the simple matter was she didn’t have anywhere she was needed today. She could choose to be slow. It feeling a good idea, she took her pet for a walk. Not a flight, but a bona fide easygoing walk. At his pace. The trails that to her usual self were slightly repulsive in this mood and thoughtfulness became attractive without themselves having changed in any fashion at all, as if some internal magnet of Dash’s had been switched in its polarity temporarily so that all else was as it was not. Tank, his expression one of pleased surprise, set out at a brisk and determined pace over the well treaded path. After a few seconds Dash took a step and caught him up. “Oh look,” she said, “there’s a bee.” That such a heavy, bulbous thing could fly at all was impressive in its own right, and she tracked its fitful, erratic motions with an expert's eye. “Kind of like Bulky Biceps, don’t you think?” The unwitting object of Rainbow Dash’s observation settled on a wild rose. Unlike the romanticised and much cultivated variety this was more modest in its design, more humble in its scale and more practical in its application. The slim flower bent and bowed as it struggled to accomdate the sudden guest, whom wasted no time in rooting about for nectar and pollen upon which it gorged with everything of delight and nothing of civil manners. “Definetly him,” said Dash. “Oh, there he goes now.” After a pause and a bee’s departure, Tank ate the flower. Three full-mouthed chewing motions and a swallow later he resumed his intrepid adventure onwards. After some minutes of peaceful woodland quiet, they rounded the first corner together. Dash occupied herself with watching the scenery. A tree was so much more than a tree, a leaf so much more than a leaf. And Tank was definetly so much more than a tortoise. The way his shell rocked side to side, the creaking stretch of each leg and the slow manner in which it took his weight so that the next limb in procession might swing forwards; Rainbow Dash wondered what he might be looking at, what aspects of detail one discovered in slowness that, new to her, were utterly familiar and sagely in him. All this she took, thought and feeling and inclination, compounded it within her head and compressed it into her mouth as a deeply moving utterance: “Huh.” She tried again. “You know,” she hazarded, “going slow ain’t all that bad. It’s different, yeah, not really what I’d normally do, but...” Dash stopped and turned to the tortoise. She smiled. Tank smiled too, albeit slowly. “It has its good points.” IntoxicatingWith a poorly thought out sweep of her holey hoof, Chrysalis knocked over the bottle. It spilled a few sticky purple drops onto the floor amidst other empties, but that was alright because she had others as yet undrunk. “Damn,” she slurred. Then she shrugged, the motion making her precariously unbalanced until she toppled back onto the chaise lounge. “Ohh...” Love Poison had been a bit of a mixed blessing once discovered by the changelings. In the face of absolute defeat it was a passable and necessary substitue for the genuine article of their particular nourishment, albeit one of of the lowest calibre. Queen Chrysalis, whom bore the responsibility of all that had transpired and whom could not beat herself up over this more literally if given a club with which to do so had fallen rather hard into the bottle. In short, she was drunk. Again. A dutiful and somewhat skittish little ‘ling whose name had momentarily eluded her but which she could definetly recall at any time was attending upon her, a duty which entailed three things: to prop up her pillows, to prop up her bruised ego, and to pop open the cork-sealed bottles. The Queen’s hooves grabbed at the changeling’s shoulders and pulled her about. “This terrible is stuff,” she said solemnly. “It’s so bitter.” Such admonitions aside, the hapless changeling knew enough to promptly uncork the next draught for her Queen. “Lookit me,” said Chrysalis. “Lookat dis. But ‘m good. ‘M good. ‘Cause ya know what, you know what? I din wanna be that hussy anyway. There! I ‘aid it, she’s a hussy!” This she exclaimed with a tactless flail of legs which scattered yet more empty bottles of Poison. “Din’t want ‘m anyway,” Chrysalis muttered. “Only innit for the power. Din’t want ‘m.” After a few wobbly tries, The Queen of the Changelings managed to get the neck of the bottle stuck through one of the holes in her hoof. Secured, if unintionally managed and precariously so, she drank from it thusly in a series of gulps. This present bottle still mostly full, Chrysalis shook it free in a sudden bout of activity and flung it out a nearby window. Something large and expensive sounding in the courtyard below smashed, and a cat screeched. She wrapped a hoof around her attendant and pulled her tightly against herself. “You see, don’tcha? I’m Queen! I’m Queen... All, wus that thing...thinkingy. Making plans, you know.” The poor