Eating Dessert First

by alarajrogers

Rating: teen
Tags: Main 6, Princess Luna, Spike, Random, Discord, Princess Celestia, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Length: 34283

Sometimes I get impatient with how long I write and how long it will take before I get to a part I want to write, and then I write it anyway. This is a compendium of snippets from future parts of my fics.

Sometimes I get impatient with how long I write and how long it will take before I get to a part I want to write, and then I write it anyway. (Which is why I'm calling this Eating Dessert First; it doesn't have much to do with dessert, no more than my other fics anyway, but it's me writing the "good parts" first.) This is a compendium of snippets from future parts of my fics, or single-idea scenes where I don't know if I want to write the rest of the fic, or character practice scenes -- basically anything pony that's out of its larger context, assuming there's going to be a larger context.

Because this is a compendium, it's tagged Random because literally any other tag (with the exception of Second Person, which I will probably never write in) could be included. I'll mark individual chapters with what tags they ought to have and what characters are in them.

Note: Cover art probably has nothing to do with the actual fic. Unless I do decide to do a snippet about Celestia and cake.

Published 2016-04-11 22:40:01 UTC
Last updated 2017-05-04 23:48:11 UTC

Tea Party Without Tea (Last Draconequus; Slice of Life; Celestia, Discord, Luna)

Note: set in Last Draconequus, sometime around chapter 6 or 7, shortly after Discord has been rescued and allowed to live at the palace.

The sun team had retired for the night, having put away the sun, and with them, most of the rest of the castle staff as well, including Papa. Celestia was supposed to be in bed, like a good Princess, but she was old enough to make her own decisions regarding her bedtime, in her opinion, and there was something much more interesting and important to do than going to bed.

Her servants had informed her that the creature had skittered off before the doctors had been able to examine it, that it had been corralled and led through the servants' passage into a bathroom where a bath had been drawn for it, and it had promptly dived under the water and refused to come out. Apparently it was amphibious. After it had been permitted to stay underwater for an hour or so, and after it had been observed playing with the soaps and shampoos, enough to have gotten itself clean, they had drained the tub and presented it with fluffy towels, which it had grabbed with its teeth and then run again. Since the bathroom, of course, led into a bedroom, and they'd had the outer door to the bedroom locked, it had gone straight in there, hidden under the bed, and refused to come out.

This wasn't how Celestia wanted to welcome her new friend to her home. When she'd talked him down she'd had ideas of how things would go, how they'd give him a bath and food and medical treatment and he'd be so grateful and happy and she could show him all around the castle and maybe teach him how to speak pony. She hadn't expected him to run away and hide under things. So she headed to the room he was hidden in, carrying supplies in a bag.

As she entered the room, the smell of scented shampoo hit her nostrils, and she wrinkled them. It smelled like he'd gone way overboard on the shampoo. Of course, who knew how long it had been since he'd had a bath? Had he ever even had a nice bath in his life? Had he even known what the shampoo was? All she knew about him was that the circus had abused him and treated him as an animal when he wasn't.

She knelt down by the side of the bed. When she peered under it she could just barely make out a pair of golden eyes, glowing dimly in the darkness. "You don't have to hide, you know," she said. "We're friends now. Nopony's going to hurt you." No response. "I brought food for us to share. Would you like some?"

That got him to crawl far enough that his muzzle was sticking out from under the bed, his eyes focused intently on her. Celestia had cared for enough animals to know he would bolt if she made any sudden moves. "You seem like you might be a meat eater, so I thought maybe you might like some dried fish?" She levitated the smoked, dried fish jerky over to him. He growled and swatted at it with his paw, tossing it aside. "Okay, so no fish." She drew a cheese wheel and a butterknife out of her bag, and sliced a wedge of the cheese out. "How about cheese?"

That got his attention. When she levitated the cheese wedge over to him, he grabbed it... and then scurried backward, back under the bed. Celestia sighed.

"You don't need to run or hide. I brought more stuff, you know. We could have a tea party." She set down two saucers, two cups and two plates. "Well, it won't really be tea, but we can pretend." On both plates, she arranged hay, a pile of nuts and fruit, a fresh salad with carrots and mushrooms, and a slice of vanilla cake with chocolate frosting. The muzzle reappeared.

"I just had a great idea!" Celestia got to her hooves – causing the muzzle to retreat back into the darkness under the bed – and began pulling books down from the bookcase with her horn. They were large, weighty tomes containing classics of literature, there to impress guests more than to be read. Before long she had stacked three pillars of books in a rough triangle, or rather, a pentagon where the two closest bedposts, at the head and foot of the bed respectively, were the other two points. Then she yanked the top blanket off the bed, tied two corners of it to the tops of the posts so it conjoined to the canopy on the bed, and ran the other two corners to the left and right pillars of books. It stretched far enough that she could lay books on it to hold it in place, but not enough to complete the effect she wanted. Two other blankets added to the mix, tied to the middle of the bedposts by one corner and draped around two of the pillars, one to left and center and the other to right and center, and now she had a proper tent, held up by the bed and book pillars. The downy comforter folded at the foot of the bed and the various soft pillows at the head went to making a comfy place to lay down on. "There we go. Now we have a fort!"

"Aaaaooow," came from under the bed. It sounded more like a cat yowling than a word.

"I'm sorry, did you hurt yourself?"

"Aaaooow! Aaaooowt! Naaaooow!" The whole head emerged, a furious expression on his face, and his paw pointing at where the door was, beyond the edge of the tent.

"Oh – oh, wait! Are you saying 'out'?" Rapid nod. "Are you telling me to get out?" Another angry nod. "Well, I won't. This is my home you're staying in, and I have every right to be in any room I like. But I won't hurt you, and I did bring you food. Didn't you see the food?" She pushed the plate slightly closer to the bed.

His eagle talon shot out and grabbed the plate, but when he tried to pull it back under the bed, she tugged it back. "No, no. I want you to eat with me. Come on out and have a tea party with me! I have a lot of drinks." Celestia levitated the ceramic jugs out of the bag and untwisted the caps. "You can have lemonade, chocolate milk, apple juice – oh, you like one of them?" He had crawled forward, warily, half his body out from under the bed now. "Point to the one you want."

He pointed. With a single, exotic digit. Celestia had to control a shiver of excitement at how strange and different he was. She'd seen griffins in pictures, but never met any – and while he had limbs like a griffin, his body shape was completely different. "Caa caooow."

"Chocolate milk? Very well, good sir." She took his cup and poured the chocolate milk into it, then levitated it back over to his saucer. He came out the rest of the way to take the cup, but was still crouched on all fours, tail curled around his legs with the end of it twitching, backed up against the bed.

The creature stretched his paw to grab the cup, drank it in a single gulp, then grabbed at the fruits and nuts with a paw and shoveled them into his mouth as fast as he could. He then devoured the cake, ignoring the greens and the hay. Celestia was still nibbling at her salad when he pushed the plate and cup at her. "Mroar?"

"You want more?" Another nod. "I'll be happy to, but you have to come out and sit with me."

The creature's eyes flicked to the left and right of her. Apparently satisfied with whatever he was checking, he crawled the rest of the way forward and sat up by the place she'd set for him. "Sssssiiih. Naaaoow mrooooar."

"That isn't the polite way to ask," Celestia said, pouring him another cup of chocolate milk. "I say, 'Would you like some more?', and you say, 'Yes, please.'"

"Yehsssss hfreeeasss." His sibilant s sounds were almost a lisp, but not quite – a sound more like a snake hiss crossed with the "th" sound than a real s. But he obviously understood everything she was saying, and had probably practiced speaking pony. For a creature that didn't seem to be able to make the same sounds ponies could, he was doing quite well.

She set his cup down on his saucer. "Now say 'thank you' and I'll give you more fruit and nut mix."

"Sssssaan gyoh."

"That's very good," Celestia said encouragingly. "We'll have you speaking pony well enough that anypony can understand you in no time. Want more cheese?"

"Yehhsss hfreeaz." This time he'd managed to make the "z" sound that occurred at the end of please.

"You're doing very well. Try to say cheese. It's almost like please, so I bet you could do it." She levitated another cheese wedge over to him.

"Sssheeeez."

She poured herself lemonade. "So they told us your name was Mixup, but since you can't really speak pony, I don't see how you could have told them your name. Is that your name?"

He growled and shook his head. "That's a 'no', I assume."

"Nroh."

"What is your name?"

He said something that she couldn't comprehend well enough to ever repeat it. "I'm sorry, I don't think I can pronounce that. Would it be okay if I still called you Mixup?"

"Nroh!"

"Hmm. Let's see what nickname we can give you, then, until you're able to tell us your name in pony. What about Mishmosh?" He shook his head. "Uh... Hodgepodge?"

With an irritated expression, he went over to the center pillar holding the tent up and shoved it, knocking all the books over, and making the sides of the tent fall down. "That was rude!" Celestia snapped. "Just because I haven't been able to come up with a good name for you—"

He shook his head. "Naaaymuh," he said, scooped up a pile of books in his forelegs, and dropped them higgledy-piggledy.

Was he trying to tell her what his name meant? "What are you trying to say? Something about this means your name? Books?" He shook his head. "Well, if it's not books, then all I see is a mess." That got a smile and a rapid nod. "Your name is Mess?" This time the creature made a gesture she didn't understand, his thumb and foredigit on his talon held almost together, pinching an imaginary tiny item with a small gap between his digits. Celestia had no idea what that meant. "Do you want me to call you Mess?" The talon gesture again, and a nod. "Okay, that's a silly name but if you want that to be your nickname, I guess it's okay."

She used her telekinesis to repair the tent. Mess didn't help; he spent the entire time drinking repeated draughts of chocolate milk out of his teacup, a talon digit crooked through the mysterious rounded handle on the side. Celestia had always wondered what that thing was for; unicorns didn't need it and other ponies couldn't use it. Apparently it was so that creatures with opposable thumbs and digits, like griffins and minotaurs, could use them.

No sooner had she finished rebuilding the tent than the edge of it pushed inward, rustling. Celestia gasped, startled, and Mess dropped his cup, spilling chocolate milk on the blanket, and darted back under the bed. The blanket took the shape of a foal, and then a familiar blue leg pushed out from underneath it. In a moment, Luna had gotten her head out into the tent.

"There you are, sister! I knew you were awake!"

Mess stuck his head back out from under the bed, slowly. Celestia sighed.

"Luna, you're supposed to be in bed."

"But you're awake!"

"I'm older than you."

"But how am I supposed to sleep when my sister is conducting diponatic relations with a new race?" Luna asked. "I have to learn how to do these things because what if you hurt your hoof and I have to do things for you someday?" Mess, who had by now fully crawled out from under the bed, started chuckling.

"It's diplomatic, not diponatic, and I'm not conducting diplomatic relations with a new race. I'm trying to make a new friend."

"Oh! Well, that is a thing I should know how to do too!" Luna plopped herself down and started lifting the lids to the various ceramic jugs. "Hmm. Lemonade, chocolate milk, apple juice... where is the iced tea?"

"I didn't bring any. Iced tea keeps ponies awake, and it's late at night."

"I drink iced tea at night all the time."

"And your nurse is always complaining that you never sleep. Where is she now?"

"Nursey is sleeping, of course. She went to bed only a little while after the moon went up. I pretended to be asleep, but the moon is so pretty and big! How am I supposed to sleep through this?"

By now Mess was laughing outright. Luna grinned at him. "Do you like to stay up at night too, weird creature thing?"

"Don't call him that. He's asked us to call him Mess."

"He can talk now?"

"Not very well." She turned to Mess. "Say 'yes please.'"

"Mroar caacow." He pointed at the chocolate milk.

"He sounds like a cat," Luna opined.

Celestia ignored that. "Oh, right," she said to Mess. "Would you like some more chocolate milk?"

"Yehsh hrfreeths."

Luna laughed. "That doesn't sound anything like 'yes, please!'"

"But we would be just as bad at his language. Mess, could you say your name again? Your real name?"

