He'd done it.
Okay, that was a cliched way of putting it, and it wasn't entirely his doing - if the Element bearers hadn't had that huge argument just the other day he doubted he'd have been set free for another thousand years at least.
But the fact remained - he was free once more, and unlike that brat of a princess he'd actually done his homework.
Discord had listened to culture changing throughout his imprisonment; Winter Wrap Up was founded, the pegasi were entrusted with scheduled weather; Luna was banished, fillies' dresses got shorter, the Royal Canterlot Voice was abolished; and - closer to home, and much to his chagrin - vines began to creep up the plinth on which he stood.
And yet there was one thing that remained constant - somepony, always, would clear them away. Had to be a unicorn - they never walked in front of him, where he could see them; always removed the vines with a quick burst of magic, and then left. It was after the first two centuries passed that he realised, well, it had to be Celestia. Nopony else would live long enough, and dragons didn't have that kind of magic.
He put this out of his mind quickly, and focused on the information he could glean from conversations going on around him. He'd need it, after all, when he got loose (and he would get loose, because nothing could keep a spirit chained up forever, Elements or no Elements).
And, for a brief moment, he had been free, and it had all ended so quickly he'd barely had a chance to really enjoy it.
But this time... this time, he'd had to wait only a year.
The Element bearers argued. He could hear them, sometimes, when he listened closely; the Elements of Harmony were so closely linked to the spirit of Disharmony, after all, and if he'd wanted to, he could have eavesdropped on Celestia for all the years he was trapped the first time around. Not that it would have done any good, he told himself.
But no - he could feel the last bit of restricting stone ebb away from his feet and his tail, and (just like last time) he toppled backwards with a sigh and a laugh and a complete loss of balance. You tended to lose a few things, when you were trapped in the same position for aeons and aeons. Your sense of balance was one of them. He'd get it back in good time.
And that deserved a laugh, too. He'd played games with them the last time. That was his first mistake. And Discord planned to learn from it. This time, he would trap them first. And Celestia. And, to avoid any loose ends, Luna too!
Discord shakily picked himself up and dusted himself off, shaking out his wings and testing his powers with a snap of the fingers. The gravel path before him turned to lava.
Yikes. He made a point of never using a lot of sense, but he didn't kill anypony. Discord tried again. Lava to ice. Good - ice would do. And what better way to get his balance back than to fit in some skating practice?
It was five minutes later that he remembered he had never had a very good sense of balance. That was okay. His powers could fix it. Discord tried another spin on the ice path and, this time, cheated gravity. Wonderful. Now that was a pirouette.
No more time to spend wasting on the small things, though. He was not about to be trapped for another thousand years just because he spent too much time messing about with some ice...
Canterlot became a fortress. Walls sprang up, impossibly high, and the invisible ceiling over the city made it hilarious to watch the bearer of Loyalty fly straight up only to smack into a barrier and drop like a stone.
He'd caught her, before she hit the floor. It was higher than that first time in the maze. Somepony could really get hurt.
"What are you planning to do, Discord?" the bearer of Magic demanded. Discord just laughed, strong and loud.
"Freedom is all I want, Twilight Sparkle. And if that means stripping you of yours to ensure I stay free, so be it. Enjoy the sights of Canterlot, ponies. You'll be seeing nothing else for some time."
They would probably try to dig their way out, if it came to it; ponies were nothing if not determined. Which was why he encased the castle in a bubble and lifted it to Cloudsdale's height, heaving the city upwards with clawed motions and a hiss.
That reminded him. He still hadn't paid Cloudsdale a visit; when he'd first been trapped in stone, it hadn't even existed, and after that he simply hadn't had time...
"Excuse me, ladies. I have a world to improve." The relieved looks on their faces as he teleported away! Really, did they think he was going to hurt them?
First, though, he had some important business to attend to. The Princesses were somewhere in the castle, too. Powerless as they were against him without the Elements, they still had to be dealt with.
He found them in the highest tower.
Even as the door creaked open, they were standing ready to face him; a confrontation, as it always had been.
"Don't try anything, Discord."
"If thou thinkest thyself wise," Luna added, pawing the ground. She was always the rash one. Pity the effect was lost when she was so much shorter than her sister.
Discord merely stepped forwards with his hands where they could see them, raised in the air like some kind of peaceful surrender. They understood, of course, that it was anything but.
"Ladies, ladies. I want nothing from you but what I should have taken a long time ago.
They were both in a fighting stance, sharp and powerful unicorn horns angled towards him and wings outstretched. It would have been threatening, once upon a time.