substitute doll was held up at hooves length like a puppy. Chrysalis’ spinning eyes struggled to focus on the changeling’s. “I was gonna dump him, I swear,” she said with a solemnenity not in anyway whatsoever spoiled by a rather wretched, gutwracked burp. The hug was resumed with lung-crushing earnest. “He was sweet. Shing. Shiiing...Shining!” Chrysalis pouted and her eyes became watery. “He was sweet. And not just brain...spell...food...thing...sweet, you know. You know,” here her hooves struggled to encapsulate a bold idea in a mind presently fizzling and mushy, “nice. Nice.” She sighed the word with wistful pleasure. Then she shook her head firmly. “But I don’t love him,” she slurred severly. “Don’t. I don’t. It’s ridiceelous!” Chrysalis blinked and gathered her mental prowess. “Ri-dic-u-lous,” she said with a smack of her lips. Then she slumped. “Do you think he could’ve loved me?” she asked, sinking lower into the couch, the mildly terrified changeling struggling to not asyphxiate in her new as squeezy-pillow. “Me-me, not her-me? I wouldn’t have kept him brained wash, you know.” Chrysalis burst into sobs. Great blubbering, nose honking, coughing sobs. “She stole him from me!” she cried. “I brain washed him first and she stoled him back! And they esploxded! It’s not fair, it’s not fair! I hate him!” Merficully, the pillow Chrysalis buried her head into and blew her nose against was an actual pillow, and not the captive changeling whom would have been traumatised beyond recovery by the experience. “I hate him,” Chrysalis murmurred once her fitful weeping had exhausted itself. “I don’t love him, I hate him,” she repeated, as if to convince herself to a truth in this that wasn’t there. The Queen of the changelings scrabbled to stand. “I’ma, I’ma go and, I’ll go and I’ll make him...” she managed two wobbling steps before stumbling and tumbling out the window. There was a whoomph of impact, the sound of something even more expensive breaking, and an angrier cat screech. “Ow...” InsanityLet us turn our gaze to Discord, draconequus ascendant. Master of trickery, doctor of diabolical disruption, snappy dresser. He breaks the laws of reality like other people jay-walk, and he walks on the clearly marked do-not-walk grass of spacetime, littering all he pleases and never getting fined for it. Domesticisty, hmm...Domesticord, perhaps? Has the beast of chaos been tamed? Has the patron saint of fun had his mix tapes confiscated at last? Perhaps, or perhaps not. Who could- “Screwball.” -could truly comprehend the workings of such a mind, and would not to do so plunge one self- “Screwball. Now come on.” -one self into eldritch union with the seething madness therein? “Screwball, really, enough with the monologuing.” Discord tapped his chin with some regard. “Admittantly the deep baritone voice was unexpected. Good projection.” Discord pouted. “It’s more of a simmering madness anyway. Very fondue like, I’ll have you know.” Screwball stopped staring at words that weren’t there when at the same time they were the only thing there when nothing else was and attempted to focus her dizzily spiraling eyes on the more mundane present in time to get a pat on the head. “Snappy dresser, though? You little flatterer, you. Now come along, let me show you this grand design.” Quick to joy and eager to please, the utterly devoted, utterly I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-butterly-insane chaos pony that is Screwball hovered along behind her master in a most floaty manner. She was, by taciturn law, responsibility, sensibility and other such boring things not supposed to be his. But the law has a way of quietly shuffling around abnormalities like sweet little Screwy, who wouldn’t have noticed it passing her by anyway. Though possibly it’s shoe laces, which have that sort of bowling alley neon green brightness to them, and where do you even get laces like that outside of bowling alleys? Presently the two chaos beings were stalking the halls of Canterlot Castle. In fact they were something between residents and guests, airily and pompously marching about the place like they owned it, but when one is a chaos being ‘stalking the halls’ is a default stereotyping that is not easy to throw off. It’s not just trope-y, it’s entropy. Discord was in a deviously delighted mood, more so than usual because today was the day that Celestia was returning from a week long trade summit with the griffons. He could of course have pestered her at any time he wished but that would have been unfairly fair to himself, and Discord was nothing if not fairly unfair. Acting within arbitrary, hypocritical and pointless bounds gave him ever so pleasent a shiver, don’t you know. “Don’t ewe know their sheep?” hazarded Screwball uncertaintly. The words behind the world could be ever so distracting, and worst still was that her watching them caused them to change, and that changed her, which changed them in turn, looping and looping infinitteeellllyyyyyy <> <> . .. ... . .. ... <> <> yyyyllllleeeettinifini gnipool...