He repeated it. In amidst the catlike noise, Celestia thought he'd said something like "Fuu tiaouh." She tried to repeat that back to him, making him laugh again.

"I brought toast," Luna announced, as Celestia poured Mess more chocolate milk and then gave Luna an apple juice. "It's buttered. I brought jams for it too." She removed a cloth-wrapped baguette from her own saddlebag, and pulled out a butterknife and a few small jars, then set the baguette down and opened the cloth. It was, in fact, a hot, toasted, buttered baguette, sliced in half longways.

"How did you do that? The kitchen is closed."

"Is not. The moon raisers and the night guard need to eat too. I just asked the night cook. Moon Cake always makes things for me because we have the same name."

Mess raised a furry black eyebrow. "'Luna' means 'Moon' in old Minosian," Celestia said to Mess. "It's said that a lot of our language comes from that region, including the word 'pegasus'."

Mess pointed at the bread. "Thoooass."

"Yes, that's toast. Do you want some?"

"Hfreess." He couldn't seem to manage the letter 'p'; he was making an overly strong "h" instead, huffing it out so it sounded like a cross between an h and an f.

"Do you want jam?" Luna asked. "I brought blackberry, peach, apple butter, orange marmalade, and strawberry."

Mess nodded. When Luna asked "Which one?" he pointed to all of them. Luna pouted. "I didn't bring that much toast."

"Here." Celestia broke off a piece of toast and gave it to him. "You can put whatever jams on it you like." She opened all the jam jars and set them down, with the butterknife next to them.

Mess did not use the butterknife. He scooped jam out of the tiny jars with a single curved claw from his talon, dumped it on the toast, and then used the back of the claw to spread it. He also covered the same slice of toast with some of every jam they had, overlapping in several places.

"Say thank you now," Celestia said.

"Sssangyaoou naaoow," Mess said.

"No, I didn't mean you had to say the word 'now', I meant..." She trailed off at the huge grin on his face and the small giggle. "Oh! You're joking!" Her face felt warm. How could anyone have ever mistaken this creature for unintelligent? He knew two phrases in Equestrian and he was already using them to make jokes.

"I still think he sounds like a cat," Luna said.

"Yes, but we have to teach him to speak Equestrian. I think if he practices, he'll get to the point where everypony can understand him, even if he has a strange accent."

Mess shook his head. "You don't think ponies will understand you?"

He made a slashing motion with his paw while shaking his head. "Unrsssan, yesssh. Unrsssan aaarr."

"Understand arrr? I don't understand what you mean."

He rolled his eyes, looking frustrated. "Unrsssan raaiik hfoniie."

"Understand like a pony? But that's what I said."

He shook his head. "Nroh asssen. Saaoon raaaik hfonie. Saahmaaie."

It took her several seconds to get it. "You're saying someday you'll sound like a pony and you won't have an accent?"

Mess nodded eagerly. "Saaahmaaie."

"Well, you've got quite a way to go," Luna said. "Because I can't understand anything you're saying."

"There are sounds he can't make," Celestia said. "He's saying 'somay' rather than 'someday' and 'unersan' rather than 'understand' because I don't think he can really make t or d sounds, and he definitely can't say p, so when he says 'pony' it comes out sounding like 'phony'. And all his l sounds are coming out like r's."

"Hrakisss," Mess said. "Hrakiss ross."

That one was beyond Celestia's ability to translate. "Um, yes, I guess so. Would anypony like me to read a story?"

"I would!" Luna waved a forehoof in the air eagerly. After a moment Mess copied her.

"Okay." Celestia lifted the edge of the tent and slipped through it so she could see the spines of the books. Most of them were entirely too boring to entertain a foal Luna's age, and she had no idea what Mess would like, but finally she found a collection of old folk tales. She skimmed through it, and was delighted to see one she thought would work well for both of them.

She crawled back into the tent with the book, having replaced it in the structure with a copy of a book that wasn't even in Equestrian, and flipped it open to the correct page. "This is 'The Goat Sister.' Once upon a time there was a queen who was about to give birth. The king and all the court were eager to see the new little princess, but to their great surprise, the queen gave birth to a kid, a little goat filly. What was even stranger was that she held a wooden spoon in her hoof, and wore a tattered hood on her body. As everypony gasped in surprise, the little goat filly said, 'Oh, don't worry so much! My sister will be perfectly normal and beautiful, you'll see!' And as she scrambled to her hooves and got out of the way, the queen gave birth to the foal everypony had been expecting, a beautiful little princess."

Luna and Mess listened raptly at first, as Celestia told the tale of how Tatterhood, the goat princess, and Sweet Heart, the pony princess, grew up as best of friends and watched out for each other, even though all the courtiers spoke ill of Tatterhood behind her back, claiming that she was ugly, that she was evil, that her strange magic was monstrous and that the queen must have consorted with a goat to produce her. Then a prince who came courting Sweet Heart turned out to be a wicked warlock in disguise, who transformed Sweet Heart into a pig. Tatterhood took Sweet Heart with her on an adventure, where they came through many trials, to restore Sweet Heart back into a pony.

By the time she got to the end, though, where Sweet Heart was getting married to a prince who had helped them in their trials, and Tatterhood had just revealed to the handsome earth pony who was captain of the prince's guard that she could turn into a beautiful pony herself anytime she wanted to, but he told her he thought she was more beautiful when she was herself... both Luna and Mess were asleep, leaning on her respective sides. Or rather, Luna was leaning against her left side, and Mess, on her right side, had somehow managed to slither over her back in his sleep, so his head was now on her left side too, near her head, and his body was draped over her back.

Celestia sighed. If she tried to move, she'd wake both of them up, and it was so hard to get Luna to sleep at night, and Mess was likely to startle and hide under the bed again. Besides, the whole reason she'd filled the tent fort with pillows was so that they could sleep in it if they wanted to; she'd wanted to give Mess a safe den to sleep in where he felt protected from intruders, but also where she could interact with him, and, well, that was exactly what she'd ended up with.

It was far past her own bedtime, and the soft little pony with her downy feathers and the skinny draconequus with thick fluffy fur around his middle were both warm and cuddly, though Mess had too many bones that she could feel for her comfort and she was definitely going to have to help the cooks make sure he filled out. Celestia pulled a pillow close with her telekinesis and laid her head on it, putting her forelegs under it. Morning was coming soon, and ever since she'd gotten her cutie mark a few months ago, Celestia couldn't sleep through the sun raising ceremony anymore; the feel of the magic of the unicorns raising the sun always filled her with restless energy, and now that she was known to have a special talent for sun-raising, she was expected to help out anyway. When Celestia participated, the number of unicorns required to raise the sun went from 12 to 9 – 7 if she pushed herself -- and if they kept the original twelve then it wasn't nearly as burdensome as it usually was for any one of the others. So she really should have gone to sleep hours ago. She certainly didn't have time to extricate herself from her sister and her new friend and go to her bedroom. And that was exactly what she would tell anypony who asked.

She set all of the food supplies out of the tent with her horn, so the servants could get to them. And then she let sleep take her.

Author's Note

So those of you who've been reading Last Draconequus know that it's a plot point that Discord can't yet make the same sounds ponies can. This isn't a general draconequus inability; this is due to the transformation Discord underwent and subsequent isolation from anyone to talk to. But I was thinking to myself, what sounds is he making that he's mistaken for an animal? And then it occurred to me that the draconequui originally come from the Terra Fabula equivalents of China and Japan, and Mandarian Chinese sounds to English speakers (or at least to this English speaker) as if it's catlike. Not that Chinese people sound like cats, but that if cats spoke a language they'd sound Chinese.

So. Discord's vocal range is actually wider than a pony's, but it doesn't help him, because at this point there are sounds he can't make, and his overlap with pony sounds is mostly in the range of vowels, nasals and sibilants. His command of his own language would be hard to understand for another draconequus, but they'd manage; his ability to speak pony is very, very impaired, but he understands it perfectly.

His real name is Futyaoei, based on the Chinese word for discord, "bu tiaohe" (there are tonal accents in this that I can't reproduce with my keyboard.) As an adult Discord doesn't have a sense that the draconequus word is his "real" name, though; his name is a concept, and therefore the word Discord in any language is his name. He doesn't know the pony word for discord yet in this snippet.

Celestia is about 12, Discord about 10, Luna about 6. Yes, Luna is precocious. She's well educated, as behooves a princess, and she reads a lot.

I am of course using the convention that Equestrian is English. It probably isn't, even in modern times, and certainly in this time period it would have been a lot more like Shakespearean English. However, I am not good enough at Shakespearean English to write an entire novel in it, so assume this is being translated into modern vernacular.

The story Celestia reads is based on "Tatterhood", an actual fairy tale. In Tatterhood, the titular character is born riding on a goat, and her sister's head is replaced with the head of a sheep. I made the sister transform into a pig because sheep are speaking animals in Equestria and pretty similar to goats.

Celestia's cutie mark is not for raising the sun all by herself; she's currently a unicorn. She won't be able to do that until she's an alicorn. But normally, unicorns suffer enormous strain from raising the sun; even ones aligned with the sun, with sun-themed cutie marks, have a hard time with it and burn themselves out, though not permanently (whereas non-sun-aligned unicorns can potentially permanently damage their magic, and many have.) Celestia can cover for 3 - 5 unicorns all by herself; she's an enormously powerful unicorn, second only to Starswirl, and she's very strongly connected to the sun.

Luna is currently a pegasus, and too little to have a cutie mark.

What Discord says that Celestia doesn't understand is "Practice lots." He's planning to practice pony until he's fluent and accentless. As we all know, he succeeds.

Ocean (Sequel to Ice; Drama; Twilight, Spike, Discord)

About an hour after Spike had woken up, and by Twilight's best guess over two hours since their nightmare trek through the frozen darkness had begun, Discord finally dropped dead.

At least, she assumed he was dead. She couldn't hear his heartbeat when she pressed her head to his chest, no puffs of air steamed from his mouth or nostrils, and he wouldn't get up and move when Spike bit him. Spike's threats to bite him – occasionally followed through on – had kept him awake and moving for the past hour, despite multiple collapses to four knees or to his belly, but for the past twenty minutes or so he'd been moving slower and slower, and been less and less responsive. He hadn't spoken at all for five minutes before the last collapse. She should have known something was wrong then. But what could she have possibly done? Aside from not have gotten any of them into this situation in the first place?

She had to leave him there, lying flat on the ice that had killed him, his expression still contorted with pain. She had to save Spike. Despite being fully reptilian, and therefore having no means of generating body heat in the absence of magic, Spike was still alive. He was smaller than Discord, more compact, and being a dragon he'd been hotter to begin with. Twilight had tried to keep them both going longer by having Spike ride Discord, a blanket tied around him and wrapped around the draconequus' middle, so they could share body heat. Discord was part mammal and could make body heat, just not enough to compensate for his reptilian parts. His scales hadn't given him any protection against the cold. She'd thought that putting them together would keep Discord alive longer, and maybe it had. Maybe he would have died of the cold half an hour ago without Spike. It didn't matter. She hadn't made it to the portal in time to save him.

It was too cold to cry.

She went back to carrying Spike, the blanket tied around him and her middle now. He was much too cold. Dragons were supposed to be hot; Spike normally felt like a hot summer day in a small package. Now he was a cool and breezy autumn. Twilight wanted to keep him awake by talking to him, but she had so little energy left and she needed it all to put one hoof in front of the other. One hoof in front of the other. Hoof, hoof, hoof, hoof. So cold.

Spike wasn't talking anymore either but she could still hear his breathing, raspy and slow but still there. He'd gone into some sort of torpor. She hoped. She hoped he wasn't dying. Of course he was dying; she was dying too. The only reason she was better off than Spike and Discord was that she was a pony; quite aside from being a mammal, she was covered entirely with fur and feathers, and her species had survived the far north and the windigos. It didn't mean that she was doing well, stumbling along through the southern polar continent of a planet without magic, without winter gear, freezing in the darkness. It just meant she'd live through this horror longer than they would.