As it was, however, Discord knew their limitations. And so he took away both.
"Discord!" Celestia jolted, glancing behind her at her now-bare shoulders. Luna blanched at the sudden lack of horns on them both, and skittered to the side as she realised she was wingless, too. "Give them back!"
"My, but you look funny without those," he pointed out liesurely, a calm smirk on his face. "You'll get them back when you come to see my rule for what it is: better than yours." It had always been somewhat of a competition, really.
"Your rule is an unrighteous one! You cause misery and steal away joy - all for your own twisted humour!"
Discord stuck a finger in his ear and waggled it, the Royal Canterlot Voice all but blowing his wings out of order. "My advice, Luna, is to stop running your mouth before I take that away, too." That shut her up. Discord held out his arms, and undid the brickwork that held the tower room together in a spiral motion that left plenty of space to move. The bricks then arranged themselves into a floating staircase, leading all the way down to the barrier.
The draconequus spread his wings and stepped forwards, clearing his throat for added effect.
"Luna and Celestia, raisers of the sun, stars and moon: your services are no longer needed, and your continued defiance causes me to banish you from Equestria." His perfect imitation of the Canterlot voice only cemented their resentment. "The door is over there, ladies. You may leave the game." The triumphant grin on his face was almost painful. "Keep moving. The path will take you right to the border. It's a long walk, but I find it fitting that your last steps in Equestria will be on Canterlot brick, don't you?"
With the princesses seemed to go the last bit of hope Equestria had. Their walk of shame, with Discord's deliberate intervention, took them right through Ponyville. Any talk of the Elements that had once resided there died down when confronted with the sight of two princesses, stripped of their crowns, their horns and their wings, stepping hoof by hoof onto brick by floating brick above the main street of the small town.
Even with their heads held high, their defiant eyes promising there is hope, the fire in their eyes only dimmed upon seeing their message wasn't getting through.
Ponies who had turned to look amidst the floating pieces of landscape and drifting practical jokes simply turned away, bowing their heads and seeming to accept that from now on, there was nothing anypony could do. After all, without the Elements who had lived their lives in Ponyville, without the Princesses who had given their gifts of night and day - who was left to fix what had been done?
Discord stood alone in the wall-less room, the roof tiles slowly falling to pieces above him. For the first time in aeons and aeons, he felt truly victorious. The world was his again. He'd learned from his mistakes and now he had nothing left to stop him from going on an all-out chaos spree the likes of which Equestria had only once known.
With a soar of his dark heart and a beat of his mismatched wings, the draconequus leapt into the air and left Canterlot behind him.
It was a full season later, as the leaves should have turned gold and red and dropped from their trees (and instead turned cyan and magenta polka-dot, broke up into colourful bubbles and burst against the sky), that Discord found himself back where he'd started.
The shocked looks on the ponies' faces as he burst open the huge oak front doors of the Canterlot palace were amusing in their own right. The pastel-yellow Kindness bearer froze in place, a feather duster in her mouth, and promptly whisked behind the vase she'd been dusting. The unicorn buffing the floor, Rarity, dropped what she was doing and stood valiantly where she was, merely glaring at him as he strolled casually past.
"And what, exactly, are you back for?"
"Scathing," he remarked, and gave the floor a light dusting of soot with a flick of his claw. Rarity made a horrified noise and leapt onto the cloth she'd dropped. "I expected better manners from you, Rarity. Especially since you seem to have seen fit to assign yourself as my castle's royal housemaid of your own accord."
The unicorn stomped, kicking up clouds of black dust. "This is not," she growled through gritted teeth, "your castle. Besides, you can hardly trap us here and expect us to let our own living quarters turn to ruin. It would be dreadful of us not to keep it tidy for when the Princesses return."
Discord stopped in his tracks, halfway up the steps, and grinned at her over his shoulder. "They aren't coming back, Rarity. I suggest you come to terms with it. And they're not Princesses any more."
With that, he snapped his fingers, and the two familiar crowns appeared on his head, looped over each horn like a mockery of their rightful places. "You can go ahead and start calling me Princess if it makes you feel any better. But I expect a dress to go with the title." Snickering, he left them in the entry hall and headed upstairs.
"Very funny." Rarity stomped again. "Oooh, the nerve! Fluttershy, we simply must not let him get the better of us."
"Um - you're getting yourself dirty again," the nervous pegasus pointed out. Rarity gave a short, sharp squeal of disgust and winked out, reappearing moments later on the relatively clean carpet.
