From The Workbench

Chapters

Chapter 1. Bestirring
Chapter 2. History
Chapter 3. Void

Chapter 1. Bestirring

Chapter 1. Bestirring

“Fer the fooking last time, ye’re not fooking Discord!” Celestia grunted, rubbing her eyebrows as migraine spread across her head. “Ye ain’t the real Discord. Just a fooking glass in a frame. A petty painting on a piece of fooking melted sand. Just’a thing on a wall!”

The so-called Discord chuckled and shrugged.

“And you, my dear, are a rather sad and bizarre, picky doodle,” he said, wiggling the shards of glass he was made of in front of a large mirror. “Oh myself, I’m such an Apollo!”

Celestia, or rather the neat and florid doodle of a magnificent and beaming white alicorn, struck her head with her hoof, grumbling from inside the cage she was stuck in: a single piece of paper simply lain above a carpenter’s bench: among pencils, pens, brushes, wrenches, charcoal, and gears, everything covered in a thick layer of dust. Forgotten. Old. Abandoned.

“Fer the last time, piece o’glass. Put yo ass back on th’workbench before th’carpenter’s back!” paper-Celestia warned, gritting her teeth. “Last time he caught us. He ain’t happy.”

“Come on, Celi… Would you kindly let me call you Celi? Oh, why am I even asking, of course you do like that name, sweetheart.”

Celestia grumbled as if it would make the headache seep out of her ears, nose, and mouth.

“Oh, ah’ve got the feelin’ ye’re going to make me shat mah sanity…”

“I definitely wonder what your sanity would look like,” said Discord, pondering, a paw under his glassy, coloured shin where dust had gathered into a dusty disheveled beard.

“Probably a tiny copy of ya!” Celestia spat back through the same clenched teeth.

“Then, it will faithfully write you a letter about how wonderfully it tried to apply your lessons. Not sure if butt lessons count though.”

Caged in her piece of rough drawing paper, Celestia vented her rage, gurgling bubbles as she turned her back to the glass-made reproduction of Discord.

“Oh, you’re such a treat,” his teasing voice soothed at her.

Celestia did not answer. Tiny drops of blue ink fell from her eyes, rolling all over the paper the carpenter had drawn her on until they vanished at his bottom.

“Come on Celestia,” Discord whispered, jumping off the frame of the mirror to land next to the drawing paper, making some screws roll away. “You’re making me look like the bad guy.”

Celestia’s head swivelled, glaring scribbled bolts of thunder out of her blue-dot eyes. “Ye sure are, ye piece o’disposal.”

Discord walked up to Celestia, looking down at her as he put a steady clawed foot on the piece of paper.

“Hey, don’t ye step on me!”

“I will not. Pinkie-promise,” Discord declaimed religiously. “Cross my heart and hope to fly, stick a cupcake in my eye. OUCH!”

Celestia puffed in laughter at the hole Discord had stuck in his forehead, one of his glassy fingers going through like a needle. Getting his digit out, throwing a few bits of himself onto the paper, Discord hid a meekly smile.

“Something is bothering you, Celestia.” Discord stated, his voice grimly carrying away. “I can see it, even through your smiley face.”

She sighed, drifting her eyes from the shining shape of her interlocutor.

“How long has it been since the carpenter went out?”

Discord shrugged with disdain. Yet, as he started pondering, carelessness gave place to wrinkles on his features. Troubled, he looked at the dwindling flame balancing on the wick of a nearly consumed candle on the far side of the table. The flame was in fact long gone since he had last paid attention to it. Its wax had trickled all over the burnished desk and dust had since amassed in small hills blanketing everything on the desk and further.

“Now that you mention it, it’s rather... unusual.”

“Ah told ya. Sumethin’s strange.” Celestia shivered, holding her hooves tight against her chest. “It’s like he abandoned us.” Turning over, she eyed for Discord’s location. “Wow, wow, wow, what’cha doing there?”

Holding a pen as large as himself, Discord was stuck in motion, tip-toeing toward Celestia.

“Drawing you a moustache. What else would I be doing with a sharpie?” Then a grinn sparked on his face, slowly crawling up to his ears. “Or, would you rather have something kinky? I knew mares who would give their souls to be redrawn at the tip of a pen?”

“Ye wot, mate!?” Celestia howled, her blue stroke turning in shades of violet and red.

Discord brandished the pen like a sword, giggling. “En garde!”

“Oh, fock all kind of chimeras! Ye won’t!”

“Make me,” Discord murmured through pinched lips.

Eyes sparkling with anger, Celestia rushed out of Discord’s range as he kept chasing her around the piece of paper. Laughter carrying away, Discord drew a single moustache in the midle of the drawing paper, threw the pen across, which ricocheted and spilled ink onto the page.

“Ye ain’t a clean guy, ain’t ya?”

With no time spared to answer, Discord jumped off the ebony workbench and landed in a puff of dust. On her own, Celestia, trapped in her two-dimension cage of paper, tried to see what misdeed her companion was brewing… to no avail.

Celestia winced as a shrieking sound of breaking items falling over erupted. “Piece o’glass, whatcha doing? STAPH!”

Discord was climbing up a mass of rejects from the carpenter: screws, pieces of scrap metal, splinters of wood, throwing it all away from beneath his paws.

“Staph, Discord, ye’re gonna get us put in the trash can!”

“Oh, Celestia. Your entitlement to panic will always amuse me,” Discord answered as he set his paws on the lock of a skylight. “Mmmh… Pretty cloudy outside.”

“What the actual fock are ye doing?”

“Let me guess. Opening a window. Maybe?” Discord grinned.

“Don’t ye dare!”

“Come get me,” he cackled, lifting the lock and forcing the rusty hinges of the dormer to creak forth.

