FIENDship is Magic: Discord

At the stroke of midnight a shudder rippled through the grand palace.

The ancient architecture groaned under the sudden stress. The birdlime between the stones crumbled as if pressed between mortar and pestle, and small fissures manifested sporadically. Royal portraits were tossed from the trembling walls, crashing and cracking on the floor, and revered statuettes toppled and shattered. For the length of twenty-three seconds, raw, unabated chaos wielded the sceptre of Coltstantinople.

Diamond Iscariot woke amid the madness. He blinked forcibly and rubbed at his heavy eyes to ward off the unnerving tremors, believing the violent oscillations to be nothing more than a lingering fragment of his dreams. When the shaking refused to cease, he cast a hasty spell of tranquility, though it similarly had no effect. It wasn’t until Iscariot heard the telltale shatter of glass above his head that he sensed something was wrong.

He snapped to full consciousness and pirouetted out of his bed, narrowly avoiding a hail of stained-glass shards that pierced the sheets. He breathed ruggedly and stared at the shards, then reeled his gaze up to the jagged hole in his window. The patterned image of Coltstantine I holding up the city with his fore-hooves had been substituted for a panoramic view of the city landscape, and as the last of the tremors faded, Iscariot watched in horror as one of the nearby spires slipped on its foundations and stumbled to the city floor, where it burst in a cloud of dust, stone and destruction.

"By the King's hooves!" Iscariot swore. His mouth hung agape and his teardrop beard dangled languorously. He picked himself up and darted to the broken window to assess the widespread damage.

The city below was in shambles. Beyond the rubble that littered every street, the very bedrock of Coltstantinople had fractured, and the earth itself had risen and fallen in bitter slices. Although the royal guard was already on the scene, tending to the injured and warning stunned ponies away from precarious structures, Iscariot knew that it would take all of the magic in the city to reverse the damage—and even then it might not be enough.

He trotted to the door of his disheveled chamber and poked his head into the hallway. The tumult was just as dire inside the palace as in the city streets. Where ponies weren’t darting back-and-forth, they were tending to the fallen treasures or simply sitting against the walls, thunderstruck by the devastation.

Iscariot reached out a hoof and seized the attention of a frantic guard dressed in sapphire panoply, which was broken and dented. He was out of breath and coated with a thick layer of grit.

"What happened?" Iscariot exclaimed.

The guard looked as Iscariot, his eyes wide and unblinking. He seemed in shock, and when he spoke, it was with a lateral vacancy, as if his body was here and his mind was somewhere else. "The Ottomare Empire. They've finally ... reached home."

Iscariot's heart leaped into his throat. He had had nightmares of this day. Perhaps every Coltstantinopian had shared in those same nightmares; of the day the Ottomare Empire cast the shadow of war over the city Iscariot and everypony else called home.

“Well, isn't that wonderful,” Iscariot muttered, and his words were numbed by fear and fatigue. “Is this a siege then? Do we make a stand?”

“We ... We think it's isolated. For now.”

Iscariot nodded and breathed a bray of relief. “Thank you. Take care.”

As the guard departed, Iscariot's horn sparkled. He summoned six small, rainbow-coloured balls from an overturned chest in his room and a large ball almost twice the size of himself. He performed a backflip and landed on the large ball, then promptly began juggling the other six with his fore-hooves as he rolled into the hallway.

He was the court jester after all. If terror had gripped the city, it was his duty to alleviate that tension. He would perform for the crowd and make a clown out of himself, all so he might offer a few stray laughs. Sure, most of them would be superficial and without any real solemnity, but smiles were still contagious even if they were feigned, and eventually his burdened audience might even start believing the collected lie.

Besides, there was a certain therapeutic quality to acting the fool. It calmed Iscariot’s nerves and stilled the air around him. If nothing else, even if the charade failed to impress, like any great artist he was performing for himself and attempting to salvage his own sanity in this hour of madness.

He flipped and spun and juggled his way through the palace halls. He earned a few isolated chuckles along the way, though he attracted scowls more than anything else. In the main corridor, however, he only exacerbated the chaos when he executed an aerobatic technique, rebounding off one of the walls which collapsed under his weight, causing a chain reaction that saw the entire palace kitchen buried under a swamp of broken stone.

Before he had a chance to come to his senses and understand what he had done, Iscariot was instantly reprimanded by Brutus Ironhoof, Captain of the Guards.

“Get your foolish hooves out of here, Iscariot!”

Iscariot brushed himself off and lowered his head remorsefully. “I heartily apologise. I was only trying to improve the mood.”