No. If Spike died, she was just going to give up and lay down on the ice. She had to make it to the portal. She had to save him.

One hoof in front of the other. So cold. It's all your fault. You screwed up that spell and now Spike is going to die and it's your fault. No. Won't let it happen. One hoof. One hoof. So cold. Can't feel my hooves. Can't really feel much of anything actually. Discord said that an hour ago and now he's dead. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, Discord, you shouldn't have tried to come through and rescue us. I know that was what you were trying to do because if it was true that you were just curious you wouldn't have admitted it. Whenever you did something to be a jerk or just for no good reason you claimed you had a good and noble reason and whenever you actually had a good and noble reason you claimed you were just doing it for fun. You said you were just curious so that means you were trying to save me and Spike and now you're dead. I'm so sorry. One hoof in front of another. What am I going to tell Fluttershy? I haven't felt Spike move in a while. He has to be breathing. Please still be breathing. Oh thank Celestia I hear it now. Don't know how long he can last. Don't know how long I can. All my fault. So sorry. So cold. One hoof in front of the other.

For several seconds she stared stupidly at the ice in front of her, wondering why she had stopped moving and what it was she had stopped here for, before instinct and sense percolated up to her half-frozen brain. This was the portal. She could feel it. It was here.

She'd expected to have Discord with her to help open it. But she couldn't doom Spike just because Discord was dead. She had to do this herself.

Twilight opened herself up to the flow of mana, as wide as she possibly could. There was nothing in the air, nothing in the ambient... but there were currents, running deep underground. In the absence of any other magic, her earth pony side could feel them for once; it wasn't usual for her to feel earth magic, not back home where there was so much other magic competing for her attention, but here it was all there was. She drew it up through her hooves, slowly, painstakingly, like trying to suck a really thick milkshake through a narrow straw, and pushed it back outward through her horn.

The portal glowed. It was active.

She pulled Spike down off her back. "Spike, Spike, wake up. Wake up. I found the portal, Spike, wake up."

"Whhuu."

"I need you to wake up. I need to send you through the portal with a way to pull you back so you can see if it's right." The fact that the portal had fractured at least once, with the intake location and the exit point so far away from each other, meant it could have fractured multiple times. There was no guarantee this portal went back to Equestria or that it was even safe.

"Sllleee."

"No, you have to wake up!" She shook him, hard. "It's the portal, Spike, we could be safe, we could be warm again, but you have to wake up to test it!"

"Jusss go thruh."

"I can't do that, it'll close behind me as soon as I go. It has to be you because it's not your magic that opened it. Spike, come on! Don't you want to be warm?" She was starting to shake. The warmth that had temporarily flowed through her as she'd pulled on the magic was fading, and she couldn't seem to reach the magic anymore, as if she'd already gotten everything she could reach from here.

"Oh. Nkeh." He blinked and roused, sluggishly.

"We have to tie the blanket around... around my neck. Then you hold it and step through." There wouldn't be enough play if it went around her barrel. "Hold on tight in case it's a cliff or something."

"Uh..."

"Spike, just hold on!"

She waited until she saw him actually close his claws tightly around the blanket, and then nudged him to stick his head through. He leaned forward, his head disappearing into the portal... and then he pulled it back, fully awake now. "It's a beach! Twilight, it's a beach! It's warm! And an ocean! And sun! And a beach!" His voice was hoarse and raspy, but excited.

Twilight sagged slightly with relief. Spike was safe. Whatever else happened, he'd survive this. "Go on through," she said.

"Okay," he said, and started forward, then hesitated with one leg in the portal. "Twilight? Aren't you coming?"

"I have to go back for Discord."

"Oh, okay." Spike went almost completely through the portal, and then scrabbled backward before he was fully through, falling on his tail and looking up at her. "Wait! Isn't Discord... isn't he dead?"

Twilight nodded. Spike looked bewildered, and a little bit angry. "So why do you have to go back for him? He's dead, Twilight. You could die in the cold trying to get him and it won't even help him because he's dead!"

Every time Spike said the word "dead", a stab of horrible guilt went through Twilight's heart. "I can't leave him," she said. "I have to bring him back to Equestria. Fluttershy..."

"Fluttershy would understand. She wouldn't want you to risk your life to bring back a dead body."

"Stop saying that!" Twilight stomped her hoof. Tears welled, and she had to fight them down, because in this temperature tears could destroy her eyes. "I know he's dead! But I can't leave him there! He – he should be buried in Equestria. Or at least somewhere that there's chaos. He hated this place. I can't leave him here forever!"

"Then I'll help," Spike said, standing up.

"No, you won't," Twilight said, and shoved. "You'll be safe! I'll come back when I can!" Spike windmilled, trying to get his balance, and Twilight shoved him again, pushing him through the portal. It was half a portal, just like the one they'd come through to get here, and therefore one-way; once his body was fully through it, he wouldn't be able to come back.

A warm beach, in sunshine. He'd be safe. She didn't deserve to be safe and warm yet. She'd gotten Discord killed. Spike was saved, but she had to retrieve Discord's body before she could let herself go to safety as well.

The trip back was faster. It wasn't any warmer – in fact without Spike on her, it was colder. But his weight, and her fear for his fate, weren't burdening her any longer, and she'd managed to pull up that tiny bit of magic, restoring some of her alicorn hardiness. The only light was moonlight and starlight, and her hoofprints hadn't made much of a dent in the thick eternal ice, but in many places there was a light sprinkling of snow that clearly showed what way she'd come. She didn't think it was a full half hour before she reached Discord's body.

Twilight winced. His lips had drawn back, making him look as if he were snarling at something. When she'd left him, the expression frozen, literally, on his face had been one of pain; now he looked bestial. His eyes were slightly open; they'd been shut when he'd dropped. She tried to close them with her hoof, but they, too, were literally frozen in place. She felt bad because she knew it would have bothered him; he'd complained of the horrible expression he'd been stuck with when they'd turned him to stone, often enough. But there was nothing she could do.

At first she couldn't figure out how to carry him. She tried tying the blanket around his tail, so she could tie the other end around her barrel and drag him, but it was Spike's blanket and it wasn't nearly big enough. With trembling, ice-cold hooves, she tried to get him onto her back. Earlier, when she'd tried to carry him, she'd been driven almost to her knees by the weight. But that was when he'd been struggling, trying to climb off of her (ironically because he thought he was too heavy for her), and before she'd drawn up magic from deep within this planet with her hooves, renewing her earth pony strength. He wasn't impossibly heavy anymore. But he was frozen stiff, legs splayed outward and body rigid, so he kept rolling or sliding off of her.

She tried to use her telekinesis, but she didn't have nearly enough energy for that; a single spark lit up from her horn and then faded. Finally she pulled more mana from down deep – no one place in this frozen wasteland could give her a lot, but if all she needed was strength, it was enough – and used her strength to bend his body into a U shape. He wasn't literally frozen; he was icy cold, but his body was still somewhat pliant, not yet icicle-hard. It took a lot of effort, but she managed to do it without breaking him. Not that it mattered anymore; she could break every bone in his body. He wouldn't feel it or suffer from it anymore. But she wanted to bring him home as intact as possible. Already she couldn't bear to think of how she'd explain this to Fluttershy. Or Princess Celestia. Or Pinkie.

Once Discord's body was bent into a shape where she could lay him on her back and he'd mostly stay on, she used the blanket to tie him onto her, holding him in place. It was hard – she had no dexterity. No telekinesis, and her hooves were both frozen and very, very low on the magic that allowed them to function similarly to paws. Plus, Discord's body on top of her made it very difficult to reach behind or underneath herself to tie anything. Eventually she got the blanket tied, and set off, returning back the way she'd come.

There were two sets of hoofprints now, making the trail easier to follow, but Discord was much heavier than Spike – not for his size, Spike was definitely far denser than Discord had been even alive, but in total. And Twilight was exhausted and close to freezing to death herself. The fact that she could draw mana, sometimes, if she was willing to stand still on the ice and pull on it for what felt like forever, meant that she could manifest earth pony strength and stamina, but even an earth pony might drop dead of this cold. Discord's fur on her back started ice cold, but slowly warmed up, like a blanket; his body, however, was still cold enough to be sucking heat out of hers more than his fur warmed her.

One hoof in front of another. She knew there was an end to this. She'd been there. She just had to get back there again. One hoof in front of another. So cold, and the weight so heavy. If she set him down here surely Fluttershy would understand?... no. She couldn't abandon him. He was Equestrian; he should be laid to rest in Equestria, not in this ice cold land where nothing changed and everything was predictable and there was no chaos. How many hoofsteps? She hadn't counted the first or the second time. Could she estimate? One hoof in front of another. No way to know. She could guess how much time it was taking but she knew that her own perceptions of time would be skewed.

By the time she reached the portal again, her knees had given way and dropped her to the ice five times, and she was trembling so violently the blanket that held Discord on was on the verge of untying itself from the vibrations. But there it was, beckoning before her. Safety. Warmth. Spike, on the other side. Without hesitation, she stumbled toward the portal and flung herself through.

Into ocean.

Twilight spluttered and struggled. The water was warm, almost shockingly so after the cold she'd endured, making her limbs tingle. Spike had said it was a beach! She fought to get her head above the waves. Yes, there was a beach, not very far away. Her portal was even more badly damaged than she'd thought; the endpoint was drifting. Which meant, in the hour or so it had taken her to retrieve Discord's body, that the portal was out to sea far enough that Twilight had to fight undertow.

The only bodies of water near Ponyville were a placid lake and a river that was usually calm unless something had upset Stephen Magnet. Canterlot had none, outside of swimming pools and the artificial reservoir higher up on the mountain that nopony was allowed to go near unless they worked there. Twilight had little experience with swimming in the ocean, and none with doing so with numb hooves, a dead draconequus on her back, and an undercurrent pulling at her. She thrashed, and Discord slid off of her back, falling to the seabed below and carried away by the tide, along with her saddlebag. I'm sorry, she thought, miserably, but at least the ocean was chaotic, ever-changing and teeming with life. She'd wanted to bring him home for burial, but he would probably have accepted burial at sea as a good choice.

And she couldn't hold onto him right now or she'd join him. She might anyway.

"TWILIGHT!"

Was that Spike? She tried to orient to his voice, paddling as hard as she could to try to get afloat. The water wasn't terribly deep yet; if Discord had been alive he could probably have stood in the water and been able to keep his head above it, and perhaps Celestia could have kept her head above if she'd been there, rearing. Except that the current was strong enough that a rearing pony would be quickly swept away.

"TWILIGHT! SWIM! THE SHORE'S JUST OVER HERE!"

The sky was covered with dark clouds, but there was enough light that she could see Spike, a bright spot of purple against the shoreline. Anything further he might have yelled to her was lost to the roaring of the waves as she was pulled under again. Her lungs were burning and there was no magic she could draw; pegasi could control airborne water, but there was no magic usable to a pegasus under water, and while the ley lines were closer to the surface of the earth here, they were still underground. She'd have to touch land with her hooves, and the land of the sea bed was too far below for her to reach easily. This was the same planet; she wasn't home, so her unicorn magic had nothing to draw. Gasping, she broke the surface again, to find the wind whipping and fat raindrops splattering on her.

She tried to go under, to swim in a straight line, but she couldn't keep her eyes open under water; the salt burned. When she came up, though, the wind was blowing even harder, flinging salt spray and raindrops into her face, making it hard to get enough air into her lungs. The waves, more violent than in Equestria, crashed over her head. She couldn't see the spot of purple anymore. The sky had turned dark, the eerie gray color of a sky completely covered with thunderheads; the pegasi almost never set up such a violent storm, but she'd been caught in one in the Everfree once.