<> looping...a lot. Discord paused, turned also to stare and sighed. Then everything shook as he gave the side of the perceived narrative a thump with his paw. “There, back on track. Really Screwy, you have to be more careful about doing that! Oh who am I kidding? I was a young little reality warper once too. Seeing you break the world sends my timeless heart a-flutter. But, my little minion, we have more mundane concerns ahead!” Screwy blinked. “Celestia?” “That’s right! Now, look here, what do you see at this door? And if you mention the narrative again, charming as it is, I shall have to make sure your ice cream is swirled counter-coriolis, am I understood?” Properly chastised, Screwball nodded. “Not at all,” she said in absolute sincerity. “It’s a door,” she guessed. Doors were often known to be door shape. “Yes it is, and do you know which door this one just so happens to be?” Screwball screwed up with screwy thought. Coherency for her was like trying to use a slinky as a ruler. Straight lines of obvious connection were so hard... “The door that’s always open?” Discord spluttered. “What? No! It’s Celestia’s door for heavens’ sake! Her chamber doors!” A wave of his talon made the intervening matter transluscent. “Now there, on the frame, do you see what I’ve placed?” Screwball hesitated, not because she couldn’t perceive what the object in question was, but because even by their non-sense-making standards this made no nonsense. “A bucket of whitewash?” she said incredulously. “Yes!” cheered Discord like a warlord who has just taken the field in triumph. “A perfectly ordinary bucket of perfectly ordinary whitewash, balanced with perfectly ordinary, and might I add perfectly boring, physical laws.” He held up his minion and stared her in the eye, his own gone huge and wide, as if he beheld the everything beyond infinite. “It is the perfect prank,” he said in a voice of rapture. A second wave of his talon and the nude matter was once more made modest and opaque. “It is a trick to play upon my little Celestia that makes no sense whatsoever. None at all! Not even nonsense! Beyond random, beyond pointless, inane in the utmost, insane in the extreme!” Discord twirled Screwy in a ballet for joy. “Oh, to think this could be one that finally warps her precious little sanity and brings her to the fun side of the farce! I am positively giddy, my minion!” “Giddy-up!” cheered on the chaos pony. Discord gasped. “Quick, hide! here she comes, exhausted to the utmost, frustrated to the last, teetering on the brink of frayed-hair meltdown at the end of her worst week in years! Glorious!” the lord of chaos squee’d shamelessly before diving invisibly under the sunlight as it shone on the marble floor. Indeed Celestia was all such things as Discord had declared. The trade delegation was of the worst sort, intractable egos and irreconcilable pettiness and diplomacy of the most assinine calibre. The alicorn dragged herself with the liveliness of a zombie and the bouncy demanour of a black hole’s event horizon. Her eyes were red, her mane was in tatters, her coat marred with sleeplessness and blood-caffeine content probably post-critical. “Bath.” the Scarelestia growled with animalistic primevality. “Sleep.” Discord watched all this attentively from his hiding place on the other side of the reflection. She was twenty paces away. Ten now. Five, two, one. The door was swinging open... He uncoiled and sprung with massless, lightless, soundless severity, slipping ghostily through the door frame itself, catching the bucket before it could fall. Thus holding it, Celestia passed beneath the draconequus, ignorant and unmolested as she went grumbling to her rest. Screwball stepped politely back into casual existence. “I have no idea what’s going on!” she proclaimed excitedly, and decided that these were perfectly good grounds for a standing ovation. Or at least she again was peeking at the narrative, and decided to go for it all the same. “A double triple miple stiple bluff!” she cheered, diamonds being flung from her left hoof and roses from her right while an unseen crowd applauded Discord’s performance. His mood for antics seemed gone, however, and with a distracted snap of a claw Screwball’s little presentation ceased. He watched for a moment, seeing how Celestia dropped her weary self into a steaming bath and all but melted in the hot waters. And he felt...glad. Then Discord turned about-heel and stalked away through halls to think, and this was proper melancholic hall-stalking, because for once he worried if he had not devised a trick so grand as to snap upon himself its foolery. But again he thought of Celestia finding comfort in her baths, and again he felt...glad. And to think the same thing twice, and get the same meaning of it, the same import? HIM? That was insanity... “Come along, Screwball,” he said with less gung-ho than his norm, “let’s go troll Luna for a while.” “What about Celestia?” “No, she’s fine just the way she is. She’s had enough this week.” Screwy, whom it bears repeating mention is stark raving mad, didn’t make any cohesive sense of this, and forgot any such considerations soon after because the narrative told her to. Luna, however, did not.