Discord opened it a crack and a wave of fog washed over him. Coughing and clumsy, his mass of multicoloured glass hurtled down the steep the pyramid of reject had formed, bringing it down with him a massive and noisy landslide of bric-a-brac.

“Ah fooking told ya,” Celestia grunted from the top of the workbench. “Ain’t ye a messy dude.”

“Damn it,” Discord pouted. “Why isn’t my magic woking?”

“Maybe because ye ain’t Luna-fooking Discord!”

“Hush with nonsenses, Princess,” he said, lifting a paw at her once he was again up on top of the pile of trash. “I’ve got a carpenter to check upon.”

From the skylight was pouring a thick smog, slowly trickling down to the ground, blanketing everything with a cloudy lid, slowly swallowing the tiles.

“Ye won’t leave me there, will ya?” Celestia brought forth, a vibrant fear in a voice.

Discord had just disappeared through the swallowed open window. Upon Celestia’s call, his head pierced through the mist.

“Why shouldn’t I?” Discord contested. “Would you draw a line on our short-term love if I were to leave a few seconds?”

Celestia frowned. “It su’e is unsafe out…”

“Eh,” Discord cut her off and giggled. “’Draw a line’, get it?”

Celestia paused, blinked, and grunted loudly. “Ah’m so going to kill ya…” she sighed.

“Why such a drawl?”

“Just shut…” Celestia’s eyes widened in shock and fear struck her face even before she could scream her warning. “WATCH OUT!”

From the fog stretched out two black tendrils, shredded, and torn like the scattered branches of a long dead tree. Weaving and cracking in silence, they thrust their tips around Discord.

Discord dodged with difficulty. Yelping, he escaped the dreary thorns of darkness and fell down the scrap mass a second time, the seeping monstruosities in his stead.

Like a mouth vomiting an overwhelming flow of bile, the skylight burst out with blackening, dank mist, crumbling like water inside the carpenter’s basement. A third tendril appeared, followed with another… and another… and from beyond the mist, a crystalline, slythering voice, as soothing as silk, and yet frightening as the dead of the night.

“...the magic, it must be all mine...” a marish voice hooted.

Phantasmal greyish hooves crawled through the vent with two blood red eyes glowing from beyond the mist. A ghostly smile creeped across the opening.

“H’lp me!” Celestia yelled, her hooves striking against the threshold of the sheet of paper as the tendrils reached the border of the workbench, bitting in the dark wood like a knife through butter. “Ple-e-ease!”

Holding his glass head between his paws, Discord escaped another assault from the black tendrils. Switfly, he jumped up on top of the top of the desk and, weary of the many gashing tentacles advancing slowly on Celestia’s paper, he set up a plan. Proud, readjusting his glass head over his shoulders, he stood between her and those eerie enemies and the creature controlling them gratting at the entry of the dormer.

“Definitely not my fetish,” he assessed.

“Halp me, instea’ of waitin’ there like a dumbo!”

He chuckled, “as you wish, my peasant milady.” And a tendril struck, wiping off clean one of his arms. Discord screamed.

Celestia gasped, tears rolling on her check. “Discord!”

“You finally call me by my name,” he stood high, pointing the ceiling in a pose of victory with his remaining paw. His scream had been more from surprise than pain. “You finally acknowledge my all-powerfulness!”

“Ye… Are ye for real?” Celestia babbled, dumbstruck as Discord carelessly walked up to a corner of the workbench and started picking up scrap glass.

“I have the advantage to come in spare parts,” he casually said aloud, building his arm anew.

As he turned back to face the dark entity, the red eyes looking at him with a hungry glare, he put up on his muzzle a set of two pieces of somber glass, stretched out his indexes at the creature from beyond the fog, “You, miss, are trying to catch me on a foggy day? Well let’s play a game of hit and mist!”

“H’lp me!” Celestia cried out, calling back Discord’s attention on here.

The tendrils had bitten into the paper, gnawing it away with an irresistible hunger. Discord stood at the other extremity of the paper, pulling it away to rip it off the Black Death’s embrace. Too weak to enforce his idea, Discord leaped across the paper under Celestia’s horrified eyes.

“Chaos-chop!”

Striking the black from the back of his paw, Discord’s arm wobbled away as if he had struck a concrete wall. Hopping back, holding his painful limb now scarred with tiny cracks, he glared around, searching for any way to get as far as possible with his doodled friend. He bit his lips.

“Do you trust me, Celestia?” he asked as the dreadful tentacle gobbled a new piece of the drawing paper.

“Ah’m not… Oh, fook it!” Celestia saw Discord heading claw-first at her. Shudders. “Whattcha doing?!”

“Hum…” Discorded stopped and wondered, looking at the ceiling now crawling with tendrils from which was pouring away streams of fog. “Cutting a way out?”

“Ye gonna hurt me!”

“Just a papercut,” Discord joked as his claws started slitting through the paper.

A few seconds later, Discord had cleaned cut around Celestia’s forced immobile stance. Grabbing her, and rolling her under his arm, muffling any of her supplications and flows of swearing, Discord rushed across the room, leaving a puffing trail of dust in his back. He reached the basement door, turned over to look at the two red eyes peering down at him from beyond the skylight, and smiled meekly.

“Come back…” it hissed. “I need it!”

“Not today, monster.”

And he slid away through the door interstice, the creature’s howl following him through the rotten wood of the door.

Discord blasted through empty, dirty hallways which cathedral-like columns was putting to a new scale even the biggest pony. From his three-apple height, Discord felt like an ant in a monstrous lair.

He walked in the main passageway of a Castle, the ten… hundreds of majestic stained glasses decorating the whole chamber laid shattered, desecrated, or simply crumbled over from their screws and stands. Fog was slowly creeping in, covering the white marble that tiled the flood with a thin but impenetrable lid of cloud. The tapestries had been ripped off, shredded, and pulled apart with an ungodly strength, now laying obscenely onto the ground, rotten and splattered by time. In the back of the room sat, like king and queen, two secular items.