"Well. If Discord is here, we are going to take advantage, Fluttershy. I don't know what we're going to do - but we're going to do... something." She paused for thought, tapping her cheek thoughtfully with her front hoof and unwittingly leaving an arc of black soot behind. "Go and find out which room our house guest is staying in, will you? He wouldn't be coming back here if he didn't plan on staying the night." She paused, as the sun set rapidly outside and then wound back up into the middle of the sky and flashed a few times. "...However long that night may be."
Fluttershy nodded, and obediently squeezed out from behind the vase. With a few soft beats of her wings, she took to the air and slipped outside, quietly beginning to gain altitude to try and find the right window.
"Oh, and Fluttershy!" Rarity waved away the puffs of soot the pegasus' wings had kicked up. They'd given her an idea. "Fly low through this hall when you come back, would you? I'd have our dear friend Rainbow Crash clear the hall much faster, but she's sulking again."
"Put a sock in it, Fussyhooves!" came a resentful cry from somewhere overhead. Rarity spared a withering look for the pony reclining on the chandelier.
“Discord!” Twilight tried not to move, despite her sudden burst of annoyance towards the irritating draconequus. Cold water was already dripping onto her back, and she tried to tilt her head forwards just a smidgen. “I’m trying to hold a conversation!”
“Looks to me like you’re trying to hold a tray of drinks.”
“Very funny!” She experimented with trying to kneel and place it onto the floor, but one of the cups fell over and spilled freezing liquid on her face; Twilight decided it would be best to just wait until she could find a table. “Look, I just want my horn back. You know my magic doesn’t affect you, anyway! There’s no reason to take it!”
Discord rearranged himself on the throne, lying sideways on it with his head and tail drooping upside-down over the sides.
“Oh, really. Where’s the fun in giving you what you want at the drop of the hat?”
“Rarity got to keep hers!”
“Rarity was using it. Surely you didn’t think my castle dusted itself?” He waved a hand lazily at the perfectly clean room. “Of course, if you pledge your allegiance to me…”
Twilight stamped her foot angrily, disregarding the splash of water that hit her neck at the sudden movement. “It’s not your castle, Discord - Rarity isn't doing it for you. And I’d never work for you either.”
“Naturally.” Discord waggled his eagle claw in her direction. The tray lifted into the air, then suddenly upturned on her head with a shockingly cold rush of water and the clatter of plastic cups. He smirked. “Now, ask me the other thing.”
Twilight shook herself quickly, stepping forwards and out of the pool of spilled water and speaking with gritted teeth. “…Other thing?”
He winked out with a flash of light. When he winked back in again, he was draped over the back of the throne, elbows resting on the seat and head resting on his hands. “You walked in here with two motives.” A snap of the fingers and there was a noise like a scratching record, then Twilight’s voice echoed around the room.
“I’ve got a couple of things to discuss with you, Discord!”
Twilight flinched. “Oh.” She shook water off her hind leg, momentarily sheepish. “I… didn’t really mean to bring this up yet. I guess it was a slip of the tongue.”
“Go on.”
She met his eyes. Discord looked vaguely amused for some reason. Well, he wouldn’t be so happy-go-lucky in a moment, Twilight was sure of it.
“Don’t think I haven’t noticed you sticking around here when you could be off messing with the rest of Equestria.” Discord blinked slowly, lazily. He didn’t seem to care as much as she’d thought. “You could be out there having fun. But you came back here and it doesn’t seem to be a quick visit.” Or maybe he just had a good poker face.
“You always were the smart one, Twilight Sparkle.” He warped to her side and slung his arm around her, wings beating a faint wind onto her mane and tail. The closeness was uncomfortable, but at least her hair was drying out. “You’ve figured some of it out already. Really, playing these guessing games with you isn’t so much fun as it is a formality.”
Twilight frowned. “So why are you still here?”
“Here – let me make it easier for you.” Discord landed beside her and took a few steps back, clearing his throat.
“A riddle for something unexpected and new
The first step is guessing – unexpected for who?
A stepping stone to help you decide what I mean
Would be to climb to the highest point you’ve ever been.”
Twilight mused on this for a moment. “The highest point…? Do you mean the tower?”
“Oh, and one more thing.” Discord snapped his fingers, and with four bursts of light, Twilight found herself wearing some kind of metal shoes on her feet. She tried lifting a hoof, and immediately had to let it drop to the floor with a loud ‘clank’. They were ridiculously heavy! “Good luck, Twilight Sparkle!”