For a long time she bobbed and struggled in the waves. At one point the tide yanked her downward and then crashed down over her head, pulling her down, down under the water, to skid across the sandy bottom. Twilight took the opportunity to pull magic from the ley line under the ground. Magic surged into her, nothing like what she'd have available to her in Equestria but far more than she'd been able to draw in the frozen wasteland. Using the magic, she propelled herself to the surface. It wasn't telekinesis, it was earth pony magic – strength and endurance. She swam, trying to use her wings underwater to help with propulsion, but the sky was too dark and there was too much rain and she couldn't see the shore anymore. She swam until her legs and wings burned with agony and her throat was raw from breathing in spray and occasional salt water and she couldn't bear to keep swimming anymore... and still she hadn't reached the shore.

She was going to die out here. The knowledge sank into Twilight slowly, bit by bit, as the burn of muscle fatigue in her legs increased. She'd lost sight of the shore, and she couldn't orient herself, and she couldn't simply float and use her wings and the buoyancy of her body to hold her up, because the waves were too violent and chaotic, one moment bearing her up on a swell, the next dragging her down, and moments after that pouring over her head. When she tried to dive, to find the sea bed below and draw magic from it, she realized she was deeper than she'd known; two pony lengths and she hadn't reached bottom, and then she needed air and she couldn't find it, the dimness of the sky making it hard to tell up from down, and if it weren't for a fortuitous upswell throwing her toward air she might have drowned right then. She broke the surface, gasping, understanding that going down to the sea bed for more magic wasn't an option anymore. What she had was all she had.

The compass had been in the saddlebag that was lost when Discord had fallen off of her, and it wouldn't have helped anyway, because in this storm she couldn't read it and she didn't know what direction shore lay in. She was too far away to see or hear Spike. She had no idea where land was.

She was going to die.

Twilight continued to swim, because she didn't want to believe it. She'd survived so many things; how could this mistake kill her? She'd lived through the trek through the frozen polar continent, how could she die in a warm ocean? But Discord was dead, and if he could die, she could as well. Logically, she didn't have any hope. But she couldn't give up – even though she knew, sooner or later, her fatigue would force her to, and that there were no other options, and her death was inevitable... still, she couldn't give up. Her friends needed her. Spike needed her. Princess Celestia needed her. How could she let Flurry Heart grow up without an aunt? The fatigue was dragging at her mind as well as her body, making her thoughts slow and illogical. I want to go back to Equestria. I want to see my friends again. She was so afraid... but also so tired, and exhaustion was steadily gaining ground against fear.

For moments she would stop swimming, and drift, half-conscious, thrown about by the waves. Then salt water in her eyes or against her muzzle would shock her awake again and she'd paddle frantically, gasping for breath. It happened over and over, and part of Twilight was terrified. Her body was betraying her, cutting out on her when she most needed it to survive. Sooner or later that short spell of unconsciousness would be just long enough for her lungs to fill with water, and then she was done. Already she spent more time coughing than breathing when she had her head above the waves. But it was getting harder and harder to feel fear, and the thought of just letting herself fall asleep was growing more and more enticing. Everything hurt so much. What if she just slept, and never woke up again? What if she didn't have to feel the pain of lungs burning and eyes on fire and muscles aching until she felt as if her limbs would fall off and the fear of death?

She had started to drift again when a shadow moving under the water caught her attention. Twilight came back to alertness, or what passed for alertness in her oxygen-deprived state, just in time for the tail of a sea serpent to come up out of the water and wrap around her barrel. She screamed, terror overcoming the hoarseness of her throat, and struggled... weakly, helplessly, no match for the sea serpent's strength. No... no, please... please, I want to be with Spike again... I want to see my friends, and my family, please...

The tail constricted, hard enough that Twilight blacked out for a moment, and then released. She tried to gasp for air. A second constriction made her vomit and cough violently, the sea water that had already gone into her mouth and nose coming back out. By the time it stopped constricting and releasing, Twilight had most of her lung capacity back but no energy whatsoever. She simply floated, pulled by the sea serpent, which was swimming rapidly, but holding her in a way that kept her head above the water. Twilight had no strength to fight anymore.

The sea serpent wasn't eating her. Was it taking her back to its nest? Lack of energy and the slow recovery from lack of oxygen made her stare dully at the sea serpent's red scales, wondering why they seemed familiar. They weren't home; she couldn't possibly know any sea serpents here, unless they were analogues of folks back home and honestly the only sea serpent she'd ever met was Steven Magnet, who technically was a river serpent. Discord had said this world was too far from theirs in the multiversal stream for there to be analogues; this was a human world, but different from the human world she'd already encountered, unlikely to have humans who'd correspond to ponies back home.

With the wind churning up the water and the rain pelting down, she couldn't see the sea serpent under the waves. But that didn't make any sense. The scales were bright red, really more of a brick red if Rarity were here to comment on it but still red, and wouldn't she be able to see red under the water? All she could make out was a dark, slender mass that was definitely not red. Why would a sea serpent have a body in a different color than his tail? Or her tail. It could be a female sea serpent.

Twilight then caught sight of something purple bobbing in the waves, much too far from shore, and screamed.

Spike could swim – Canterlot Palace had swimming pools, and Celestia had insisted that Spike needed swim time because dragons had to learn about water. Later Twilight had found out that this was entirely made up, intended to make Twilight herself exercise physically in a place where she'd be literally unable to carry a book, because the jogging and calisthenics while attempting to read had caused her several minor injuries. Most Western dragons, the type Spike was, actually couldn't swim and never went near water, because it put out their flame and they were too dense to be buoyant. Spike was secure enough that he didn't feel he needed his flame at the ready constantly, and in a swimming pool the negative buoyancy was easily counterbalanced by his strength and stamina. But there he was, in an ocean. He must have tried to swim out to rescue her – stupid! Stupid, stupid! He knew he couldn't float! He knew he didn't have the strength to manage a stormy ocean!

The sea serpent was making a beeline for him. Twilight screamed again, her voice hoarse and cracking, and she struggled, kicking the sea serpent's tail as hard as she could. This got her dunked, as the sea serpent dropped her, then grabbed her up again before she had a chance to swim away. It was one thing to let the serpent carry her off and eat her, but it wouldn't get Spike. She wouldn't allow it.

The tail now pinned all her limbs together up against her body. This gave her leverage. She pushed, trying to break the hold. This time the tail dunked her in what was probably a deliberate act, letting her trail underwater for the longest seconds of her life before letting her up again. She gasped, and panted, and tried to shake the salt water out of her eyes so she could see.

Once she could get her eyes open again, she saw Spike... bobbing in the waves up ahead. How? This ocean must be far, far more saline than the ones Twilight was familiar with, for a dragon to achieve buoyancy. Well, either that or Spike had managed to inflate his secondary lungs. Which would be an important step in learning to breathe weaponized fire rather than magical transport fire, and if he'd managed to finally do it she was proud of him, but there was still a sea serpent swimming straight for him. "Spike!" she yelled, but the crash of the waves made her voice sound tiny, and she saw no evidence that Spike was even conscious. (Or alive... no, no, don't think that, he'd have released the air if he was dead and he wouldn't be floating, he had to be alive.)

None of her screams or struggles availed her anything. The sea serpent drew up to Spike, overtook him... and then shot forward toward land. Where was Spike? Held in the serpent's claws? (Water serpents, unlike actual snakes, had forelimbs, with claws on them.) Being held underwater, drowning? She summoned the last dregs of magic from within... resulting in a single, sad spark from her horn, and nothing more.

And then the sea serpent heaved its upper body out of the water, standing, and with the salt water making her vision into a glittering, nonsensical kaleidoscope, at first all Twilight could perceive was the purple in the creature's golden forelimbs, and the generally dark color of the rest of the body. And then she managed to blink enough of the water out of her eyes to see.

It wasn't a sea serpent holding Spike and Twilight. It was Discord.

The water here was shallow enough that Discord could stand in it. He was holding Spike in his arms, and had lowered Twilight to the point where only her neck bobbed above the waves; his tail, wrapped around her barrel and legs, was underwater, and most of her body with it. Here, it was shallow enough that the powerful tides surging back and forth were dragging sand across her body, pulling it up from the sea bed.

Shock kept Twilight silent for a moment. When she finally managed "Discord?" it was a nearly inaudible croak.

He staggered forward against the pull of the waves, and fell when they returned to push, dropping both Spike and Twilight into the water... but they were almost to shore, the water just above Spike's head and low enough for Twilight to walk with her head above water. She grabbed Spike and tossed him on her back, and trotted forward against the ocean's back and forth buffeting until the water had receded enough for Spike to be fully exposed. She heard him cough and gag.

"Twilight? Twilight... I thought... I thought you were swept out to sea..."

Twilight couldn't even answer him; her throat was too hoarse. She needed fresh water, but probably wasn't going to get it. She staggered up the sandy bank and dropped to the ground, her legs splayed out under her, in total exhaustion.

A moment later there was a loud thump behind her, and a low-pitched wailing moan, the sound of a stallion in agony.

"Discord?" she said again, her voice rasping but at least audible this time. "You're alive..."

"Why?" Discord wailed, his voice just as hoarse as hers. "Why am I alive? It huuurttss, it hurts, everything hurts, please... why?"

"I don't know," Twilight said. "You were dead. I... I carried your body... we found the portal..."

"You both sound awful," Spike said. "Would anyone like coconut water? I found coconuts and they have water inside them."

"Oh Celestia yes," Twilight said. "Please."

"Won't help," Discord moaned. "Throat hurts less than everything else. Ohhh my tail, my back, my eyes, everything's burning, my tail feels broken... what did you do to me?"

"Pretty sure—" Twilight started to say, and coughed, the irritation in her throat keeping her from speaking. Spike brought her a fresh coconut and poked a hole in it with his claw for her. A bit of liquid sprayed out. With trembling hooves she took the coconut, put her lips to the hole, and drank the refreshing liquid inside in several gulps.

"Where's my coconut?" Discord whined.

"You said you didn't want one."

"I said it wouldn't help. I didn't say I didn't want one."

"Fine." Spike walked across the beach, back toward the tree line and his pile of coconuts.

"Pretty sure your tail isn't broken," Twilight said, her voice a little stronger now. "You were holding me with it."

"It didn't hurt this much until I got out of the ocean," Discord moaned. "I'm burning. Everything hurts. Why didn't you just leave me?"

"You were dead," Twilight said again, helplessly. "You weren't breathing, your heart wasn't beating—"

"I know what dead means." He took the coconut Spike handed him and devoured it savagely, ripping at it with his fang and claw, gulping down the water inside, then biting and chewing the coconut itself, tearing away the shell with his claws and eating the fibrous part along with the meat. With his mouth full he said, "I knew I died. I could tell. Why didn't you leave me?"

"I wanted to bury you in Equestria," Twilight said. "Or at least not leave you in an ice-cold place where there wasn't any chaos. But then you fell off my back because the portal drifted into the ocean, so I fell in."

"It huuuuurrrtttsss," Discord groaned again, closing his eyes. "I don't want to be alive. You should have left me."

"I could bean you over the head with a really big coconut," Spike said. "I don't think it would kill you, but maybe it would knock you out."

"Spike—"

"Twilight, he wants to be dead. If it hurts him that much... unless your magic is working, I think maybe we should knock him out."

"But why does he hurt? And why is he alive?" She coughed again. "I'm sorry, Spike, can I have another coconut? I'm really thirsty."

"I found a pond through the trees," Spike said. "The water's pretty yucky, though. I drank it but I think for a pony we'd have to distill it or something."

"We don't have a still, though."

"It's going to rain again," Discord pointed out.

"Oh, yeah, that's a good point! Those clouds aren't done with us by a long shot, I'm sure. Spike, we need more coconuts! Or better yet, half coconut shells! And anything else it looks like we could store water in!"

"I'm on it." Spike began waddling back to where he'd left the pile of coconuts. For the first time Twilight noticed how slowly he was moving. Their time in the cold had obviously drained him badly. She was sure he needed to sleep, and if she could find any gems to feed him that would be best.

"How did you come back?" Twilight asked Discord. "You were dead. I mean – I mean, I'm – s-so glad—" She swallowed hard. She couldn't break down crying. She was still too weak. "I'm glad you're alive – but how?"