“Canterlot… What happened to you?” Discord murmured as he approached two thrones, one sewed with crimson and gold, the other with night blue and silver, dusty, damaged, and abandoned.

“Mmmmhmhmhmhmmhm,” a muffled shrieking voice broke the eerie contemplation.

“Excuse me?” Discord frowned at the scroll folded under his armpit.

“Mhmhmmhmhmhmh,” it continued.

“I beg your pardon?”

Putting a paw over the paper, Discord folded down a third of it.

“Would ya kindly put me fooking back down ta earth!” Celestia barked.

“Of course your Majesty, thy will is thy order.”

Smirking, Discord readied himself and strained on his imaginary muscles. In a swift jerk, he threw the scrolled up Celestia into the air.

Screaming, Celestia unfolded, waving her paper legs in the air as she started descending…slowly, like a leaf prey to a weak breeze. Bemused, she landed silently on her four legs on top of the gold throne. Searching for Discord, she found him next to her, lying on the crimson frame of the regal chair, smiling wickedly, swallowing down his upcoming burst of laughter.

Celestia glared daggers at him, eyes narrowed with cartoonish bolts of thunder rushing out of them. Then, curious, she cocked up her head and watched over the deserted and crumbling throne room.

“Where’re we?” she whispered.

“Welcome back on your throne,” Discord solemnly announced, lifting his paw and sweeping it before him. “This is all yours.”

A mass of rubble, broken shards of glass, and empty hallways, everything throw in stark relief under a greyish light that struggled to pierce the smog enveloping the castle.

“Ah’m not… Oh, fook it…” She sighed heavily, questions bubbling in her mind. “What happened ta Canterlot?”

Discord paused, thinking, greatly troubled. After a moment, he looked back at his scribbled interlocutor, reaching out at her with his glassy paw. Before Celestia even had time to protest, Discord put his index onto her lips.

“Shhh… It’s okay,” he huffed. “Everypony is gone somewhere... I think.”

Doubt was eating away at him, washing all his assertiveness away, bleaching the colours out of his cracked features.

“Everypony… is gone.” He nearly chocked.

“Eh, ye… Discord, ah’m sor…”

“BOO!” a shrilling voice brashed from behind.

Discord and Celestia jumped on their feet, hooves, or whatever and fell down the top of the throne.

Celestia planed down slowly and landed ten seconds after her glassy counterpart had crashed down on the old and raggedy velour.

“What the actual fook!” Celestia blurted.

From the top of the chair rested a small pink filly, her indigo mane struck with a white lock of hair. Her flank sported a greyish tiara.

“I. Am. Bored!” the filly wailed, jumping off her position to land between Celestia and Discord, blowing the first away in her landing. Celestia hit one of the armrest and flopped down, two crosses barring her face instead of her pair of eyes.

“Diamond… Tiara?” Discord asked, surprised and a tiny horrified to meet the filly. From the crusaders’ tales, he knew she was a pest.

It was rather a doll of Diamond Tiara, painted with matching colours, her eyes, two globes of porcelain with two bright blue dots, and limbs showing expertly crafted articulations. She started stomping the ground with her artificial hooves. Cogwheels could be seen from a hole in her chest. Her limbs were marked with cracks and scratches.

“I. Am. So. Bored!!” she screamed. “I wanna play!”

As Celestia slowly woke up from her short-lived unconsciousness, she saw Discord trying to calm her.

“Who’re you?” Celestia asked.

“Diamond Tiara,” she beamed, prancing over. “The sweetest filly in Equestria, like… ever!”

Discord gave ‘that’ look at Celestia, the latter giving it back with the same level of hopelessness.

“Sweet Celestia,” Discord muttered.

“Oh fooking Discord,” Celestia outbid.

“What’ve we got ourselves in?” they finished together, their voices echoing in the empty skeleton of Canterlot… Long dead. Long forgotten. Swallowed in a strange mist that only filtered a grim light.

A castle creaking over its aeon-old foundations.

There, In this cathedral of death, three souls remained.

[…]

The carpenter’s bench is the place where the hooves give shape to raw materials, could it be wood, glass, or simple paper. Through melding, moulding, planning, painting, carving, and writing, only the carpenter was able to nurture the wanted shapes.

Some said the best carpenters could even light life in their creations.

Below Canterlot was a carpenter’s bench. The carpenter, famous for having made the two Sisters’ castle windows, had dedicated his life to creating, to the search of artistic awe itself. His basement… his kiln, not many ever saw it. However, those who did visited him speak about the toys, drawings, mechanisms, and paintings populating the walls of his place. They tell about the toys’ eyes following the visitors, the paintings, never really fixed on their support, as if the whole place was bursting with a life that the common eye couldn’t fathom.

But no object ever told the tale until one day, the carpenter never came back.

Chapter 2. History

Chapter 2. History

“Gotta tell her…?” Celestia wondered aloud, laying boredly on the edge of a kitchen tap. “She’s kinda a poor ball o’ pity right now.”

“Tell her what?” Discord smirked as he slid on the layer of muck covering the work surfaces of the Canterlot cuisines, jumping off from one to another in a perfect ice-skating figure.

“That the jar she’s trying ta pry open is twice her size?” Celestia snickered. “An’ that, by the look of its inside, it’s not safe ta eat anymore.”

Passing by in a large curve, Discord chuckled, “If only she could eat.”

Grunting and moaning in despair, Diamond Tiara was hacking her wooden teeth on the lid of a rotten pickle jar. Around her mouth, the paint cracked, falling into scabs of pinkish colours.

