For the fourth or fifth time, Applejack felt a tingling start way out at the tips of her hooves. Which was more'n a mite peculiar since, near as she could tell, she didn't actually have hooves right at the present moment.
Nothing but blackness filled everything everywhere—over, around, inside, and outside her—but suddenly her hooves were tingling like she'd slept with her legs bunched wrong, pins and needles jabbing and stabbing wherever her hooves were and making her grit her teeth even though she wasn't exactly sure where they were either.
Tiny specks of light and color took to jabbing and stabbing through the darkness, too, a breeze puffing in cold little gusts that gave her goose-pimply reminders of her hair and hide. And then with a rip like forty thousand paper bags all tearing open at once, blue sky burst in above her, grass and dirt crashing into place under her, and she was running, pounding as fast as she could up the side of a hill.
Not wanting to risk losing the trail, she charged right over the crest and down the other side, the valley ahead shady with trees that would've fit just fine in Whitetail Woods if they hadn't been all pink and puffy and sticky-looking like cotton candy growing up from the ground. She could only give 'em the slightest glance, though, her attention darting till she caught a glimpse of that snaky brown and white tufted tail slipping away between the flossy trunks.
"Discord!" she shouted. "You get back here!"
"No time!" came his all-too-familiar baritone, a warbling note of panic there that she'd never heard before today. "There's nothing I can do now, nothing anypony can do!"
"No!" She lengthened her stride and leaped forward—she didn't have to worry about her hat since she'd lost it two or three skips ago while racing after him down a white sand beach, the greenish sky smelling ever so slightly of pumpkin bread and something like water sloshing purple and thick as molasses to her right. "I ain't buying it!"
"That's because you're a fool!" he shrieked, his voice bouncing around the weird trees. "You'll only get us killed the same as the others!"
"Don't say that!" Not daring to clench her eyes, she still had to blink to clear them so she could dodge among the fuzzy trees. "They ain't dead! Twilight said there wasn't—!"
"Shut up, shut up, shut up!" She could see him now ahead, loping along fast, low, and stretched out like a weasel. "She didn't know what she was talking about! She never really does! I mean, never really did!" He threw back his weird gray head and howled as mournful as a timberwolf, blackness starting to scatter again like pepper across Applejack's field of vision.
"Consarn it!" she yelled, but by then the bits of black were growing, joining, swarming to steal everything away, and for the fifth or sixth time, darkness engulfed her, all sounds and scents cutting off like somepony'd taken a knife to 'em.
Applejack didn't shout after Discord like she'd done the first couple times this had happened: he only answered whenever they came popping out into one of those crazy places, and she reckoned she oughtta save her breath. Not that she had any idea what was going on, but then that wasn't exactly an unusual occurrence the last couple years if she was being totally and completely honest....
Desperate to keep her mind occupied, she thought back to the day before when Fluttershy and Pinkie had come out to the Acres and asked if they could use the barn to put on a birthday party for Discord—
"Because he's never had one!" Pinkie grabbed AJ's shoulders and rammed their snouts together. "Never! It makes my tummy all hot and itchy just thinking about it!"
Fluttershy gently pried Pinkie off while explaining that Discord had mentioned in passing during their last tea party that he didn't have a birthday since he'd never been born. "And that seemed so very sad," she said with a sniffle.
"Sad?" Pinkie leaped up into her hind hooves and scratched frantically along her belly with her front hooves. "It's awful and pokey and boiling inside me that one of our all-time bestest friends hasn't ever had a birthday party! So we've gotta throw him a surprise one right now, or I'm gonna go cray-cray-crazy!" She flopped over onto her back, her legs splayed, and started hiccuping as fast as a corn popper.
They set it for the next day since AJ didn't think Pinkie could last any longer'n that. They invited the rest of the girls and Spike, got everything laid out on the big tables in the barn, all yelled, "Surprise!" when Discord and Fluttershy came wafting in—
And that was when everything went wrong.
Discord started shouting that they were going to destroy the universe by trying to pin him into the time stream, and Twilight started shouting that that was nonsense, that time was no different for him than for any other corporeal being. AJ sure couldn't understand half the words they commenced to slinging at each other, but before long, her mane was quivering and standing on end like a thunderstorm was brewing, the air around her seeming to crackle with jagged little black and white specks.
"The cake!" Discord broke off his argument with Twilight and leaped for the twelve-layer banana creme and chocolate sculpture AJ and Pinkie had spent all night putting together. "We've got to smash it before the entire cosmos dissolves into random swirls of plasma!"