"I'm not." Discord rolled onto his back, still moaning with pain. "It hurts, Twilight, make it stop, please..."

"What hurts? I mean, how does it hurt? And where?"

"Everywhere. It's burning. Literally every single part of my skin. And my eyes. And inside my ears. I don't feel any pain in my hoof or my antlers and I think those are the only places I don't."

"Could it be a bad reaction to the salt water?"

Discord glared at her briefly before closing his eyes again. "I once lived in the ocean for a month. Oh, my gills! Oh Chaos this hurts, they're on fire. No, it's not salt water! If anything it's air, it didn't hurt nearly as much while I was in the water!"

"I didn't know you had gills."

"You never asked." He was hyperventilating. "They hurt so much. When I was breathing with them they didn't hurt this much but they felt like they weren't working right. I couldn't get enough air."

"Do you know how you—how you revived?"

"Chaos. I remember it was peaceful and warm and I wasn't cold anymore and it was so boring but I was too tired to care and I was just going to sleep. We're in another dimension, I don't have magic, I won't be going to the Shadowlands and I won't be coming back. I'll just disintegrate eventually when the very last dregs of my magic are gone. But I didn't care because I was so tired and I didn't want to be cold anymore and if I just slept and never woke up that would be okay. And then something started waking me up, I could feel randomness and change all around me." He opened his eyes again. "The ocean. It was the ocean. I wasn't dead enough yet not to feel the chaos of the ocean. This one is so much stronger than at home. You feel those waves?"

"I almost died in them."

"They're so wild. This Moon's a lot bigger than ours and I'll bet its orbit is controlled by gravity. It's yanking the entire ocean around willy-nilly. So many waves and they're so fierce."

"I guess that's theoretically possible but wouldn't it eventually decay and crash into the planet?"

"If it's as big as I think it is then no because it has to be very far away. You can see it. Look."

Twilight looked up. "All I see is clouds."

"There's a break in the clouds. Right there."

"Are you sure that's not the sun?"

"Absolutely. No amount of clouds would ever turn the sun milky pale like that. Besides, the sun's over there." He pointed in a different direction. West, she assumed, since the sun was near the horizon and she could see the moon.

"Is the moon supposed to be out in the daytime like this?"

"Nothing prevents it. You just can't see it very well because the sunlight washes it out." A cold breeze kicked up. "Owww. Oh chaos this hurts. I'm going back in the water. It didn't hurt so much in the water."

"If the ocean is chaotic enough to bring you back from death, it might be giving you enough magic to heal, or at least ease your pain," Twilight said. "But I don't understand why you're hurting. If it was just your back and stomach maybe I could understand but all over?"

"Why would my back and stomach be understandable to you?"

Twilight sighed. "I had to bend you to get you to stay on my back. Rigor mortis was setting in. Your skin was frozen but your core body wasn't, but it was stiff from rigor, so I had to bend you or you just rolled off."

"I think you broke something," Discord whimpered.

"No, you were moving just fine in the water. I might have bruised you though. But I'm pretty sure nothing broke or you'd be bleeding from the mouth and your legs and tail wouldn't work, if I broke your stomach and your spine."

"It hurts."

"I know. I'm sorry. I thought you were dead. You were dead. I didn't know you would – oh, of course!" A sudden revelation interrupted her train of thought. "Your skin froze, Discord!"

"You said that already."

"I mean that's why it hurts! Cells that froze would have ruptured. You've basically suffered frostbite over your entire surface area. Go back in the ocean. If you don't gather enough magic from chaos to heal yourself... I don't know. Your skin might all come off or turn gangrenous or something."

"Oh, wonderful." Discord tried to get to his feet, and failed. He then tried to get up on four paws, and failed. He attempted to inch, and howled in pain. "AAAAAAH! Hurts it hurts oh chaos please am I bleeding? Did I rip it all off?" He fell onto his side, presumably to show Twilight his belly where he'd been trying to inch it along the beach.

"No, there's no bleeding." Twilight tried to heave herself up, but her limbs burned from the forever she'd been in the water, swimming for her life. "I can't – I'm sorry – I want to help but—"

"No, no, that's quite all right, after I saved you and your little dragon from drowning I suppose that merely calls it even if you're responsible for getting me to the ocean so I could survive, even though technically the entire reason I died was your fault because you're the one who made that portal, but of course if it's a little inconvenient to—" The rest of the sarcasm was cut off by a coughing fit that went on, and on, and turned horrible, gurgling noises coming from Discord as he hacked and wheezed, and blood coming up out of his mouth. His eyes were wide with fear, but he couldn't seem to stop coughing.

Was he going to die, again? Right in front of her? Fear for him gave her enough of an adrenaline shock that she could get to her hooves. She was wobbly, and weak, and ached everywhere, but Discord sounded like he was about to cough up a lung. Tears were streaming from his eyes, and he looked terrified.

Once again Twilight reached down, down into the earth below her hooves, to try to find magic and pull it up. There was less of it here than on the ocean bed, and she could actually feel it ebbing down into the ocean, slowly eroding away. But there was enough to fuel earth pony strength, for just a few moments. Long enough to pick up Discord, who screamed in pain, but at least that seemed to interrupt his coughing, and carry him a few heads down the beach, where she laid him down in the water. A moment later the rushing tide drew the water back out, away from him, and then came back in on a large swell, splashing over him.

Discord submerged his head when the next waves came rushing in, and lifted it when they ebbed. "Better," he said weakly, no longer coughing. "Sleep now." His head sagged again, and he lay limp and floppy on the sand.

Spike came back with many, many coconut shells, which he was arranging on the beach, in sand to hold them in place, high enough that until the tide rose the salt water wouldn't get to them. "We'll have to move those before high tide," Twilight said. "Nowhere on the beach is safe. But that's good for now." A few raindrops were spattering on her head.

"What about Discord?" Spike pointed, and Twilight followed with her eyes. The waves rushing in were actually lifting Discord, pulling him into the ocean, and then rushing back in and dropping him on the beach. He was either unconscious or sleeping, or possibly dead again although she hoped not, and in any case was doing nothing to anchor himself.

"Get me a vine, Spike. A really long vine, but strong. And a really long stick. Hurry!"

He couldn't hurry. He was obviously hurt, but he was gamely struggling onward. With what was left of the strength she'd drawn from the earth, Twilight staggered up the beach and into the trees. "I'll help."

"No, Twilight, I can do it..."

"We have to move fast, before the undertow drags Discord off." If the ocean was chaotic enough to strengthen him, maybe that would actually heal him, but he'd been complaining that his gills weren't working well. What if he woke up under water, choking for air like a sleep apnea patient, and he was too deep and disoriented to find the surface in time? Gills were on the surface of the body, generally. She didn't know where his were, but if they were on his outside like most creatures with gills, then they had frozen too, which meant they were probably in much worse shape than his lungs, even given that he was coughing up blood.

Despite his sluggishness, it was still Spike, who'd explored the island earlier while she'd still been in a frozen hell, who found the vines and the appropriately large stick. Drawing as much strength from the earth as she could, Twilight used everything she had to drive the stick into the sand high above the furthest point inland that the tides went. She had Spike, with his dexterous claws, tie one end of the vine to the stick, wrapping around it multiple times for security. The other end, he tied to Discord's tail while Twilight held onto Discord and kept him from floating off. Now Discord could bob in the waves, the water flinging him to and fro arrhythmically and not entirely predictably, but he wouldn't wash out to sea.

Finally Twilight and Spike could rest. The rain started coming down, but it wasn't quite at sky-opening yet. It filled several of the coconut shells quickly, and Twilight drank and drank, draining several of the shells for the rain to fill back up again.

"You're moving very slowly," Twilight said. "Are you hurt?"

"I can take it," Spike said, which was a "yes".

"Tell me. Maybe we can find something to treat you."

"Naah, it's just... I've got no fire and I just feel... really, really weak and run-down. Thought maybe I was hungry, so I ate a few coconuts, but that didn't fix it." He rubbed his belly. "What I wouldn't give for a gem."

"Maybe we can find some."

"I doubt it. There's a – I don't know what to call it – kind of a smell? Rarity's better at detecting them than I am, but... when we're in a place where they're easy to get to, I can smell them. And I don't smell any gems here."

"Maybe you'll feel better once you dry out and your fire starts back up."

"Yeah, though with this rain, I kinda think it might be a while before that happens."

And then the heavens opened up fully and drenched them both.

The wind was vicious, flinging water into her face at high velocity, blinding her. She tried to catch the wind, to redirect it with pegasus wings, but its magic was slippery and insubstantial. "I think we need to find shelter!"

"There isn't any, I looked! There's a rotting hut with the walls falling down and no roof, and I'm not sure it'll even stay up in this wind, and that's all I found!"

"What about caves?"

"Twilight, there aren't any caves on an island like this! It's made of coral or something! If there were any caves they'd be under water!"

"What if we dig something?"

"If I were less tired, or you had your magic, or Discord could help, yeah, maybe we could do that, but with just me and you working with claws and hooves, it'd take so long to dig a shelter the storm would be over."

Twilight sighed. She'd really, really wanted to be able to get out of the rain. Or the wind, at least. "Come closer." She wiggled her body into the sand, which was a lot warmer than the air was right now, making almost a nest.

"Okay..."

"Closer. Snuggle up. Like we used to do when I was little and you were a baby."

"I think I'm too big for that now."

"Nope. I got bigger too. Alicorn now. Snuggle up."

Spike sighed as he wiggled closer to her. His spines poked her at first, but then relaxed and folded down as he spooned against her. "You're warm."

"So are you, but not as warm as you should be." Carefully she laid her wing across him. There might be hardly any magic here, but pegasus wings were waterproof even without magic, like duck wings. There was nothing she could do to protect herself from the wind and rain except to keep her head down, but she could shelter Spike, at least.

For a few minutes they lay there, Twilight resting, the exhaustion of the trek through the cold and then the swim in rough ocean taking its toll on her. Then Spike asked, plaintively, "Are we ever gonna find the actual portal back to actual home?"

She watched Discord in the waves, rolling onto the beach as the ocean drew back, floating as it rushed forward and then pulled out to the length of his tether. The vines seemed flimsy to stand up to the fury of this storm. Discord, please be okay. Please don't drift off into the ocean and lose us. She swallowed. You sense magic, a lot better than I do. You've traveled to a lot more other dimensions than I have. You sounded like you knew something about this world, specifically. I need you. Spike and I aren't going to make it without your help. You have to be okay. The fact that he'd died and come back to life didn't reassure her. It seemed like it must have consumed any residual magic he had to do that, and that now maybe he was even more fragile than he'd been before he'd frozen to death.

At least Spike seemed to be getting warmer. Or maybe she was just getting colder. "I hope so, Spike," she said. "I really hope so."

Author's Note

This has been kicking around in my head for forever, but I have so many different ways it could go from here, I have no idea which one I'm going to take, if any. So here you go, the not-really-awaited-by-anyone sequel to Ice.

Red in Tooth and Claw (Futurefic, Fluttershy, dark)

I was Kindness, once.

I still can be, at times. When the creatures of my forest are injured, they call on me, and I come to them, and grant them mercy. Heal them, if they can be healed. Grant a different, sadder, mercy if they can’t be. I am the Spirit of Nature, but I am not always red in tooth and claw. I was Kindness, once, and I still am, when I can be.

I will not be tonight. I cannot be.

You have slaughtered beasts in my forest. You have killed over a hundred manticores simply to take their tails. You have brought down countless hydras for the regenerative properties of their venom, taken their fangs and venom sacs, and left their bodies to rot in my swamps. You have shot Orthroi in one head and then removed both, to show their heads off as trophies while their headless bodies bear silent witness to your crimes.

And then you shot my husband when he tried to warn you.