“If you want to practice being a ballerina,” Brutus said, “go and dance in the ballroom. Leave the reparation to the real stallions, you idiot.”

A vehement cheer rose among the attending guards, who sneered and thrust spears and shields into the air. One protesting guard even tossed a bruised tomato at Iscariot, though it was easily deflected with a quick whip of air.

“I do have permission from King Cosmos to be where I think I am warranted.” Iscariot was prideful in his declaration, almost to the point of hubris. “You do not get to order me hither-and-thither, Brutus."

The Captain of the Guards stepped forward, his bulking, robust form almost eclipsing the gangly court jester. “Do not try and wave your authority around with me.” His voice was deep and cruel, and although Iscariot tried to stand tall, he was nothing more than a field mouse against the night hawk that was Brutus. “You're nothing but a joke.”

Iscariot rolled his eyes. “That's kind of the point.”

Brutus snapped and swung a hoof, which was enamelled with decorative platinum and bespeckled with jewels. He hit Iscariot smack in the muzzle, and the force of the blow immediately dropped the unicorn to the splinted tiles.

“Don't let me see you again tonight, or you'll regret it.”

Iscariot would have quipped back—it was in his very nature to counter chastisement with chastisement and he never backed away from a challenge, especially from a meat-head like Brutus Ironhoof—but his jaw was now bruised and swollen, and by the time he was able to form words through the throbbing ache, Brutus had stormed away.

He picked himself up and worked his mouth to gauge the damage, though it wasn’t anything serious and the blow hadn’t even drawn blood. He quickly realised, however, that he was being irreverently ignored by everypony present in the main corridor. The royal guard was working around him as if he was a piece of debris to be ignored for the time being, and all of the servants kept their eyes averted with acute disregard.

He frowned. He tried to break a conversation with some familiar faces, but it was evident that Brutus had left an infallible impression, and everypony thought it would be advantageous to follow by example. To top it all off, Brutus had even seen to have Iscariot’s rainbow-coloured balls pierced and deflated.

Iscariot didn't take it personally though. He knew how much pressure was currently piled on top of the Captain of the Guards, and the poor pony probably wasn't going to find a wink of sleep for the next few days, not until this incident was thoroughly cleared and the city’s security appropriately attended to.

Iscariot drew back into the shadows and skulked away from the main corridor. He passed other ponies who were busy cleaning or bandaging the injured, and while he offered a hoof a couple of times, his proposals were always ignored or he was simply dismissed.

He took to wandering the outskirts of the palace, idly inspecting the ruination of the proud city. He mused on the power that would have been required to mutilate the city so severely in such an isolated snippet of time, and the more he thought about it, the more he feared the pending invasion and the eradication that would follow. This perpetual war, which had been fought for generations—over a cause that had long-since been forgotten—was going to destroy Coltstantinople. He could sense it. The doom hung heavy in the air, like a blanket of humidity, and sooner or later the storm was going to burst.

And there was nothing he or anypony else could do about it.

He soon found himself traipsing through the Botanical Gardens. It broke his heart that even this slice of paradise had been throttled by the fingers of chaos. Trees that were tent times older than Iscariot had been uprooted, and soil, rocks and mud had been scattered all around. The lake itself had disappeared, having seeped away into a fresh crack in the earth. All the ornamental pillars dating from the time of the now-defunct Romare Empire—the very foundation stones of Coltstantinople—had also fallen, and many lay splintered and broken. Perhaps the only article in the Garden that remained intact was the stone bench, which stood on a pavilion overlooking the barren lake.

And sitting upon it was the Princess.

Iscariot stopped in his tracks, as if hitting an invisible shield. He had already royally annoyed the Captain of the Guards tonight, so he had no intention of interrupting Her Majesty’s peace and quiet. He turned and attempted to whisk away, but he caught his hoof on one of the fallen pillars then lost his balance, skipped ludicrously across the downslope of a knoll, and toppled straight into the empty basin.

It was the princess who saved him. Only inches from plunging into the marshy lakebed, she cast a spell of levitation, which surrounded Iscariot in a protective, glowing orb. He was then lifted out of the lake and dropped off on the pavilion where the Princess presided.

Iscariot kept his eyes low, as custom dictated, for he did not wish to offend her more. Only those of regal status were honoured enough to freely gaze into the eyes of either Princess—the two shimmering gems of Coltstantinople—and while Diamond Iscariot was respected within the grand palace, he was still stranded on one of the lower rungs of the ladder.

But she smiled at him, and although he couldn’t see, he could hear the glee in her voice. "I understand my father pays you to act foolish, Diamond, though I wouldn't want you to hurt yourself.”