The trio of wanderers had found the large kitchen as filthy as the surrounding rooms and towers shaping Canterlot out of a mountain pic. Everything lay silent and abandoned as if years of inactivity had washed over the castle with nopony to guard the gates, now squeaking over their rusty hinges. It was just as if everypony had just…

“… Vanished,” Discord broke the silence settling between Celestia and him.

“Uh?” Celestia raised her head, quitting her dangerous game: waving her paper-hoof below the end of the tap, preparing herself to dodge any droplet that was expected to fall.

“It’s weird, last time I focused…”

“Cause, ye can focus?” Celestia smirked.

“Stop interrupting me, will you?” Discord grumbled, crossing his arms in disbelief. “Last time I had my eyes open, I… Everything was still alive. And now? It’s just ruins and dirt… and dust…”

“Ah thought you like ta be the destructive villain?” Celestia playfully nickered.

Discord struck the ground with his left hind leg and slid away with a long, chin-toward-the-ceiling, ignoring face. After a few swift drifts and movements, he marked another trait into the murk covering the stainless steel of the furniture.

“Tadaaa!” Discord cackled, opening his arms in a gesture belonging to a showmare.

“Whatcha doin…?” Celestia asked, breaking her reverie and looking down at the draconequus. “Oh… Discord.”

In the dirt, the glass figurine of an all-powerful creature had drawn, badly, a cheerful image of Celestia’s face. Hearts and froufrou circled the smiling visage, saying words that the air would never carry.

“Drawing.” Discord beamed. “Instant mood enhancer.”

“Ye’ve watched th’carpenter too much, am’ah right?” Celestia remarked.

“I’m just curious. And I also like when you call me Discord.”

Celestia laughed meekly, and sighed, again looking away. Sadness veiled her face, casting her eyes with dark shades of grey. “Ye’ve seen it?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The sun. It’s been hours already, an’ the sun hasn’t set or nuthing,” Celestia pointed out, looking at a vent at the top of the opposite wall. Since their waking up, the castle had remained prisoner of a grey and chiaroscuro cage of fog and grim glimmers with nothing willing to trouble such a state.

“And that… thing,” Celestia geared up, her voice slowly shrilling to a higher tone. “It nearly killed ye… us.”

“Let’s not talk about it,” Discord simply asked.

“Why?” Celestia brought forth, surprised.

“It’s… it is just that speaking of the spooky often summons it sooner than a pony wants.”

Celestia cocked her eyes in disbelief, a smile on her face. “I didn’t know th’almighty Discord was like… superstitious.”

“Big words for a peasant mouth,” Discord struck back, pinching Celestia’s paper face between his glass fingers. “Be happy I cut you out of trouble back there.”

“Puns? Again?” Celestia huffed, annoyed.

“Have you got better in stock?” Discord raised an eyebrow, a mocking grin in the corner of his lips. “Do you really have a good joke?”

“Eeyup!” Celestia countered, nodding, before she pointed her hoof toward the edge of the kitchen work station. “Right’here.”

Her royal doodle tip was aimed at Diamond Tiara, still playing on the edge of the jar lid, and next to the edge of the table tip. She rolled aside and fell with the jar. The crash came up a second later, quickly followed by a scream.

Rushing to the border of the table, Discord and Celestia watched over a broken jar, its rotten and black content sprawled over a moving, whirling, and whinging moving shape. Perplexed, Celestia darted her head in Discord’s direction and stared incriminatingly at him. Discord replied with a tenuous shrug.

“She’s yours, not mine!”

Celestia’s blue features turned red. “What? I ain’t her mother!”

“I am not her mother too,” he accused. “And you were the one who ought to look over her!”

“What, me?” she disagreed. “Ye’re th’one who wanted to keep her!”

“No, that’s not true, and… you’re the mare: the loving mother archetype!”

Celestia would have spit and spill milk if she had just drunk some, if she could even drink.

“Ye fooking what, mate!”

Celestia’s eyes had swollen outside their orbits, biting at Discord with rage and outrage. Diamond Tiara cried out and charged under a near set of crumbled casseroles, bumping them over in a pigsty of thundering echoes of metal. Celestia and Discord, turned over and leaned over the workstation’s edge. From the pickle of jar was running a long series of minuscule hoofprints, rushing away and out of the Canterlot royal kitchens.

“Your fault!” both said simultaneous, then smashed their hoof and paw respectively onto their face.

“What Ahma gonna do with both of ya?” Celestia grunted, rubbing her forehead.

“Nurturing?” Discord supposed. “I need at bath at ten, four meals a day, ten chicken dips for teeth flossing, and…”

Celestia threw a paper tantrum, not even buggering up Discord’s glass body. A small smile on his lips, containing the laughter behind, Discord watched over Celestia’s paper-hooves folding and twisting on his chest.

“Would be so much fun in a bed,” he teased.

Celestia stopped, narrowing her eyes to a blade’s width, forcing her lips in an angry plucked face.

“I’ll find a way to break ya, piece o’glass.”

A crash echoed away down the alleyway.

“Daddy!” a distant filly’s voice called out.

Celestia smirked at Discord who looked away to mark his discontent.

“Not going to happen,” he defended, shaking his head, before jumping off the kitchen promontory.

He ran, Celestia in his stead following Diamond Tiara’s trail of wailing.

The passageways, rooms, and alcoves were completely empty, prey to the same thick fog seeping out the cracks and the same emptiness that blanketed everything under a lid of silence, deafening, zooming over. All windows had been shattered and nothing but grey could be seen outside. The few terraces that had once bore vegetal life only displayed crooked, darkened trees, which scattered, cracked, and broken branches had stopped growing toward an absent sky.