Oh, he’ll live. Your cold steel bullets are anathema to magic – as you well know, obviously—so you hurt him, far worse than anyone has ever done in millennia, but he’ll live, and heal. But you should have heeded his warning. You thought he was another beast that you could kill with impunity. You thought you could kill any of my beasts with impunity. You thought you could come through your portal, and kill, and kill, and then go running back to your world without magic, where no magical pony could follow and bring you to justice.

I suppose you were very surprised when my minotaur friends captured you and brought you back here. You didn’t know minotaurs existed here, did you? You didn’t know there was a creature bigger than you, stronger than you, with hands like yours that can hold your weapons, and no more dependent on magic than you are.

Perhaps it’s fortunate for you that you shot my husband, then. Or perhaps not so fortunate. It depends on what you prefer to lose. My husband would have taken your sanity, but left you in your own world, alive, as a warning to the rest of your kind. He is Chaos, you see, but he prefers the side of Chaos that doesn’t kill. He will never kill unless there is no other way.

But death is just as much a part of Nature as life is. I cannot be Kindness all the time. Sometimes I am the tooth that rends, the claws that slash. Nature is bloody and ferocious and beautiful, and so must I be.

This is the forest you despoiled by your murders. These are the creatures whose families you rent apart. And tonight, the weapons you bore when you killed the beasts of my forest have been taken from you. You will fight with nothing but the gifts Nature gave you.

Oh, stop. Your situation is far from hopeless. Nature gifted you long legs and endurance for running, didn’t it? And arms that can climb trees? And minds that can turn objects you find into weapons? The Wild Hunt disperses at sunrise. All you have to do is live from moonrise to moonset. It’s a better chance than you gave any of the beasts you killed.

I grant you a ten minute start. It’s hardly a hunt if I let them loose on you now, is it? And you hunted my beasts. You tracked them and you followed them relentlessly and when you injured them and they limped home to nurse their wounds you followed them there and killed their entire families. It’s only fair we do the same to you. Be grateful enough of me is still Kindness that I didn’t involve your families. I didn’t bring the Hunt over to your world… although I could have. Your world isn’t truly magicless, and the Wild Hunt has ridden there before. But no. I granted you the mercy you denied my creatures, and I brought you here, far from your homes, to face your punishment.

Look there, the moon is rising. It’s time for you to go.

Run.

And in ten minutes… the Wild Hunt will ride.

Author's Note

I... have no idea.

If I could draw, this would simply have been a picture. But I can't, so I wrote this instead.

This is from a very vague notion of a future where Fluttershy married Discord and has ascended to become a Spirit of Nature. In my head, she's either a symmetrical draconequus or a chaotic, chimerical alicorn.

And yes, she is talking to a group of humans. I'm not adding the human tag to the collection, though, because at this point it would be misleading.

Voyage of the Harmony (Sci-Fi; Twilight, Spike, Fluttershy, Discord)

Author's Note

This is an SF AU with ponies. Humans exist as another spacefaring race, but there aren't any in this section. Inspiration drawn heavily from the works of Cordwainer Smith, particularly "Scanners Live In Vain" and "The Game of Cat and Dragon"; also, C. S. Friedman's "This Alien Shore", which is also based on Cat and Dragon. I think most of what you need to know about the setting and the characters for purposes of understanding this piece is in the piece itself, so I won't overexplain.

Voyage of the Harmony (Sci-Fi; Twilight, Spike, Fluttershy, Discord)

With Spike on her back, Twilight trotted eagerly down the road. The Dark Queen had gifted Equestria with an especially bright moon tonight, and the close-stars beamed tiny patches of mostly red, warm sunlight, drawn from the sun so far away. It wasn't anything like the light and warmth of Queen Celestia's solar array, let alone an actual sun, but it was better than the perpetual, chilly gloom from when Queen Moon had taken power.

Queen Celestia... No. Twilight wasn't going to think about the lost queen. Not now, not while she was on Equestria. She had to stay focused. Get her crew, load up the ship, and go.

Fluttershy was the last one on her short list. Her backer, Rarity, had introduced her to Rainbow Dash, whose piloting credentials were impeccable. Rainbow had introduced her to Applejack, apple farmer turned engineer when night fell ten years ago and apples could only be grown in hothouses with grow lamps anymore. Applejack had introduced her to Pinkie Pie, an experienced cook and a mare of sufficient exuberance and cheer to make a fantastic morale officer, and no ship out there risking the Pain of Space dared to go without a morale officer.

All of them were in agreement. The mysterious Fluttershy, hardly ever seen in town, was Ponyville's best xenomedic – which would have sounded awfully like the best gardener in Cloudsdale, except for Ponyville's proximity to the Everfree Forest. Fluttershy had experience treating animals no one else on Equestria even had names for.

Also. She had a draconequus.

Twilight had only worked with the savage, snappish creatures once. The snakelike chimera had been dangerous enough that its handler had kept it muzzled and leashed all the time. It was unpredictable, randomly aggressive toward ponies for no good reason, and ornery, refusing its handler's commands more than seventy percent of the time. She'd counted.

But it had flawlessly navigated the ship through Deep Warp, allowing them to cut transit time to a third of what it would have been in the Warp Corona, and eight times faster than transit in shiftspace.

Even with Rarity's backing, Twilight could never have afforded a draconequus. They were too sadistic and prone to rage to breed well; the species was slowly dying out. And that made them fantastically expensive. Without them, ponies would be limited to transit through the Warp Corona, and would lose their technological edge over humans – who bred some small number of their kind for deliberate insanity so that they could navigate Deep Warp, but humans, like ponies, were fundamentally a harmonious species, dependent on the bonds of friendship. The disharmonious, solitary, nasty draconequui would always be better at handling the chaos of Deep Warp than even an insane human, and ponies weren't capable of manifesting the type of insanity that would let them travel Deep.

If this Fluttershy was willing to join Twilight's crew, and was either a qualified draconequus handler or was willing to lend her draconequus to somepony who was, Twilight's mission could be accomplished in a fraction of the time.

"You think she's really got a draconequus, Twilight?" Spike asked. "They're not exactly pet material, you know?"

"She lives by the Everfree and she treats the wild animals in there," Twilight said. "Who knows but maybe there are feral draconequui hiding in that forest, and she managed to tame one?"

"You don't tame a draconequus."

"Fine, she managed to get one to let her handle it. Maybe she found an egg. Ponies sometimes do find unusual eggs, you know. " She turned her head and grinned up at him.

Spike grinned back. Ponies finding an unusual egg was exactly why he was her assistant.

Fluttershy's house... had magical lamps. All over. Shining sunlight onto what would have been a charmingly bucolic scene – a bubbling brook, a garden, birds chirping in the trees – if not for the black shadows cast in the places where the lamplight fields didn't quite touch each other. Twilight frowned. She should have seen the light shining through the trees, or she should have felt a magical shield. She hadn't perceived either one. And wasn't this Fluttershy a pegasus? She couldn't have enchanted all these sunlamps. Also, didn't Fluttershy know this was dangerous? So many sunlamps would likely brand her a sun-lover, and she'd end up in a dungeon in Canterlot, or worse... Tartarus. When Twilight was a child, the legendary prison had been home only to the worst of the worst, criminals so violent and dangerous they had to be imprisoned deep underground. Now she heard rumors that Queen Moon had been throwing ponies in there for being dissidents, and she believed them.

She trotted up to the door and knocked. Once, twice. Nothing.

She knocked again. And again. Still nothing. Was Fluttershy even home?

The top of the door – it was in two parts that swung independently – opened a crack, and she caught just the faintest glimpse of a pink mane and a pony face before the pony behind the door stammered, in a whispery feminine voice, "Nopony's home, sorry, we're not buying any, you can leave now!" and slammed the top door shut again.

Twilight tried to open the door with magic, but the inhabitant had already locked it again. She banged on the door with her hoof. "I'm not selling anything!" she shouted. "I'm a friend of Rainbow Dash!"

The top door opened again, a crack. "Rainbow Dash?" the soft, breathy voice asked.

"Yes. I'm the captain of the Harmony, a trading vessel heading out in a few days, and I've hired Rainbow on as the pilot."

"If you know Rainbow Dash," the voice said, almost accusingly, "then who is her favorite Wonderbolt?"

Twilight blinked. "Uh... she never said who her favorite was. She went on and on about a few of them – I think one of them was named Spitfire? And, uh, Soaring? Sorry, I don't follow sports and I didn't know I'd have to take a quiz."

"Why are you here?"

"Uh... well, Rainbow told me you were the best xenomedic in Equestria." This, like everything else Rainbow had said (except her braggadocio about her own talents – the Pilot Rating Board, and the sports news that Twilight had Spike pull from archives at the library, backed her up on those), was probably an exaggeration. "I wanted to ask you to join my crew."

"Not interested!" The door slammed again. Then opened slightly again. "Um, if that's okay with you." And slammed again.

Spike had been wandering around, looking at the property. He came up to the door. "This is amazing, Twilight! She's got, like, an entire habitat arranged out here. Just like in space, except she's doing it on a planet!"

"She'd kind of have to. She's got very limited sunlight to work with... though I still wonder how she gets away with that. Everything I've heard of Queen Moon... well, let's just say I haven't heard a lot of good things."

"You shouldn't talk like that," the crack in the door whispered. "Her spies are every—wait, is that a baby dragon?"

"I'd like to think I'm a little bit older than a baby," Spike said, somewhat indignantly, puffing his chest out.

Some hasty whispering behind the door, too quiet for Twilight to make out, and then the top door opened again, this time all the way. "You are! You're a baby dragon! Oh, wow, you're so adorable! I never thought I'd see a baby dragon!"

The mare who was suddenly gushing about Spike had to be Fluttershy. She was butter-yellow, with an immense, perfectly styled waterfall of pink mane that Twilight suspected Rarity had to be jealous of, and big blue eyes that were now lit with excitement. "Miss... if I let you in to talk, will you let me pet your dragon?"

"Yes," Twilight said.

Spike puffed his chest out even more. "It isn't up to her, it's up to me. And I say... I never turn down pets from a beautiful mare. I'm Spike the Dragon, and if you let us in you can pet me as much as you like."

"Suave, Spike," Twilight whispered, amused.

"I try."

The bottom door finally opened. "Come in. Would you like tea? I have tea brewing. Oh, but do dragons even drink tea?"

"I love tea," Spike said. "The hotter the better. If you put hot spices in it, like cayenne pepper or something, even better."

"Oh! Oh, I do have some very hot tea. Di – uh, a house guest of mine likes very hot and spicy things too. Oh, and you, miss?"

"I'm a captain, actually, but you can just call me Twilight. And yes, I'd love some tea. Earl Grey, maybe? Hot?"

"Oh, of course, Captain Twilight," Fluttershy said hurriedly. "Let me just go get the water started."

She didn't, in fact, just go get the water started. What she actually did was disappear into the kitchen until the tea kettle started whistling, and then came back out with three cups of tea. "Here you go," she said, setting them down. She then knelt down next to Spike and started stroking his head. "Oh, you're so warm."

Spike leaned back, an expression of apparent bliss on his face. Twilight knew him well enough to know he wasn't bowled over like he'd been when he'd first met Rarity, but Spike loved attention and affection. In space, most ponies had assumed he'd be an arrogant jerk, like most gunnery dragons (and probably most dragons, period, regardless of profession), and had steered clear of him. Twilight had always thought that was tragic; Spike was the sweetest person she knew.

"I assume you're Doctor Fluttershy?"

"Oh, um, just Fluttershy is okay? If that's all right?"

"Well, then I insist that you just call me Twilight."

"But... but you're a ship captain. That's much more important than being an animal doctor, isn't it? I mean, you must, uh... lead your crew. Through space." She shuddered. "Space is so scary."

"Space isn't scary," Twilight said. "It's... just another environment. Just like floating cities. You're a pegasus, so you probably came from a floating city, didn't you?"

"Cloudsdale," Fluttershy whispered. "But it was a very scary place. I don't like to fly."

"We've got habitats in space that look just like the area around your cottage!" Spike said. "Except we only run the water when the artificial gravity is on, of course. But lots and lots of animals! And tons of plants!"