"That's impossible!" Twilight stomped her hoof. "How could anything as simple as throwing you a birthday party destroy the universe?"
He showed no sign of slowing, so AJ jumped after him, not too keen to see the hours of work she'd put in on that cake just plain wasted. The specks in the air were getting longer, joining together into thin jagged cracks, and when one of those cracks split open the space right in front of the cake, it swallowed Discord, AJ moving too quick to stop from getting swept in as well.
That was the first stretch of nothingness, the hammering of her heart the only sound in her ears until—
The tingling started in her invisible hooves for the sixth or seventh time and pulled her out of her memories. The blackness broke up, and a city streetscape sprang into place around, over, and under her. Buildings as tall as any she'd seen in Manehattan stood on either side, but running past the folks on the sidewalks, she saw with a double take that they weren't ponies. Near as she could tell, they were giant cats wearing hats and scarves and staring back at her with expressions every bit as confused as the one she reckoned she had on her own face.
But Discord was still galloping along ahead of her, so she forced herself to focus on the real problem. "Just tell me!" she shouted. "What in the ever-loving name of Equestria is going on here?"
"There is no more Equestria!" The panic she'd heard in his voice earlier had only gotten thicker and shakier. "And it's all my fault! Well, all your fault, technically, but we shouldn't quibble about such matters at a time like this!"
"What?" Shock pushed Applejack forward faster than she'd ever moved in her whole entire life; knowing she had one chance, she sprang, the cobblestones flashing beneath her, and wrapped her front legs around Discord's tail just as the black specks started shimmering up again. "No more Equestria? You can't—! That ain't—!"
"Get off!" He squirmed and squiggled, but AJ clung on tighter'n mistletoe to an oak. "You'll doom us both if you don't!"
"Not till you tell me!" The blackness exploded this time as loud as the confetti load from one of Pinkie's party cannons. But instead of disappearing, AJ saw herself and Discord floating plainly in the dark, a wave of light sweeping away ahead of them.
"No!" Discord reached his lion paw toward the sparkling colors, but they dwindled to nothing almost at once and vanished. "No..." he repeated more quietly, and the plaintive tone behind the word almost made AJ forget she was mad at him.
Almost. "What the actual heck?" She wanted to smack him, but she couldn't see how to do that without loosening her grip. "I don't know what'cher game is here, Discord, but I'm of no mind to be playing it! So you tell me what's going on, and you tell me now!"
He looked over his shoulder. "Tell you?" He wasn't shouting anymore, but the rumbling edge in his voice was somehow worse. "How about you tell me, Sapjackal?" He reached down with his eagle talon and plucked her from his tail, his hide and hair so smooth, she couldn't keep her grip. Dangling from his claws by the scruff of her neck like a kitten, Applejack forced herself to meet his yellow and red gaze. "What part of 'doom us both' did you not understand?"
She jabbed a hoof at his narrow chest. "I ain't understood one thing that's happened all ding-dong day!" She jabbed him again 'cause she couldn't think of anything else to do. "And how'm I s'pposed to take it when you say Equestria's been destroyed, huh? How'm I s'pposed to take that?"
"Ah. Yes. Well." He cleared his throat. "That may have been the tiniest bit of an exaggeration on my part."
"What?" Trees had fallen on AJ more'n a couple times while working the Acres, but never had she felt as smacked around as she did right then. "Either something's destroyed or it ain't, Discord! Not a lotta middle ground there!"
He snorted and set her back down on his tail. "It might as well be destroyed is the thing." He sucked in a breath and blew it out. "Since we're never going to see it again."
Unwrapping what he'd said from the way he'd said it, Applejack couldn't keep her heart from leaping. "But it ain't actually destroyed? Our friends and ev'rypony? They...they ain't actually dead?"
"Probably not." He scowled. "Unless they've gone and done something even more monumentally stupid than throwing me a birthday party."
Her vision blurring again, AJ pressed her face into his hide and muttered, "Thank Celestia..."
"Oh, please." The disdain dripping from his voice made her snap her head back up. "If Celestia had simply seen fit to tell the bunch of you the truth about me from the beginning, none of this would've happened!" He touched a talon to his chin whiskers. "Though I suppose I would've had to have told her the truth about me before she could've told you, but I'll continue to recommend we not quibble about technicalities at a time like this."
Applejack rolled her eyes, "This truth about you: that something I need to know to help get us back home?"