With a giddy laugh, the draconequus vanished, leaving the unicorn mentally cursing.
Still, if he thought this important enough to turn into a game, maybe he was teasing her with the key to defeating him…? The best she could do was play along. Twilight dragged her heavy feet along the carpet that led out of the throne room. It was time to do some scouting.
An earth pony stood at the base of the tower, watching Twilight slowly approach but making no move to help her.
“Tangled with Discord, huh?”
The unicorn just rolled her eyes and kept walking.
“Y’ can’t be headin’ up the tower with those on y’ feet, Twi.”
“They won’t come off, and I can’t teleport without my horn,” she stated irritably. “Now leave me alone.”
Applejack flashed her an accusatory glance. “Y’know, this’d be a lot easier if’n you just admitted you were wrong. The fillies were countin’ on you to know what you were doin’, Twilight.”
Twilight stopped in her tracks, glaring hard at the floor beneath her iron-clad hooves. “I said I was sorry, Applejack. But I wasn’t wrong. That spell should never have reacted the way it did.”
The earth pony gave a disapproving frown, crossing her front hooves and leaning against the wall. “Y’ don’t try a spell like that on fillies in th’ first place. Even if they ask fer it. They don’t know any better, Twi, but you do.”
“It shouldn’t have gone wrong. I made sure of it!”
“So you were wrong! Just admit it!”
With renewed resolve, Twilight began climbing the tower staircase, leaving Applejack forlornly standing at the bottom. “I’ve said all there is for me to say, Applejack.”
When she finally reached the top, Twilight was exhausted. She all but collapsed on the stone floor of the tower's highest room, and it was only as she stood up a few minutes later after catching her breath that she realised the walls were missing.
"Yikes!" The unicorn held herself low to the ground, the sudden shock of realising the room was open to the air giving her shivers up her spine. "Ugh, that Discord...!"
Twilight steeled herself and shuffled forwards little by little, eventually making it to the frontmost edge of the flooring.
The view was, to say the least, spectacular. Discord had raised Canterlot to cloud level, and the cliffs below them had already given it a wonderful view over Equestria in the first place. But what really made it a sight was the vast assortment of colours and floating bits and pieces of architecture strewn across the landscape. Birds left glittering trails in the air, pink clouds of spun sugar rained chocolate milk on no particular schedule (and here she spared a thought for the weather team; surely they must be having fits by now); buildings sometimes rotated or flipped upside down at will, evacuated ponies leaping from floating terra to floating terra to try and find somewhere safe and relatively stable to rest.
Despite herself, Twilight couldn't help but find it an amazing view, even knowing that this chaos meant misery and endless problems for the ponies living amongst it. They'd lucked out, really, being stuck in Canterlot. It seemed to be the least affected place in Equestria.
Which, naturally, only made her question all that harder to solve. Why had Discord chosen to sit around in the castle when all of Equestria was his for the ruling? Surely he hadn't returned simply for the purpose of sitting on a throne...
"So why not go out there?" she mused, sitting back on her haunches to give her aching legs a rest. Twilight was getting sick of trying to figure it out with such a vague clue. "A riddle for something unexpected and new..."
Well, chaos in general was unexpected for just about everyone. Was that it?
"The first step is guessing..." Twilight cast her gaze out to the farthest reaches of Equestria, hoping to find some other hint at its borders. "...Unexpected for..."
And then it hit her. What if she'd been going about this all wrong? She had only been thinking in terms of ponies and Equestrian logic - what if, in that couplet at least, Discord had been referring to himself?
"But why would Discord find this unexpected? He lives chaos." She paused, scrutinising the landscape. Her eyes came to rest on a small family of ponies making their way to a trashed barn. They looked depressed, sorrowful. Mourning their old home, perhaps. A fresh pang of hatred for Discord swept through her, but she pushed it aside in favour of trying to work out the riddle.
A stallion lost his footing, slipping to the edge of the floating piece of earth upon which he was walking and scrambling to stay on. Another immediately came to his rescue, hauling him up by his saddle.
Twilight blinked. That was it.
Even through all of Discord's havoc and confusion, ponies were still going on the way they had before. They helped each other, stayed true to themselves, and… more or less disregarded the chaos around them to the extent where no one minded much about new surprises – because they all had each other.
Discord had returned to Canterlot because the rest of Equestria simply didn’t care.
"What fun is a game if nopony wants to play?"
Twilight whirled around, eyes drawn to the roof. The roof that had been floating in place without walls to support it since she'd entered the room. Suddenly, Twilight felt very silly.