FunThe desert sand was soft underhoof, while the sun above was harsh and absolute. The dunes stretched in every direction as an ocean of colour untouched by water, with windswept ripples and swirls all its own. Luna’s hooves sent little slides of sand in motion as she crested a dune. Celestia landed softly next to her, the last few sweeping strokes of her wings sending a blast of sand out into the still air. “Good timing sister,” Luna said as she unslung a sadle bag. “I admit I had entertained some small worry that you wouldn’t be able to attend. Or wouldn’t want to...?” Celestia scoffed. “And miss this? I’m not that uptight. Everything went well with your half of things, I take it?” “Naturally,” said Luna, giving the bag strapped to her side a hearty thump. “Everything we need is right here. And your end?” Celestia stretched with a deep bow. “Canterlot thinks we’re on sabbatical. A relaxing break with sunshine, peace and quiet.” Luna grinned, so Celestia added with a pout, “It’s not entirely a lie.” “Only mostly a lie,” Luna chuckled. “Peace and quiet would quite undermine the whole point of being here, don’t you think?” She batted her sister with a blue wing. Celestia took a haughty stance. “I’m in this for the academic interests.” “So you keep trying to tell me, not that I believe it for a second. Come now, let’s dig up this tomb already. And then bash mummies.” It started with the twinned glows of alicorn magic, a crackling line of sparks that sank into the quiet sand. Something shuddered through the ground, and a wind picked up, swirling in on itself with arcing bolts of magic zapping across it. The flurry rose, in height, in sound, sand content, until it was scooping up the desert by the tonne, lifting it in a storming fountain of which the two alicorns shared its eye. With a thunderclap and a flash the whole thing exploded, spreading the sand outwards in every direction for a thousand paces. Fine grains fell sparkling through the once again still and quiet air. Luna sneezed, brushed the particulate from herself hastily and rummaged through the bag. “Ah, yes. Here we be. The lost tomb of Tooty-Fruity the Uncommon. Oh Celestia, do look at the pictures on the door! Very exciting! Shall I shatter this timeless find to untold pieces so that we may begin the fun, or would you like to? Celestia shook sand from her wings as she approached the door. It was greatly exaggerated in size, even for an alicorn. Neither her nor Luna could actually read horsey-glyphics, but the skulls, spears, monsters and other pictographs of the like spoke on a very international level. The door, of the sort likely to hold untold horrors at bay, could easily have weighed several tonnes. Eons had added everything of mystery and majesty to its image and taken nothing from the granites strength. Prying it from its hinges took some small effort. Frowning with concentraion, Celestia levitated it gently to one side, laying the giant door neatly into the side of a dune. “We’re not vandals,” she explained with a smile. “It is an artifact after all.” Luna only huffed. “Spoilsport.” She could not tarnish her enthusiasm for long though, and as they left the world of light and heat behind she grew ever more excited. “Perhaps there’ll be bone wraiths!” she said hopefully. “Mummies go without saying, but bone wraiths add an element of speed and danger that I really find quite exhilerating. Or sphinx golems! Oh, sister, look at my shillelagh. Studded with moon-chaste silver no less for that little extra something.” The short club indeed shone with a slight silvery luminescence of its own, just barely visible against the light spells both alicorns had conjured. “Planning ahead,” Celestia said gravely, “that’s unlike you.” “They passed deeper into the necropolis, passing collapsed corridors and trivial dead-filled dead-ended antechambers along the way. “Well yes, I wanted to make sure this went off well. It’s been very long since we went raiding together.” “An age,” Celestia agreed. “Do you have an extra one of those, by any chance?” Luna beamed. Not literally, which would have been magical and explosive, but the expression, which can have almost the same effect. “That I do, which I had crafted knowing you’d ask just that!” One in blue magic, the other in white, the twinned beat-sticks hovered like vanguards ahead of the alicorns. “Let’s keep score!” “Luna, no, I don’t want to.” “Oh surely you do!” Luna sidled up to her sister. “Or are you hesitant, thinking you are going to lose? Which you will, certainly.” Celestia