At a crossing between two large alleys, Celestia stopped, looking at the wooden pediment of a golden gate. The wall around was fissured, its painting fallen into clumps on the ground, revealing beneath a far older painting of a blazing sun. The yellow had evaporated away, giving place to a dull cream white.

“Ah know that room,” Celestia said, troubled.

Discord looked back and forth at her and the door, wondering.

“Ah think it’s… was mah room.”

Celestia was fighting against glimpse of images she had stuck in her head. The pictures, sounds, colours, and smells that were far, unreachable, unreliable. Images that definitely seemed to belong to another mare.

The gate was slightly open, a grim light filtering through the crack, and, among the defects of paint fallen before the opening appeared tiny hoofprints. Celestia entered, slowly, likely trying not to wake up a monster that only she could imagine dwelling behind the massive chunk of chiselled wood. Discord’s heart suffered from a crippling knot, a feeling of being unfazed with the environment: calm, boring, and stable. As Celestia disappeared, he looked at his paw and snapped his fingers in a vivid clack, but nothing happened.

He sighed and entered.

The room, shaped in a circle and spacious, presented one small bed in the middle and four massive bookshelves reaching the top of the impressively high round wall. The farthest wall had a massive window, not broken strangely, sporting the image of six ponies whose colours and features had washed away with time.

“Is this your room?” Discord asked grimly, feeling so little in a room so large as he walked in, his hind legs walking on what seemed to be eggshells.

“If it’d been. It ain’t anymore,” Celestia answered, looking at the bookshelves, empty.

“Where are all the books?” Discord asked.

Tension pinched at his glassy heart.

“Down,” Celestia found the courage to reply as her eyes widened once they had set them onto the ground.

The marble tiles were covered with burnt, cracked, and shattered remains of thousands of pages that inestimable books had once contained. The leather covers, now closing on empty space had withered into formless brown and black masses. Somepony had performed a complete book-burning. Flames had been spilled onto the shelves, now blackened and unstable. What blanketed the floor, ashes, remains, and dust had once been a treasure.

Celestia nearly shed a tear at this spectacle. Yet, she broke when she saw Diamond Tiara, sitting, slumped over before a massive shape curled up beneath the filth. The air was filled with the repetitive pokes Tiara was giving with her wooden hoof against something sturdy and disturbingly hollow. Hearing Celestia and Discord walking up to her, she turned her head. Her porcelain eyes couldn’t cry, but she exuded an aura of sadness that made both the drawn alicorn and the cast-in-glass spirit of chaos gag. Sobs without sniffs. Eyes without tears.

“I… I can’t remember,” Diamond Tiara began, her voice trembling, interrupted with short fit of maddened and raspy laughter. “I was… somewhere with ponies, mean ponies… and… then, I was alone.”

A corpse. Diamond Tiara was sitting before a decomposed corpse that had left nothing behind but a preserved set of bones and a large cracked and dry dark puddle beneath it.

Discord hugged her first and raised her head with the tip of his paw.

“Diamond Tiara, is that it?” She acquiesced silently. “I know you are hurt, we all are right now. But the castle is not safe… anymore. We must be careful. And when we find out what happened to your daddy, we… we will see. Okay?”

Diamond Tiara nodded and slipped out of Discord’s embrace, walked to Celestia and briefly hugged her. Then, she jumped up to the dusty bed and lay silent.

“Ye really think the… thing gonna chase us?” Celestia whispered, frightened.

“Maybe,” Discord said, touring around the cadaver and stated, “a pegasus.”

“Uh?”

“That pony was a Pegasus. And he, or she, was killed.”

Pushing the murk from over the bones, Discord revealed the body’s wings, then its neck. Two vertebras, greyish and filthy, showed a large gash made by something long and edgy. What had spread and splattered beneath its now desiccated hooves was simply caked blood.

“A knife?” Celestia risked to bring up.

“I can’t tell for sure.”

Looking sideway, Celestia caught something out of the ordinary. Somepony had stacked up vinyl disks next to the bedside table. Broken and reduced to dust. Whoever had wanted to burn the books had not stopped there. Her eyes wandered to the night table and to the dark round tip poking from under its frame.

The tip stroked her curiosity chord and she called Discord for help. Together, they pulled, not with its lot of difficulty, the black tip.

It was a vinyl disk, intact and dusty. It had been hidden beneath the table, the pony who had done so hoping nopony with vile intentions would find it. And it succeeded. Discord looked around and found it. Dissimulated under a shadow, a massive box displaying a massive brass horn and a tiny golden arm, a diamond at its tip. The top of the contraption showed a rotary section with a small pike in the middle. A phonograph.

“Think we should?” Celestia wondered.

Discord shrugged, “Not that I will for once go against my curiosity. Let’s try. It’s not like a record can kill.”

Together they set the vinyl on the turntable and Discord, the only one able to move the side-lever started going back and forth, his paws biting in the antique piece of wood. The phonograph burst with static, a voice slowly tuning out of the horn as its stylus stabilised on the microgrooves. The first voice to manifest itself was feminine, and by the short and repeated little breaths she suffered from, she was deeply stressed. In the background could be heard the muffled cacophony of thousands, if not dozen of thousands, of voices. She sighed.

“Are you sure we have to record this, Blueblood?” she asked, febrile. “I- I’m not sure…”

Celestia shot on her hooves, ears perking up at the words, “Ah know that voice,” she bellowed.

Discord grunted as he pushed on his knee-caps to stand up, “Me too,” he announced sourly.

“It’s for historical posterity,” a stallion answered, displaying a low and impassive tone, betraying the gravity of a situation both of them were deep in, “and, to be honest, I don’t think we… that you have any choice. You’re meant to be here.”

The way Blueblood had pronounced those last words sounded eerie, if not wrong, in Celestia’s ears. He seemed jealous, but also thankful.

“You’re going to save Equestria from another year of civil war.”