"But don't you send animals up to die from the Pain of Space so ponies don't have to?"

Twilight sighed. "No. No, that's... not a myth, exactly, but it's not true either. In the beginning of space travel, ponies would go into shiftspace under spells to not feel anything – literally anything, no emotion, no sensation – because being cut off from a web of life turns out to cause a lot of pain to harmonious creatures. Ponies who went up with the ability to feel would very quickly suffer from suicidal depression and blind rage, and a lot of physical pain. The humans discovered that if you send animals up, the Pain of Space eases up, but humans don't know much about magical or metaphysical effects, so they thought the animals were somehow absorbing the Pain, and that they'd die in the humans' place. We ponies discovered that what was actually happening was that the magical fields in shiftspace, what we call the Nightmare Force, trigger any creature but a cat, dragon or draconequus into these horrible black feelings, and what resists those fields is a lifeweb in harmony. So we bring the animals up, not to die for us, but to live for us. The magic of their lives, their harmony with the habitats we create, creates a shield against the Pain of Space."

"Oh." Fluttershy considered. "Oh! That's so much better. I am so glad you explained that to me! I've always had nightmares about space, and the Pain of Space killing poor innocent creatures. I'm so glad to hear it's not true!"

"Would that make you feel better about joining the crew as our xenomedic?"

Fluttershy rapidly shook her head. "Oh, no no no. Space is still so very scary. It's up so high, and there's no gravity, except when it's artificial. And a tiny little rock could break your hull open and all the air could leak out and you'd explode in space!"

"Ponies don't explode in space," Twilight said, slightly exasperated. This mare seemed to have somehow picked up every negative myth about space there was. "That's not what explosive decompression means. And the ATK field protects us against tiny little rocks."

"But there's so many other scary things."

Twilight tried a different tactic. "I heard you have a draconequus?"

Fluttershy blushed. "Well, I don't have him. I mean, he's my friend."

Twilight was sure the chickens in the coop, the tweeting birds in the trees, and the rabbit who was... glaring?... at her, were also Fluttershy's friends, but it said a lot for her prowess with animals if she really had managed to make a pet of a draconequus. "Why do you have a draconequus for a pet if you're so scared of space?"

"Well, he needed someone to take care of him, and somewhere to live."

"But you know they're never happy unless they're in Deep Warp, right? Don't you think it's cruel to deprive him of space?"

"I... I'm sure Discord could go to space anytime he wanted to... and he is happy. He's very happy here with me."

Twilight had never heard of a happy draconequus, and didn't think such a thing was possible. "If you won't join our crew, then maybe you'd be willing to lend us the draconequus? Maybe he's very happy here with you, but I'm sure being in space would also make him happy."

"I'll ask him." Fluttershy put her forehooves to the sides of her mouth. "Discord!" she called. "Could you come down here, please?"

You couldn't ask a draconequus anything. They were animals. They couldn't talk, and their disharmonious nature made them incredibly difficult to train. And they were stupid even for animals. Cats who were trained in gunnery could communicate if they had language implants, as long as they were hooked into the gun system or some other system that could read the output of their implants. You couldn't put speech implants in a draconequus anymore than you could put them in a gecko or a fish.

Twilight did not point this out to Fluttershy. If she'd tamed a feral draconequus, maybe she did have fantastic levels of insight into their behavior and what it meant.

And then a tall, slender creature with a snakelike body, but on legs, walked – on two legs, like a human, a minotaur or a baby dragon – down Fluttershy's staircase. "Fluttershy! You have guests?" it said, in a voice exactly like a stallion's. "You should have called me down sooner!"

Twilight stared at the draconequus in shock, her eye twitching slightly. "That – that draconequus just – talked."

"How rude! Calling me 'that draconequus' like I'm some exhibit in a zoo! Discord, master of chaos, at your service, madame captain." He bowed deeply, with a feathered hat in his hand that hadn't been there a moment ago.

Twilight felt acutely nauseous, and cold, and her vision was graying out at the edges. She'd just felt the flux of chaos, only a flicker, like she was suddenly and without warning in Deep Warp for a nanosecond only. "It—how – I don't—"

"Twilight! Calm down!" Spike said, but his voice was sounding strangely far away.

"Oh dear. She seems to be going into shock? Spike, get some damp, cool towels please. I have a stack of towels in the kitchen, on the counter; just run cold water on a couple of them, squeeze them out so they don't drip, and come back quickly."

"On it!"

"Was it something I said?" the draconequus asked, in a false-soliticious voice that had the undercurrent of a chuckle in it. "Here, let's get the dear captain onto the couch."

And then she felt it all around her, chaos, seething and mind-breaking like the Deep Warp, lifting and surrounding her. It was too much for her. In terror and shock, Twilight fainted.

When she opened her eyes again, Spike was next to her, pressing the cool compress against her forehead. "...come on, Twi, you gotta wake up. You don't faint from unusual things happening! What's wrong? You gotta wake up and tell me what's wrong!"

"I believe she may be entirely too magic-sensitive for her own good," a male voice said. Who was that? There hadn't been a stallion... no. No, wait. That was the draconequus.

"Oh, dear, is she reacting to your magic? Is there anything we can do for her? I'd bring out the smelling salts, but I don't have a lot of experience with unicorns... or ponies, really, at all..."

Twilight sat up and pointed a hoof accusingly at the draconequus, who was still standing on two legs. And wearing clothes. Aside from the top hat, she hadn't noticed earlier, but he was wearing shorts and an open jacket. "You talked!"

"I did. I do that rather often. It's actually one of my greater pleasures in life."

"Draconequui don't talk."

"Humans didn't believe in unicorns before they met you ponies, and look where you all are now."

"And they don't have magic!"

Discord smiled very thinly, the oddly pony-like jovial expression he'd been wearing replaced with his red eyes fixating on her coldly. Twilight shivered. She'd never been attacked by a draconequus, but they were nasty, fierce beasts. She'd seen plenty of training videos of what not to do near draconequui if you weren't a handler, and knew ponies who'd been nearly ripped apart by one of the beasts. "The interesting thing about magic is that to perform a spell, you have to be sapient. You can have plenty of natural magic, and there's no shortage of magical creatures on Equestria, but they don't do spells. Their bodies just perform the magic for them, and generally it's only one or two things."

"For instance," Fluttershy said eagerly, "timber wolf recombination into a mega-timberwolf. That's very much like a magical spell, but it's instinctive. They can't vary it the way you unicorns can, or the way a pegasus can approach a cloud in different ways, assessing what they want to do and how to do it."

"But draconequui aren't sapient!"

"I've been listening to him for the past five minutes, Twilight," Spike said dryly. "Pretty sure he's sapient."

"How? Are you genetically engineered or something?"

"Ma chère capitaine, you have it backwards. I'm not the one who was interfered with." He sat down on Fluttershy's coffee table. "A little bit sensitive to magic, are you? Either you swooned at my astonishing good looks and incredible erudition, or you sensed the very, very tiny opening I made to the Realm of Chaos. Do you pass out every time your ship goes in there, or have you never flown with a draconequus?"

"You-- opened a portal to... the Realm of Chaos? Is that the same thing as Deep Warp? It – it felt like I was suddenly surrounded by Deep Warp. Without a shipfield to protect me. Did you do that?"

"And I'll do it again, as often as I like. If you want me and Fluttershy on your crew, you will most definitely have to get used to it."

"Discord, we're not going to be her crew!" Fluttershy said. "I'm not her crew! I can't go to space!"

"How are you talking?" Twilight asked.

"The same way you are. Once upon a time a mommy draconequus and a daddy draconequus loved each other very much, and then the mommy draconequus laid an egg, and I came out, and they talked to me until I started talking back. Is there something particularly difficult to grasp about this concept?"

"Don't be rude, Discord. She doesn't know the history."

Discord stood up so quickly his swishing tail knocked the coffee table over. "She should know the history!" he snarled suddenly. "Ponies like her are the entire reason—"

Spike jumped onto the couch, trembling, possibly shielding Twilight with his body or possibly taking cover within the range of a magical shield if she cast one, Twilight wasn't sure. But Fluttershy, showing no fear, put her wing on his arm. "Discord. Please. She doesn't know. And if Rainbow vouches for her then I'm sure she's the kind of pony who would be very upset if she did know, and I'm sure she would take your side."

Discord was breathing hard. "She's a spacer. Ponies wanting to go to space and control every last aspect of how they do it is why I was in Petrifax for three hundred years."

Twilight's eyes widened. Petrifax was the legendary ultra-secure ward of Tartarus, itself a maximum security prison. It was almost a death penalty. The Way of Harmony, practiced by all of Equestria for hundreds of years, would never tolerate executing a captive criminal, but Petrifax sealed criminals into magical sleep. Forever, in theory.

"But you're not there now. You're out. You're safe."

"For the moment."

"I... hate to ask, but... why were you in Petrifax?" Twilight asked hesitantly.

"That depends on who you ask. You want the pony version of the story?" He chuckled. "If you listen to ponies, it was because I was a terrorist, fomented chaos, and attempted to overthrow Queen Celestia and take over all of Equestria myself, and came dangerously close to doing so because I'm the most powerful chaoticist, probably ever, but certainly alive back then."

"Uh... how much of that is true?" Spike asked anxiously.

He chuckled again. "All of it."

"Discord..." Fluttershy said warningly.

"What? They won't believe me anyway." He smiled widely, cheerfully, but it never reached his eyes. "And it doesn't matter anyway because I am reformed! Fully and completely obedient to the lawful authority of Equestria, not a single spark of a desire to rule over ponies, or anyone, in my heart." Discord leaned forward into Twilight's face. "I'd give myself a halo to get the point across, but I certainly don't want you fainting again, Captain Sparkle."

Fluttershy sighed. "Discord doesn't want to tell you his version of the story," she said. "Because if he did, and you didn't believe him or you didn't care... that would be very hurtful. He's much more sensitive than he pretends to be."

"Fluttershy, you're doing this all wrong. Don't you have to wait for my back to be turned to gossip about me behind my back?"

"But I don't believe that anypony that Rainbow would have referred to me could be that cold-hearted. Have you met any of Rainbow's other friends?"

"Uh, yeah. Rarity's our backer, and she may come with us as a cat handler because her cat Opal is licensed for gunnery and Spike's still an apprentice. Applejack's signed on as our engineer, and Pinkie Pie's going to be the cook and morale officer. Which is why I need you! Not only are you a xenomedic, but you're obviously experienced at creating the kind of multi-animal habitat we need in space, so I won't need a habiteur."

Fluttershy shook her head. "We're not talking about that right now and anyway I'm not going into space. My point is, that if all of those mares vouch for you... then I think you can be trusted with this information." She turned to Discord. "Do you want to tell her, or should I?"

"Well, since you have your heart set on spilling all my secrets, who I am to stop you?" Discord asked sharply, bitterness in his voice.

"I... I mean, if it's going to cause strife in your... uh, friendship, you don't have to tell me. I was just curious."

"All draconequui are sapient, Twilight."

Twilight blinked at Fluttershy's quiet words. "...What?"

"Or they would be, if... if ponies didn't break them." Her voice went very low and quiet.

"I—" Draconequui were easily the stupidest, hardest to train animal Twilight had ever met who were physically more complex than a small lizard. They couldn't be sapient. "That doesn't make any sense."

"It does. We... uh, we do things to them. So that... so that they become like animals."

"How? How would you turn a sapient creature into something that isn't? And why?"

"Well, to begin with the how," Discord said, in a tone of false cheer that was completely at odds with what he was actually saying, "you capture adults, and when they lay eggs, you take their eggs from them. And when the baby draconequus hatches, you cut off its thumbs." For the first time, Twilight noticed that Discord had four digits on his mismatched paws, not the three that every other draconequus had, and his were longer and didn't move as a group. "You tape the fingers together so they can't move them independently. And you put them in a tank of warm water, like their egg, but with no light or sound." The bitterness he obviously felt about this was coming through more and more strongly in his voice. "You put a breathing mask on them, with a nipple in it for drinking their food, and you put them in the tank, and you close the lid. For two years. Two years of no sound, no light, no real sensation at all. No one to touch them or hold them or talk to them."