halted and gave her coy sister an eyebrow-envigorated expression of incredulous disbelief. “Certainly?” “Of course,” Luna flaunted. She lunged around a corner ready, finding a complete lack of anything remotely eldritch. Mildly dissapointed, she settled down a tad. “Try to find a trap or some such thing. I was hoping we’d have at least had to dodge poison darts or leap spike traps by now.” “Patience,” Celestia chided affectionatey. “I’m lead to understand this tomb is extensive. We could be here all day, or even get lost. There could be all manner of monsters in here with us. Maybe they’re surrounding us even now, cutting us off from all hope of escape.” “You know just the things to say to cheer me up. I have missed our little adventures.” Luna hugged Celestia. As she did so a stone underhoof shuddered and sank with horrible groaning slowness. In the indeterminate distance in an indetermanite direction, the low groan of something evil and ghastly rose. “So it begins,” said Celestia, smiling. “And fine, we’ll keep score. What’s the prize?” she asked, in a louder voice now because unspeakable terrors from beyond the craven grave were closing in. “How about first dibs on the loot?” Luna shouted over the horrid din. “Fine by me!” Celestia sidestepped a badly sung glaive, bashing a mummy’s head clear off. “First point to me!” she cried. Luna dove headlong into the press of ancient dried flesh and bandages, cackling gleefully as she wrought havic on their rank smelling rank and file. “Oh, oh! There’s my bone wraith! Dibs!” Luna went lunging after the monstrous spectre. “I love it when we go clubbing!”
ReflectiveWhitetail Wood could boast in addition to its well known running track a series of meandering trails to walk. The area was much given to breezes and the gentle swaying of stately deciduous trees while the occasional conifer sprinkled throught added a dash of crisp fragrance to the air. The trails had no given name, nor any particular course to be adhered to. Rather, the winding series of pathways intersected, doubled around, and looped upon themselves with all the self-evident pleasure and aimlessness of a pegasus in flight. All throughout the boughs of trees makde for an ever shifting kaleodoscope of green and blue, of yellow and white, of light and shade. Rainbow Dash was aware of the trails. Once a promising slalom course for her training, quickly abandoned in the face of compliants for upsetting the atmosphere of this peaceful place. Crashing into ponies as well as trees had not helped matters any, and Rainbow Dash had been quick to forego the potential here for better pasture. Even now, a faint, acute and lingering embarrasment stirred in her whenever these walkers’ trails of Whitetail Wood were brought up in her mind, leading her to somewhat unconsciously avoid them. As such, she had never actually walked them as intended. And Rainbow Dash never walked where she could run, and never ran where she could fly. Even at that, she flew always faster, the fastest she could go in her ongoing battle to push back the edges of talent and possibility. But today she walked. A strange mood had taken her from the very instant of waking and had been omnipresent in her every thought and action since. Not unpleasent, not anxious, but unusual. Normally one to tear through breakfast like an obstacle, today she ate it in contemplative slowness, as if the assorted letters in her highly literate cereal might spell out to her some deep wisdom if she could but decipher their seeming and obviously feigned randomness. More vowels would have helped, but she was not so eccentric as to go fishing them from the box. She might instead have picked up a book and so wiled away the morning until her usual spirits reasserted themselves, but the high-flying adventures of that arch archeologist Daring Doo - as loved as ever - were quickly set aside after just a few pages. “Tank,” she said as she brought the tortoise his food, “hi.” He smiled slow, and blinked slow. Dipped, chewed, and swallowed slow. Dash watched with absolute and uncharacteristic focus. Slow, that word being such anathema to her nature, more vile an insult and offensive a slander Dash could not imagine, yet that is what she felt today, what this unusual mood was bringing out in her. And it did not feel bad, she was quietly surprised to realize. Surely, if it had been a matter of having to be slow she would have reacted in a most volatile manner, zipping about in a raging bid to prove to everyone and everything otherwise. But the simple matter was she didn’t have anywhere she was needed today. She could choose to be slow. It feeling a good idea, she took her pet for a walk. Not a flight, but a bona fide easygoing walk. At his pace. The trails that to her usual self were slightly repulsive in this mood and thoughtfulness became attractive without themselves having changed in any fashion at all, as if some internal magnet