“How can have we fallen so low?”

No answer came as Blueblood let out a long breath first. Trumpets roared from an ‘outside’, making the horn saturate.

“Don’t worry,” Blueblood finally broke the ice. “You’ve got a large part of the aristocracy and the commons with you, and…” A long pause followed; Blueblood sounded wounded, nearly ashamed, “you have foreign approval for this.”

The mare let out a sob.

“Oh, please. Don’t cry,” Blueblood reprimanded softly. “Just there, on that balcony, destiny awaits. You don’t know how much ponies would give to be there, now.”

He apparently spoke out of personal experience.

“Okay,” the mare acquiesced, ripping a piece of tissue from a box that had to be next to her to wipe her tears. “It’s just… it went too fast.”

“If not for you, do it for everypony.”

The recorder who had once carried the vinyl shook and probably rolled toward an exit, the noise intensifying as the two ponies seemingly stepped in a gigantic stadium or esplanade overcrowded with uncountable talking ponies.

A unicorn horn lit up with magic with clacking sparks. In a few seconds, the majority of ponies shushed and a tensing silent hovered aloft through the gramophone. It lasted a full minute, buzzing softly with the low whispers of many.

“Fillies and Gentlecolts,” the Canterlot feminine voice boomed, magically amplified, carrying across lands unknown to Celestia, Discord, and to Diamond Tiara, finally cocking her head toward the phonograph. “Mares and Stallions, Equestrians and From-afar-the-shores, thank you for coming. If you are here today, in this dire situation, it is because you have been deemed to represent in its entirety the millions of citizens of our wounded nation.” The mare breathed in. “Today was meant to be another Summer Sun Celebration, but, two years ago, the assassination of princesses Celestia and Luna left us in deep mourning and social unrest. In spite of…” Pause, again. “…Cloudsdale and Manehatten Communes, we survived those dark times. I had to make a choice. All together, we have to make a choice. With Celestia and Luna’s death, worldwide political balance has been reshuffled. Thus why I asked for help to the Empire of Kralle three months ago. A plead they answered yesterday.”

A massive contestation outburst from a side of the spectators, swears and insults could sometimes be heard, thrown vehemently at the speaking mare.

“Silence,” the mare ordered without raising her voice, “please. This is not an option, and we will all comply with this. If not, this will be the Equestria’s ruin. Our dire end.”

The mare stopped, taking a little breath in, readying herself to what was coming next.

“Equestria has stayed isolated for too long. We have lost our advances and privileges. Furthermore, the last two years had wrecked our society, economy, and moral. We must change. And thus, this is why today, to mark the end of the Great Turmoil, I, Princess Twilight Sparkle, Princess of Friendship and Magic, abolish the Equestrian Diarchy and its one thousand and six years of long and peaceful duration.” Whispers filled the air. “Today is a new opening door for all ponies of Equestria. I declare official the new Equestrian Monarchy. The civil war is now officially over and, as Regent, I declare that better days are before us.”

Claps erupted, sparking overwhelming statics in the phonograph. The record stopped a few seconds after a full standing ovation had sprawl like fire on black powder in the pony assembly. That mass of pony had indeed witnessed history scroll down before their eyes.

“Ah am... dead?”

Discord and Celestia’s stares met. But there was no time for complain. Diamond Tiara shrieked and alerted as a shadow slid in the interstice left in the door frame. A creeping laughter erupted and a chill invaded the air.

The trio made its way through the windows and stepped outside the room, hoping what was before them would not mar the troubled memories they had left.

Chapter 3. Void

Chapter 3. Void

The run lasted some long minutes during which Celestia headed first.

The trio dug their way to a vast esplanade through a thick smog. Only when the laughter had vanished into thin air, only then they slowed down and stopped. As they finally rested, with no landmark to guide them out of the mist, they remained silent, lost to what their mind believed could dwell beyond the mist. Only the muffled zoom of a landslide lost in the far away broke the setting immobility.

“The empire of Kralle?” Discord asked, looking at Celestia who, prostrated, was eyeing at her own hooves as if her sight could tear in.

She cringed in reaction, biting her lower lips in full resignation before lifting her head, overwhelmingly slowly.

“Why the fook did ye have to lift that fooking window!?” she burst out, making Diamond Tiara jerk away from her in sheer reaction. “Why did ye have to do such crap move!”

Discord backed away as Celestia crawled forth to him, casting shadows with her murderous eyes. Diamond Tiara smirked at the glass-draconequus and waved a goodbye from the tip of her hoof.

“I was just being curious, sweetheart,” he blabbered. “It’s not like I wanted to harm us in any way.”

Celestia steadied, stiff, taking in a long, noisy respiration. Eyes closed, she breathed out as slowly as she could. Her left hoof was hovering over the ground, swaying swiftly up and down, betraying an intense flow of inner thinking.

“First, dontcha call me that way. Ah’m not your thing,” she dropped like an anvil on Discord’s head. “Ye’re. So. Disappointing.”

Discord looked down, acknowledging a defeat that pained him more than he wanted to show. Both turned their head away from each other, a pregnant and awkward silence slowly setting in like a knife in a wound.

“Hey, the two lovebirds,” Diamond Tiara cut in the feud.

“We’re not together,” both said gullibly, swivelling toward the voice’s direction.

However, Diamond Tiara wasn’t anywhere to be seen, the fog creepily intensifying for Celestia and Discord, two dots of life in an ocean of dead grey nether.

“Remind me why we should take care of her?” Discord wondered aloud, massaging his temples.

Celestia huffed, “She’s a child. Ah won’t let her walk arou’ here. An’ so will ya!”

Discord gave up, his shoulders levelling down a little, “Alright, alright. But trust me, it’s gonna be a lot of trouble.”