He pressed his claws together. "Perhaps you need your hearing examined, Spacklepack. We're never going to get back home." He waved at the darkness. "Riding that discontinuity wave was the only chance we had, and it was really no more a chance than you are a princess."
Her stomach going cold, AJ squinted into the distance. "Don't you got any way of catching up to it?"
Discord grimaced. "That you can even ask the question shows how ignorant you are of the situation."
"'E'splain it to me, then." It took some effort, but instead of spinning around to buck him right in the face, she gave him her biggest, cheesiest grin. "Or d'you got another appointment somewhere?"
His grimace sharpened into a glare. "I don't believe I know enough one-syllable words."
Reaching out, she patted his nearest knee. "Reckon you always like a challenge."
That got a snort, but she was fairly sure she saw at least part of a smile twitch his lips. "I'll begin, then, with something you may in fact have considered during the many hours that I'm sure you've spent contemplating my existence."
She gave him a snort of her own, and a short but full-fledged grin flickered over his snout.
"I'm not," he went on, "native to your land, your world, or even your universe." He spread his front legs. "This charmless spot, this non-place where the wind goes when it's not blowing, this dimensionless stretch between the peaks of an individual particle-wave, this is as close to a natal place as I have. For I am the spirit of chaos, of disorder, of entropy, and this massless mass of undifferentiated space-time is all that and more. I floated at one with this less-than-nothingness until some freak accident sent a discontinuity wave crashing through and washed me out into your lovely and layered universe, the one place where I could take advantage of my true nature."
With a blink, AJ looked at the blackness around them. "You come from here?"
"In a simplistic sense." His voice got quiet. "Perhaps you've noticed that I've not engaged in any of my usual larger-than-life shenanigans since we began our little journey?" He snapped the pads of his lion paw, and nothing happened. "Surrounded by a state in which every part is exactly equivalent and can be replaced with any other part, a spirit of chaos cannot function. I am the living embodiment of discontinuity, but this non-place is nothing but continuity! No difference, no change, nothing discrete from anything else!" He closed his eyes. "My old stone prison was a fun house compared to this..."
More ice trickled down Applejack's spine. "And how exactly did a birthday party do whatever it did to get us here?"
"Discontinuity," he said again. "In Equestria, I lived like a taut rubber band, a crack stretching between every sweet molecule vibrating throughout your entire cosmos. I need to maintain that difference, that frisson, in order to carry on in my accustomed style. Becoming too much a piece of your universe, putting down stakes and partaking of your continuity, well, I'd always feared that that sort of thing would snap me right back into this nasty little sinkhole." He shrugged. "I've been able to use the tension between my former life and the life of friendship I've begun leading to very good effect, but being tied to something as mundane and regular as a birthday..." He shook his head and shivered. "Might as well put a bow tie on me and send me to work at an office job."
AJ's mind spun. "So it's you not being a full part of Equestria that gives you your power?"
"My power comes from the possibility of change." He sighed. "You ponies always trying to impose order, laying out your trees in unnatural rows and growing apples of nearly uniform size, shape, color, taste, and texture: you have no idea how much you're stifling your universe's potential!" He clasped his talons into a fist. "But you'll see! Once you've spent a timeless time in this placeless place, you'll see how continuity kills! You and I will have nothing to do but observe the lack of differentiation, the sheer, mind-numbing chaos of interchangeability, and—!"
"Hey, now!" She couldn't keep from tightening her jaw. "There's nothing wrong with being organized! And I don't see what'cher talking about anyway! There ain't one single bit of chaos anywhere 'round here: no ballet buffaloes or chocolate rain or any such thing!"
"Of course not!" His wings buzzed behind him like a hummingbird's. "Chaos relies on contrasts, so when you've got no contrasts, you have both all chaos and no chaos, both one hundred percent and zero with nowhere to go and no possibility of change! Everything's the same! It's all frozen solid! And we're frozen right in the middle of it!" He thumped a talon sharp as the broken end of a dead tree branch against the top of her head. "Any of this getting through, Grapplehack?"
"No, it ain't!" She slapped at his claws. "It's like you're saying that being too organized and being too chaotic are the same thing!"
"Ding, ding, ding!" he shouted. "We have a winner!"
"But—" Stopping, she thought a moment, then decided she was right the first time. "That don't make a lick of sense."
"It's a continuum." With both paws he traced a circle in the emptiness above Applejack. "No matter which direction you go, you'll eventually end up in the same non-place." His eyes pulled shut again. "Stasis. Where it doesn't matter of nothing changes or if everything changes. There's no life, no fun, no discontinuity because every possible chunk is the same as every other possible chunk...."