of Dash’s had been switched in its polarity temporarily so that all else was as it was not. Tank, his expression one of pleased surprise, set out at a brisk and determined pace over the well treaded path. After a few seconds Dash took a step and caught him up. “Oh look,” she said, “there’s a bee.” That such a heavy, bulbous thing could fly at all was impressive in its own right, and she tracked its fitful, erratic motions with an expert's eye. “Kind of like Bulky Biceps, don’t you think?” The unwitting object of Rainbow Dash’s observation settled on a wild rose. Unlike the romanticised and much cultivated variety this was more modest in its design, more humble in its scale and more practical in its application. The slim flower bent and bowed as it struggled to accomdate the sudden guest, whom wasted no time in rooting about for nectar and pollen upon which it gorged with everything of delight and nothing of civil manners. “Definetly him,” said Dash. “Oh, there he goes now.” After a pause and a bee’s departure, Tank ate the flower. Three full-mouthed chewing motions and a swallow later he resumed his intrepid adventure onwards. After some minutes of peaceful woodland quiet, they rounded the first corner together. Dash occupied herself with watching the scenery. A tree was so much more than a tree, a leaf so much more than a leaf. And Tank was definetly so much more than a tortoise. The way his shell rocked side to side, the creaking stretch of each leg and the slow manner in which it took his weight so that the next limb in procession might swing forwards; Rainbow Dash wondered what he might be looking at, what aspects of detail one discovered in slowness that, new to her, were utterly familiar and sagely in him. All this she took, thought and feeling and inclination, compounded it within her head and compressed it into her mouth as a deeply moving utterance: “Huh.” She tried again. “You know,” she hazarded, “going slow ain’t all that bad. It’s different, yeah, not really what I’d normally do, but...” Dash stopped and turned to the tortoise. She smiled. Tank smiled too, albeit slowly. “It has its good points.”
IntoxicatingWith a poorly thought out sweep of her holey hoof, Chrysalis knocked over the bottle. It spilled a few sticky purple drops onto the floor amidst other empties, but that was alright because she had others as yet undrunk. “Damn,” she slurred. Then she shrugged, the motion making her precariously unbalanced until she toppled back onto the chaise lounge. “Ohh...” Love Poison had been a bit of a mixed blessing once discovered by the changelings. In the face of absolute defeat it was a passable and necessary substitue for the genuine article of their particular nourishment, albeit one of of the lowest calibre. Queen Chrysalis, whom bore the responsibility of all that had transpired and whom could not beat herself up over this more literally if given a club with which to do so had fallen rather hard into the bottle. In short, she was drunk. Again. A dutiful and somewhat skittish little ‘ling whose name had momentarily eluded her but which she could definetly recall at any time was attending upon her, a duty which entailed three things: to prop up her pillows, to prop up her bruised ego, and to pop open the cork-sealed bottles. The Queen’s hooves grabbed at the changeling’s shoulders and pulled her about. “This terrible is stuff,” she said solemnly. “It’s so bitter.” Such admonitions aside, the hapless changeling knew enough to promptly uncork the next draught for her Queen. “Lookit me,” said Chrysalis. “Lookat dis. But ‘m good. ‘M good. ‘Cause ya know what, you know what? I din wanna be that hussy anyway. There! I ‘aid it, she’s a hussy!” This she exclaimed with a tactless flail of legs which scattered yet more empty bottles of Poison. “Din’t want ‘m anyway,” Chrysalis muttered. “Only innit for the power. Din’t want ‘m.” After a few wobbly tries, The Queen of the Changelings managed to get the neck of the bottle stuck through one of the holes in her hoof. Secured, if unintionally managed and precariously so, she drank from it thusly in a series of gulps. This present bottle still mostly full, Chrysalis shook it free in a sudden bout of activity and flung it out a nearby window. Something large and expensive sounding in the courtyard below smashed, and a cat screeched. She wrapped a hoof around her attendant and pulled her tightly against herself. “You see, don’tcha? I’m Queen! I’m Queen... All, wus that thing...thinkingy. Making plans, you know.” The poor substitute doll was held up at hooves length like a puppy. Chrysalis’ spinning eyes struggled to focus on the changeling’s. “I was gonna dump him, I swear,” she said with a solemnenity not in anyway whatsoever spoiled by a rather wretched, gutwracked burp. The hug was resumed with lung-crushing earnest. “He was sweet. Shing. Shiiing...Shining!” Chrysalis pouted and her eyes became watery. “He was