A high-pitch scream echoed, piercing through the smog like through a thick metal door, repeating not just once.

“I told you, Celestia.” Discord brought forth, staring at her, an eyebrow cocked up.

She shook her head and walked away, rapidly disappearing beyond the misty veil, leaving Discord to grunt on his own plight.

“Damn good, it couldn’t start any better,” he reprimanded himself, another scream flying by.

“Tiara?” Celestia called, already gone through the mist.

“Celestia?” Discord howled.

“I’m here!” her voice popped from somewhere.

“Oh, I’m going to like this thoroughly,” Discord exasperatedly said, rubbing his forehead.

Half an hour later, Discord and Celestia reunited in front of a large brass pond. The water that had once filled it and reflected the intertwined figures of two mighty alicorns, one younger than the other, had dried out. The bottom of the pond was covered in shatteringly old leafs, fallen from a nearby barren and black tree.

“Tiara,” Celestia beckoned loudly, instantly answered by a shrilling scream.

She was running along the edge of the pond, head and mane shaking as if she was trying to get rid of something stuck in her mane.

“Catch her,” Celestia ordered.

“Why me?” Discord pondered, his paw held on his chest in a gesture of incomprehension.

Celestia punched at his face, doing nothing but tearing a bit of the paper she was made of. Her eyes narrowed, speaking silent words.

“Oh…” he nodded, rolling his eyes. “As you wish, Princess.”

As Diamond Tiara passed by, Discord grabbed her by her flank, his paw etching slightly in the wood of the filly figurine.

However, she kept running, Discord looking now at where his right paw was missing, now stuck on the wooden hide of the filly. Both Celestia and he looked at his stump. Celestia bit in her lips but failed to contain herself. She burst loudly into a fit laughter. Meanwhile, a playful pout settled on the draconequus face, decided to retrieve his lost hand.

“Diamond!” he called, starting running behind the poor filly that was still bigger than the doll of glass. “Get back here!”

“Ya, go fetch,” Celestia cackled, falling onto her rump.

Watching Discord bouncing behind his hand stuck in Diamond hindquarters, Celestia puffed a little. Yet, she narrowed her eyes when she saw Diamond Tiara… glowing.

Diamond Tiara, from her imposing size in spite of her filly appearance, was indeed glowing with a faint yellow light, going through her mouth, belly, and eyes, the whole amplified by the dust and mist blanketing the air. She shook her head in disbelief.

Something struck Celestia. She had already thought about it, but never really paid it the attention it deserved. The sound of silence. Apart from her two companions, one chasing the other on the other size of the pond, everything was drowning in a sarcophagus of silence. It was unsettling to Celestia. In her blurry memories, she was keeping the souvenirs of the craftmaster tinkering around his workbench: pulling, lifting, welding, and sawing. She had become acclimated to it, the noise. However, now dwelling in the silence, she felt eerily out of place. She wanted to go back to the basement and take her place back in the frame of paper. But the same memories, the ones of the black beast told her not to. Who knew if it wasn’t waiting, patient?

She shivered and looked away from her paper-hooves. Discord jumped, grabbed Diamond Tiara, and, from the destabilising weight of his thin body, made her fall in the pond. Together, they hit the rocky bottom, passing through leaves so dried they crumbled to ashes and dust.

“Got it!” Discord eructed in victory.

“Get it off! Get it off!” Diamond screamed out.

Reaching in the broken panel on Diamond Tiara’s chest, Discord caught in his paw a firefly, buzzing loudly. Celestia smirked: that was the origin of the light.

Holding it above his head like a vrooming trophy, Discord cracked a laugh at the filly, “I think you had a bug! Isn’t that uproarious?”

Diamond Tiara narrowed her eyes and unveiled her teeth, missing a part of their pristine white paint since her assault on the pickle jar.

“Hey, Fragments. If I wanted you to lend me a paw, I’d have asked.” she snarked. “Oh, that’s true, how would I count on you as you just come to have the ability to lose ‘em all!”

Her drawl done, she punched in Discord’s loose claw, which clattered away onto the ground, again leaving Discord with only one paw, tightened over the whirling insect. His eyelids closed to a knife’s width, slowly stretching a long face as he neared at a hoof-length from Diamond Tiara’s muzzle.

“Lady, why would not you go planking away from me?” He paused, thinking about a pertinent pun. “Coconut head!”

Celestia shook her head disapprovingly and slipped in between the two of them.

“Calmos, amigos!” she spat.

In the middle of the hot rock-off, both Discord and Diamond Tirara ended crushing the poor slim alicorn after their attempt to pinch-punch each other. They rolled over into a whirling childish fight, balling over Celestia’s flattened form.

She pouted, stretching her hooves into a pop as she unburied herself from the cover of ashes covering the bottom of the pond. Both Diamond Tiara and Discord had noisily spread chaos across the landmark that, in a swallowing dark fog that could suck up one’s soul into an unhealthy bewilderment, appeared monolithic.

Huffing, Celestia sat, slowly unfolding herself, her eyes wandering over the mighty statutes standing on a pedestal in the centre of the construction. There, a bigger representation of herself was cast into iron, covered with a thin layer of gold that had started falling into patches at her own hooves. The once shiny statute was entwined with Princess Luna, cast in the same way but with silver. Residue from pollution had set onto their features, trickling down into dried blackened and rusted tears, the iron beneath prey to the elements.

She looked at the two fighting pieces of craft and sighed. Lifting herself up, Celestia neared toward the pedestal. Above the water mark lay a single sentence.

‘To our dearest fallen Princesses, your memories will be kept ablaze in our heart, in times of peace as in times of war.’

The firefly whizzed past before Celestia’s eyes who cocked her head back by instinct. The insect rounded above her head and landed on her streaked doodled mane. Celestia laughed until her head tilted down under the weight of the animal. She bit the dust.