“You know my name, Princess.” Iscariot was near-breathless. It was a great honour to be spoken to by a Prince or Princess in such a civil tongue; it was a sign of reverence to have either speak one’s name in casual conversation..

She giggled. "Look up.”

Iscariot obeyed. He raised his eyes slowly, following the contours of her shoulder and crest, mesmerised by her silky smooth coat, which was the colour of midday clouds. Her cosmic hair, floating freely as if caught in a breeze only the Princess could feel, was beyond conscious elucidation, and her eyes … those magnetic orbs of glimmering purple, and her dark, alluring eyelashes, they completely captured Iscariot and held him on the spot as if he’d been lassoed. Oh, he’d seen her plenty of times from afar, and when he performed for the royal family, he always watched her with ephemeral glances, never lingering long enough to arouse suspicion. To behold her at this distance, though, was simply sublime.

"I should not be so coy, Princess,” Iscariot said, his voice weak and tender.

“My father may disagree, though I prefer to look into the eyes of the ponies I speak to.”

She smiled heartily, and it melted Iscariot’s heart. He flushed a stark shade of red and his legs quivered so violently his knees almost clipped together.

"Would it be pretentious to ask you a question, Princess?” Iscariot asked, his words slow and nervous.

"It would not. And please, call me Celestia."

Iscariot would do no such thing! To call the Princess anything besides her title was to incite the wrath of the King, and far greater ponies than Diamond Iscariot had been sent to the dungeons for fraternising with the Princess of Coltstantinople. He would uphold all of the rituals and traditions as were to be expected of the court jester.

Those butterflies in his stomach begged to do otherwise though …

Iscariot cleared his throat, then excused himself for effectuating such a discourteous gesture.

The Princess smiled again. “What is your question?”

”Why are you,” Iscariot said, pausing mid-sentence to try and calm his nerves, “out here all alone?”

"My father wanted me out of the palace, in case there were any after-shocks."

"Is your sister—I mean the Princess Luna—is she okay?"

The Princess nodded. “My sister will be fine. She doesn't sleep in this realm."

Iscariot cocked his eyes, though he didn't query further. Unless the Princess desired to explain, it would be considered rude to try and excavate an answer.

"Do you know what happened?"

"The Ottomare Empire has evidently learned to control the elements," the Princess said with an air of defeat, "if only one of them. Our forces are continuing to wage war in the Western Lands, but if they have tapped into the elements, all it will take to destroy our city is a few rogue sorcerers."

Iscariot swallowed. "Is that what happened tonight?"

"No, tonight we believe only one sorcerer attacked us. This was nothing more than a test, to gauge our weaknesses and to measure the strength of their newfound power."

Iscariot was speechless. One sorcerer was able to break Coltstantinople? It couldn't be. The devastation was so widespread, so absolute … but if the Princess was right—if the Ottomare Empire had tapped into the elements themselves—it could spell the end of not just Coltstantinople, but the entire world could be swept away under such volatile power.

"That's very unsettling news, Princess."

"Which is why you're going to be a very important asset for morale over the next few weeks."

Iscariot blinked. "I beg your pardon?"

"When the night is darkest, Diamond, we all need to remember how to laugh."

Iscariot bowed respectfully. ”I'm honoured that you have such a high opinion of me, though I think Captain Brutus and his men do not share your enthusiasm."

The Princess cocked her head and grinned. It was a mischievous grin, something he’d expect to see in a mirror, not on the Princess herself. It was so unbecoming of her that Iscariot almost burst out laughing.

"I'll handle Brutus,” she said with a scintillating twist to her words, “and you keep doing what you do best."

Iscariot didn't believe her. He figured the Princess was making a joke on his behalf, and he didn’t mind so much. He existed for that reason. He was the court jester, a joke unto himself, and if the Princess could draw humour from him—in whatever way she saw fit—he considered himself still valuable. Yet when Iscariot saw Brutus the next morning, the bedraggled Captain of the Guards actually saluted and bowed his head before Iscariot. His entire retinue followed the Captain’s lead, and for every bemused word that Iscariot muttered, four-dozen soldiers chuckled and bellowed as if someone was tickling them behind the ear.

Although he knew he should have been appreciative, Iscariot couldn’t help but feel terrified by the turn of events. When the King called an emergency council to discuss the recent attack, for which the court jester’s presence was also required, Iscariot absolutely believed his encounter with the Princess would be held to the question, and he’d then be banished to the dungeons for the remainder of his life.

But at least it would give everypony something to laugh at for a while.