sweet. And not just brain...spell...food...thing...sweet, you know. You know,” here her hooves struggled to encapsulate a bold idea in a mind presently fizzling and mushy, “nice. Nice.” She sighed the word with wistful pleasure. Then she shook her head firmly. “But I don’t love him,” she slurred severly. “Don’t. I don’t. It’s ridiceelous!” Chrysalis blinked and gathered her mental prowess. “Ri-dic-u-lous,” she said with a smack of her lips. Then she slumped. “Do you think he could’ve loved me?” she asked, sinking lower into the couch, the mildly terrified changeling struggling to not asyphxiate in her new as squeezy-pillow. “Me-me, not her-me? I wouldn’t have kept him brained wash, you know.” Chrysalis burst into sobs. Great blubbering, nose honking, coughing sobs. “She stole him from me!” she cried. “I brain washed him first and she stoled him back! And they esploxded! It’s not fair, it’s not fair! I hate him!” Merficully, the pillow Chrysalis buried her head into and blew her nose against was an actual pillow, and not the captive changeling whom would have been traumatised beyond recovery by the experience. “I hate him,” Chrysalis murmurred once her fitful weeping had exhausted itself. “I don’t love him, I hate him,” she repeated, as if to convince herself to a truth in this that wasn’t there. The Queen of the changelings scrabbled to stand. “I’ma, I’ma go and, I’ll go and I’ll make him...” she managed two wobbling steps before stumbling and tumbling out the window. There was a whoomph of impact, the sound of something even more expensive breaking, and an angrier cat screech. “Ow...”
InsanityLet us turn our gaze to Discord, draconequus ascendant. Master of trickery, doctor of diabolical disruption, snappy dresser. He breaks the laws of reality like other people jay-walk, and he walks on the clearly marked do-not-walk grass of spacetime, littering all he pleases and never getting fined for it. Domesticisty, hmm...Domesticord, perhaps? Has the beast of chaos been tamed? Has the patron saint of fun had his mix tapes confiscated at last? Perhaps, or perhaps not. Who could- “Screwball.” -could truly comprehend the workings of such a mind, and would not to do so plunge one self- “Screwball. Now come on.” -one self into eldritch union with the seething madness therein? “Screwball, really, enough with the monologuing.” Discord tapped his chin with some regard. “Admittantly the deep baritone voice was unexpected. Good projection.” Discord pouted. “It’s more of a simmering madness anyway. Very fondue like, I’ll have you know.” Screwball stopped staring at words that weren’t there when at the same time they were the only thing there when nothing else was and attempted to focus her dizzily spiraling eyes on the more mundane present in time to get a pat on the head. “Snappy dresser, though? You little flatterer, you. Now come along, let me show you this grand design.” Quick to joy and eager to please, the utterly devoted, utterly I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-butterly-insane chaos pony that is Screwball hovered along behind her master in a most floaty manner. She was, by taciturn law, responsibility, sensibility and other such boring things not supposed to be his. But the law has a way of quietly shuffling around abnormalities like sweet little Screwy, who wouldn’t have noticed it passing her by anyway. Though possibly it’s shoe laces, which have that sort of bowling alley neon green brightness to them, and where do you even get laces like that outside of bowling alleys? Presently the two chaos beings were stalking the halls of Canterlot Castle. In fact they were something between residents and guests, airily and pompously marching about the place like they owned it, but when one is a chaos being ‘stalking the halls’ is a default stereotyping that is not easy to throw off. It’s not just trope-y, it’s entropy. Discord was in a deviously delighted mood, more so than usual because today was the day that Celestia was returning from a week long trade summit with the griffons. He could of course have pestered her at any time he wished but that would have been unfairly fair to himself, and Discord was nothing if not fairly unfair. Acting within arbitrary, hypocritical and pointless bounds gave him ever so pleasent a shiver, don’t you know. “Don’t ewe know their sheep?” hazarded Screwball uncertaintly. The words behind the world could be ever so distracting, and worst still was that her watching them caused them to change, and that changed her, which changed them in turn, looping and looping infinitteeellllyyyyyy <> <> . .. ... . .. ... <> <> yyyyllllleeeettinifini gnipool...