"The same?" A thought tickled through her brain and made her pull in a lungful of the flat, dry air. It couldn't be that simple, could it? But—
Not quite sure what she was doing but absolutely sure that she was going to do it, Applejack raised a hoof and concentrated. Something inside her swirled, and something outside as well: with a pop, her hat appeared and settled itself right and perfect between her ears. "There you go," she said, grinning up at Discord. "Discontinuity."
His jaw dropped, and she recognized the strangled little noises coming from his mouth as the sort of sounds she made a lotta the time when he was being his wacky ol' self. "'Cause y'see," she went on, "might be you're from around here and can't do a thing with it. But I ain't a native, and it might be I've got enough of a rubber band thing going on to, well—" Again, not sure what to do, she clenched her eyelids and thought about home, her barn, the party they'd fallen out of however much of a timeless time ago that'd been.
A breeze puffed across her face, and she heard Discord gasp. Opening her eyes, she saw a shimmering bubble floating to their left, a warped and distorted view of Twilight frozen in place, her wings outstretched, Rainbow Dash and Pinkie just behind her, Rarity and Fluttershy just behind them.
"Impossible..." Discord's whisper brought her attention up to him, his eyes shining in the light of the bubble but focused on her. "You...you did this?"
"I reckon." Parts of her were twitching that she'd never even realized she had before now, a sort of whispering in her brain and along her spine that she wasn't at all sure she wanted to listen to; she rubbed her forehead, almost afraid she'd find a horn jutting up there. "Can't say I care much for it, so how 'bout we get outta this noplace and get ourselves someplace, huh?"
"You—" His expression made her think of somepony who'd been kicked in the gut, and as often as Applejack had thought about doing that exact thing to him, she found she didn't like seeing the big phony look as real as he did right then. "You'd let me come back?" he asked so quietly, AJ could hardly hear him even in the darkened silence.
Smiling then was about the easiest thing she'd ever done. "I wouldn't leave anypony stuck here." She tapped his knee a mite harder'n she prob'bly should've. "Not even you, Discord."
His giggle made her think of silver bells ringing, and before she could do anything else, he was reaching for the bubble, lunging at it like a crow at a ripe and juicy ear of corn. AJ grinned and hung on as he flexed beneath her; her ears popped, and the air suddenly tasted like air, her friends' voices sweeter'n any meadowlark chirping: "What happened?" Twilight was asking over the mixed questions of the others. "Where'd you go? I've never felt any magic like that before!"
"Yes!" Discord shouted. He spun, Applejack losing her grip on his tail and sliding across the sawdust-covered floor. She sat up then to see him dive straight into the cake, and when he stood up, he was wearing it like a hat and coat. "My compliments to the chef—or the tailor," he announced, his voice as full and laughing as it usually was. "But I will not, can not, and shall not have a birthday cake! Or a birthday suit, for that matter!"
The others were staring at him, but AJ clapped her front hooves together. "The day we destonified you! That's what we oughtta celebrate: the day you started to stop being the who that you were and started to start being the who that you are!"
Pinkie's neck clicked, cranking her head around to blink at Applejack. "What?" she asked.
"Perfect!" Discord snapped his paw, and all of the cake 'cept for the part balanced between his horns slid three paces to his right. It squashed and stretched like salt-water taffy and formed itself into a pretty fair likeness of the gap-mouthed statue they'd turned Discord into after their first meeting with him. "If it confuses Pinkie Pie, then I heartily approve!" He reached out, snapped the cake's snaggle-tooth off, and gave it a lick. "Mmmm! Banana creme!"
"Ummm..." Ears folding, Fluttershy kept looking back and forth between Applejack and Discord. "Is everything all right, you two?"
"Eeyup." AJ reached up to straighten her hat, the strange swirling force that had filled her now completely gone. And good riddance to it. "Me and Discord," she said, drinking in the sight of her friends and her barn and her life back where if oughtta be, "we've just been finding out how helpful it is to be a little different. Ain't that right, Discord?"
Discord straightened his own cake hat. "Eeyup," he said in a passable drawl. He burst out laughing then and smacked the cake statue in the back, the whole thing exploding out across the room and everypony in it.
Swallowing her shout, AJ smiled instead and licked a chunk of cake shrapnel from the end of her nose. A little bit of chaos made for a nice contrast, after all.
And besides, she reckoned she wouldn't have too much trouble guilting Discord into helping clean up when they were done.