The insect was still waving its translucent wings above Celestia’s head when she heard Diamond Tiara and Discord stop. A long moment of silence ensued that washed over Celestia with a growing shame. The two distinct bursts of laughter that followed made her hope the firefly had buried her face only deeper.

“You’re unfortunately not going to find a brighter light down there,” Discord cooed. “The idea might just fly over your head.”

Diamond and he kept laughing together. Celestia even caught the thump of a rump hitting the floor. She muttered.

“Can’t hear you,” Tiara added.

“Wasp the point about talking to her?” Discord grinned.

“True, true,” Tiara confirmed, nodding firmly with a widespread grin.

The firefly suddenly flew up around the statute, giving the poor doodle of a princess time to crawl back up to her hooves.

“Ah’m going to whip both of ya!” she growled.

Discord was ready to drop another anvil, which would have quickly been followed by a piano when he saw Celestia crying silently, minuscule dot of blue going down her cheeks.

“Oh, come on, Celi,” he asserted. “We’re just joking. Look around you. All’s grey and dull. Spoon some uncertainty and chaos in your mood.”

She did not answer. She did not even give him a hard look. She simply weaved in between the two bullies and climbed up to the edge of the farthest part of the pond. there she sat, alone. Discord rested his forehead on two digits of his paw.

“Excuse me,” Discord said, walking away from the two statutes. “I have to apologize.”

His face was tired, marked with a typical twitch of a lip that betrayed remorse. Looking at his feet, he slid between the crumbling grey leaves and made his way to Celestia’s side. Both started talking together with Diamond Tiara was too far to hear something but a low murmur.

“Why be sorry?” she reassured even if she was the only one to give an ear to her words. “It was funny.”

Rolling her eyes, she wandered away across the pond to a part that had been broken by an unknown feat of time. Walking over the rubbles, she stepped out of the pond and looked back at the two forms in the fog. By their movements, they were vehemently talking, maybe shouting, but the sounds were lost in the mist. Straightening herself, Diamond Tiara scanned the surroundings that still remained visible.

Something fluttered in the distance, eerie, like a thin piece of paper waving under an absent wind, fixed onto an invisible support in mid-air. Curious, she paced to the apparition, and, as she closed in at each of her hoofstep, more appeared floating above and afar her head.

There were hundreds of them, tiny pieces of paper pinned onto the many branches of a metal pole. A soft breeze was sweeping by, making of that artificial tree a phantom waving his appendices, casting its overwhelming and bizarre presence onto its spectators.

Prayers.

Each piece of tissue, wool, parchment, or simply paper, wore one of two sentences, often scribbled. Words of faith and fear.

Diamond Tiara tore one off the metal tree.

‘Dear Celestia, help us.’

Surprised, she pull a second one.

‘I wished it had gone differently, pardon me.

BonBon.’

Diamond Tiara discarded it.

‘Make him come back in one piece.’ That one was signed with a cross instead of a signature.

Shocked, she let it drop.

‘Celestia, Luna, if you’re here somewhere, please, give me back my little girl.

Make she survive the time.’

She bit her lower lip, meeting the hard structure of the wood she was made of. She managed to take off another one. Old darker marks had been sprained on it. Tears

‘Hello daddy, mommy is sad, when are you coming home? I miss you,’ it claimed, full of mistakes with a side marred with remains of a badly traced pastel picture. It had been ripped off a drawing book and nailed there.

Hanging her head low, Diamond Tiara continued, starting to lack prayers low enough to be reached.

‘Give me back my Sweetie Belle’

‘Please, let me repair all of this.’

‘I don’t want to be alone anymore, please!’

‘Give me strength.’

‘Help me out.’

‘I can’t continue anymore, if somepony reads this, please help me.’

‘Let me be heard!’

‘Let me live through this.’

It continued, over and over again until Diamond Tiara snatched the last two that she could. She was crying… Or more likely wanted to. Two porcelains eyes that could not go red, that could not bulge, that could not water, that could do nothing but see and witness. She could not even blink.

She opened the before-the-last and her eyes would have widened in shock if she had been able to.

‘Don’t read the last one, not yet.

Pinkie Pie.’

“Diamond Tiara,” Celestia called from behind. “Are you okay?”

The filly, still twice Celestia’s size gasped in fear, holding the two pieces of paper tight to her chest. She turned and faced Discord and the alicorn, worry cast onto their features. She opened her mouth, ready to lie, but just dropped her stare.

“No,” she confessed. “Not really.”

Celestia drew a meekly smile and hugged the filly for all it could mean. Diamond Tiara hesitated but finally lifted her hoof and gently shared the embrace. Discord caught the two tiny sheets in her hoof. He smiled comprehensively. He would have liked to boast the mystery, but he had once learnt that hurting was bad, and hurting what was already wounded was just vile.

“We must go, now,” Celestia urged them. “I don’t feel safe here.”

Both Discord and Diamond Tiara approved and fell in line behind the frail alicorn. Before stepping forth however, Diamond Tiara looked one last time to the first bit and Pinkie’s message.

“How did…” she whispered, glaring at the second one, still folded.

She looked down at the paper and, vanquishing the curiosity, she shoved it into the hole in her chest. There, maybe, would it be kept safe for later.

Walking away, Celestia looked back first at the pole of prayer, then at the pond. The firefly was still flying softly around her statute’s head. In the blink of an eye, the light flashed out of existence so fast she blinked away. Like a pony catching a fly with a cigarette in its flight, the fog had swallowed the tiny creature in an instant. Somehow, Celestia wondered how long it would take to gobble her up.

Overthinking brisk events was never a good thing. This in mind, Celestia gulped and stared gravely at her two companions, oblivious of such event. She urged them to move faster.