<> looping...a lot. Discord paused, turned also to stare and sighed. Then everything shook as he gave the side of the perceived narrative a thump with his paw. “There, back on track. Really Screwy, you have to be more careful about doing that! Oh who am I kidding? I was a young little reality warper once too. Seeing you break the world sends my timeless heart a-flutter. But, my little minion, we have more mundane concerns ahead!” Screwy blinked. “Celestia?” “That’s right! Now, look here, what do you see at this door? And if you mention the narrative again, charming as it is, I shall have to make sure your ice cream is swirled counter-coriolis, am I understood?” Properly chastised, Screwball nodded. “Not at all,” she said in absolute sincerity. “It’s a door,” she guessed. Doors were often known to be door shape. “Yes it is, and do you know which door this one just so happens to be?” Screwball screwed up with screwy thought. Coherency for her was like trying to use a slinky as a ruler. Straight lines of obvious connection were so hard... “The door that’s always open?” Discord spluttered. “What? No! It’s Celestia’s door for heavens’ sake! Her chamber doors!” A wave of his talon made the intervening matter transluscent. “Now there, on the frame, do you see what I’ve placed?” Screwball hesitated, not because she couldn’t perceive what the object in question was, but because even by their non-sense-making standards this made no nonsense. “A bucket of whitewash?” she said incredulously. “Yes!” cheered Discord like a warlord who has just taken the field in triumph. “A perfectly ordinary bucket of perfectly ordinary whitewash, balanced with perfectly ordinary, and might I add perfectly boring, physical laws.” He held up his minion and stared her in the eye, his own gone huge and wide, as if he beheld the everything beyond infinite. “It is the perfect prank,” he said in a voice of rapture. A second wave of his talon and the nude matter was once more made modest and opaque. “It is a trick to play upon my little Celestia that makes no sense whatsoever. None at all! Not even nonsense! Beyond random, beyond pointless, inane in the utmost, insane in the extreme!” Discord twirled Screwy in a ballet for joy. “Oh, to think this could be one that finally warps her precious little sanity and brings her to the fun side of the farce! I am positively giddy, my minion!” “Giddy-up!” cheered on the chaos pony. Discord gasped. “Quick, hide! here she comes, exhausted to the utmost, frustrated to the last, teetering on the brink of frayed-hair meltdown at the end of her worst week in years! Glorious!” the lord of chaos squee’d shamelessly before diving invisibly under the sunlight as it shone on the marble floor. Indeed Celestia was all such things as Discord had declared. The trade delegation was of the worst sort, intractable egos and irreconcilable pettiness and diplomacy of the most assinine calibre. The alicorn dragged herself with the liveliness of a zombie and the bouncy demanour of a black hole’s event horizon. Her eyes were red, her mane was in tatters, her coat marred with sleeplessness and blood-caffeine content probably post-critical. “Bath.” the Scarelestia growled with animalistic primevality. “Sleep.” Discord watched all this attentively from his hiding place on the other side of the reflection. She was twenty paces away. Ten now. Five, two, one. The door was swinging open... He uncoiled and sprung with massless, lightless, soundless severity, slipping ghostily through the door frame itself, catching the bucket before it could fall. Thus holding it, Celestia passed beneath the draconequus, ignorant and unmolested as she went grumbling to her rest. Screwball stepped politely back into casual existence. “I have no idea what’s going on!” she proclaimed excitedly, and decided that these were perfectly good grounds for a standing ovation. Or at least she again was peeking at the narrative, and decided to go for it all the same. “A double triple miple stiple bluff!” she cheered, diamonds being flung from her left hoof and roses from her right while an unseen crowd applauded Discord’s performance. His mood for antics seemed gone, however, and with a distracted snap of a claw Screwball’s little presentation ceased. He watched for a moment, seeing how Celestia dropped her weary self into a steaming bath and all but melted in the hot waters. And he felt...glad. Then Discord turned about-heel and stalked away through halls to think, and this was proper melancholic hall-stalking, because for once he worried if he had not devised a trick so grand as to snap upon himself its foolery. But again he thought of Celestia finding comfort in her baths, and again he felt...glad. And to think the same thing twice, and get the same meaning of it, the same import? HIM? That was insanity... “Come along, Screwball,” he said with less gung-ho than his norm, “let’s go troll Luna for a while.” “What about Celestia?” “No, she’s fine just the way she is. She’s had enough this week.” Screwy, whom it bears repeating mention is stark raving mad, didn’t make any cohesive sense of this, and forgot any such considerations soon after because the narrative told her to. Luna, however, did not.