Twilight's jaw worked. She swallowed. "They'd die. Foals... foals don't live if no one touches them."

"Oh, but these aren't foals, they're draconequui, so it's all perfectly okay. They survive it just fine. Of course, after that they won't let anyone touch them, and they don't comprehend that language even exists, and they live in a state of aggression and fear that keeps them from learning much of anything. Also, did I mention that the solution they're fed isn't draconequus milk, or pony milk, or formula, but something specifically designed to have inadequate proteins and vitamins for brain growth? Physically they recover. Mentally, they do not. Ever." His voice cracked. "Pony foals have an advantage. Ponies are herd animals. Without the herd, they die. Draconequui can live through having no parents, no family, no caretakers, no one to love or care for them at all or even talk to them. You'd think that would be an advantage, but it's not. We can live through being turned into brute, mute beasts. Which means that anyone who wants to exploit our talents can do that to us, and we'll survive, so we can still be used."

Spike said, in a choked voice, "That's... that's horrible."

"They'll get around to doing it to you dragons too, Spike. Just you wait. Sooner or later, oh, what a pain it is to have to pay dragons to ride our spaceships and kill boojums for us! Wouldn't it just be so much better if they could be pets, like cats, and couldn't take care of themselves?"

"That won't happen," Fluttershy said firmly. "Dragons get too big. It takes a very strong pony to be able to restrain a draconequus if it attacks. No pony would be able to restrain a dragon."

"True. And they always have the option of using cats. Humans don't even have dragons – their gunnery teams are always a cat with a human partner. Whereas what draconequui do... is irreplaceable, and no one else can do it. As much as humans like to think they can master chaos, they can't... and ponies, at least, know better."

"Why... why didn't Queen Celestia do something about this?" Twilight whispered.

"A sun-lover, are you?" Twilight's shock and fear must have shown in his face, because he laughed. "Oh, don't worry. No one's going to rat you out to Moonie the Great. My shield spells don't allow anypony to hear or see anything near the cottage until they get close enough that we can hear them."

"Well." Twilight swallowed. She'd just met Fluttershy. The fact that Rarity, who shared Twilight's goals, had referred her to Rainbow Dash and Rainbow Dash had told her about Fluttershy, suggested that Fluttershy was not a moon loyalist, but that didn't mean she was on the side of the sun either. "It doesn't really matter what I thought of Queen Celestia, anymore, does it? She was banished or killed over a decade ago, and she's not coming back. We all live under Queen Moon now, and that's just the way it is."

"Very pragmatic of you," Discord said. "So. Now that you know the deep, dark secret of the draconequui... can you see why possibly I might have wanted to foment a little chaos, back when there were any free draconequui who could have benefited from it? Why I thought it might be a good idea to terrify ponies with the wrath of the free draconequui, so they'd make an outcry to their government to stop stealing and torturing our children? Why, when a pragmatic, sensible Queen was just looking out for the interests of her people in a universe that suddenly had another spacefaring race in it, I might have turned to an emotional young Princess for aid, and when she refused to betray her sister for the sake of countless draconequus cubs being tortured into mindlessness, I might have thought it a good idea to depose them both and rule by force?" He went down to one knee, his voice softening. "Why I might have wanted to drive ponies mad, drop the Realm of Chaos on their heads and use my magic to make them terrified, aggressive, paranoid and barely intelligent anymore... just like they were doing to my people's children?"

Twilight bowed her head. "I... I guess... if someone was doing that to pony foals... someone who ruled over me but wasn't even a pony... I might think about doing the same sorts of things." She sighed. And then added hastily, "But of course, Queen Moon has the best interest of our foals in mind. She's not doing anything like that, and obviously she's a pony too! So she'd never..."

She trailed off. Discord's head was bowed as well, but whereas her head bow had been in respect and guilt... he was shaking, eyes tightly closed, tears running down his cheeks. Fluttershy was kneeling by him, her forelegs around him.

"It's all right," she said. "You can cry if you need to. No one here will blame you. It's all right."

"It's never going to be all right," Discord choked out. "It's never going to be all right, Fluttershy, because I failed—there aren't any left—our culture, our civilization, gone, and none of us but me are anything other than animals—"

"I know. I know. It's terrible. But you're alive, and you're free, so you can have hope, right? Even if you can't ever do anything for the other draconequui, there's one draconequus who can think left and you can make sure he has as happy a life as you can."

"I'm sorry," Twilight said to him. "My race did this to you, and I'm not even sure why—wouldn't intelligent draconequui make better navigators?"

"Oh, much better," he said, lifting his head and wiping the tears off his face with the back of his lion arm. "You've never worked with as amazing a navigator as I am, I can promise you this. But—" He shrugged. "We didn't like some of our working conditions. We wanted the right to be captains ourselves, not just navigators. Or to occupy any position... just because all of us can navigate the Realm of Chaos doesn't mean some of us might not have preferred to be doctors, or cooks. And ponies said, if they gave in to our demands, before long we'd be the only ones running the ships. Because we're the only ones who can take you through what you call Deep Warp, and if we can hold every other position as well, what would stop us from shutting ponies out completely? So we went on strike, and shut down space... or at least, any ships trying to go through the Realm. Right after we'd all discovered that humanity was also in space, competing with Equestria for colony worlds and trade routes." He lowered his head again. "In retrospect... that was a rather big mistake."

Twilight's heart sank. She'd been thinking, surely Queen Celestia couldn't have known, couldn't have had anything to do with it. Queen Celestia was kind, and compassionate.

But if this had happened just after ponies had made first contact with humans, the only other race to have discovered the secrets of the Deep Warp... a race that, while based in harmony as ponies were, was also more aggressive, more xenophobic since they'd had no other intelligent races on their world, and less willing to share territory? A race more willing to kill? And if the draconequui going on strike had run the risk that humanity would take over the stars and leave ponies with nothing, and if giving the draconequui what they wanted had seriously seemed as if it, too, might cut ponies off from space, leaving only the draconequui to cross the stars from Equestria?

It had been wrong. It was still wrong, and she couldn't comprehend how Queen Celestia could have let it go on for three hundred years. But... that initial decision... yes. Yes, the pony who'd been her teacher for five years, before the stars had aligned and her banished sister had returned and deposed her, could have made a cold and practical decision like that. Which made Twilight feel even more guilty.

"Oh," was all she could say, and then, again. "I'm sorry. I know that doesn't really help, but... I'm really sorry."

"Would you free us if you could?" Discord asked, looking down at her (even on his knees he was taller than she was). "Would you take the risk that maybe we might hog space travel all for ourselves, to let children who should grow up to walk and talk and think be free to do that?"

Twilight nodded. "There are humans who can manage the Deep Warp. Even if ponies can't, who's to say that maybe griffins or minotaurs couldn't learn the same trick the humans use? And ponies get along with humans – and most races, honestly – better than griffins, and pegasi and griffins make the best pilots, and if your ATK field fails you're definitely going to want a powerful unicorn aboard, and most habiteurs are earth ponies for a reason. Space travel works best when it's ponies collaborating with other races; the crew I've put together so far is mostly ponies, but we have a dragon, and probably a cat, and I'd be honored to have a talking draconequus for a navigator, if you wanted. And if I ever saw an opportunity to help you free the babies who haven't – who aren't hopeless, yet, and the eggs, and make sure they're raised by good people of whatever species... I'd take it. Because what we're doing to your kind is just wrong."

"Well then." Without warning, Discord flopped at Fluttershy's feet. "Please! Please, please, Fluttershy, please let me go to space! You have no idea how long I've longed to feel the Realms again, you can't even imagine it. Pleeeease."

"Um... I would never want to stop you, Discord. I'd miss you, but I would never want to stand in the way of you doing what you love..."

"No, you don't understand, I need you. I can't manage on my own! You have to come with me, or I can't go!"

"Discord. You can so perfectly well manage on your own, if you're in space with friends. I know that here on Equestria you can't go out in public, but of course if Captain Sparkle knows you're intelligent, you'll get along just fine with her and her crew."

"No, I won't. Ponies don't even like draconequui. And even if they did..." He looked up at her plaintively from his position on the floor. "I'm going to need a handler. I always did before, we all always did. Someone has to help us come back to ourselves when we come out of the Realms, someone has to vouch for us, and make sure we eat, and... and all those things, and I can't trust a trained draconequus handler because they'll think I'm stupid and they'll always be fighting with me to try to make me obey, like an animal. I need you." He lifted his head almost all the way to her head, which was impressive considering that most of his body was still sprawled on the floor. "Please. I promise I'll protect you from space, if you come with me and... and help me."

"But... the animals..."

"If I leave you'll have to turn the sunlamps off. My enchantment won't hold when I'm gone. If you bring them and you come with me, they'll have a nice, bright, sunny habitat, without a madmare trying to micromanage how much light they get. They'll be happier! I'll be happier! You'll be happier because you won't feel like you have to hide out at the edge of the Forest!"

"But it's space," Fluttershy said helplessly.

Spike sauntered up to her. "So, I was looking at your bookshelves and I saw you have a lot of books about animals, and notebooks where you were writing down all kinds of nature watching stuff and things from studying animals you meet?"

"Um, yes," Fluttershy said, obviously as nonplussed by the apparent non sequitur as Twilight was.

Twilight had faith that Spike wasn't just randomly interrupting, though, and his next words bore out her faith. "So, wouldn't you like the opportunity to study a dragon? At close range? A safe, pony-friendly, ba – juvenile dragon, who's used to being a research subject and can even help you organize your notes?"

Fluttershy swallowed. "Um... maybe?"

"And we might be visiting a lot of colony worlds where the flora and fauna haven't been fully catalogued yet," Twilight said. "You might discover an animal no one's ever encountered before."

Discord, now sitting next to Fluttershy rather than sprawled on the floor, pulled her onto his lap, holding her gently. "I know you're scared, Shy," he said. "But I'm scared of what might happen if I leave you here. What if Moon's goons ever do figure out who shut down Cerberus and busted me out of Petrifax?"

Twilight's eyes went huge. "He's... he's not really a computer," Fluttershy whispered. "He's three dog brains, running the whole system. They used dogs because they don't get bored being on watch all the time, but... he's wired in. He never gets to run and play. And if you know some programmers..."

"You broke into Petrifax and released a prisoner?" Twilight stared at her. "You broke into Tartarus?"

"It, um... if you know that the security system is actually kind of a dog, except with three heads instead of one... I'm not really that special. I just had insider knowledge."

"How?"

Fluttershy shook her head. "I can't tell you. I can't even tell Discord. Can't take the risk."

"But if I left you behind and the Mooninites figured out you were the one... Fluttershy, they'll interrogate you, and they'll want to know your accomplices. And they'll torture you. I'm... I can't leave you behind. No matter how much I want to feel the Realms again. You freed me." Discord's head bent and turned sideways so he was looking directly at Fluttershy despite the fact that she was still in his lap. "Please, Fluttershy. Please come with me."

Fluttershy bowed her head and said something in such a tiny voice it was incomprehensible. Discord said, "What was that?" before Twilight had a chance to ask.

She lifted her head. Still in a tiny voice, but at least audible now, she said, "I'll go."

"You will?" Discord stood, lifting Fluttershy into the air as he did so. "Yes! This is wonderful news!" The nauseating feeling of raw Deep Warp fluxed around Twilight for a second, and confetti fell from the air. She swallowed the nausea back down. If he was going to be her navigator, she had to get used to that. It was probably a small price to pay to get a draconequus navigator who was intelligent enough to understand orders and self-controlled enough to not try to rip every pony's face off.

"Great!" Twilight said. "Um, we'll have to make arrangements to get you to the ship. I'm pretty sure you're not going to want to travel in a draconequus cage."

"Given how distinctive in appearance we all are, and the fact that I'm a fugitive from the law... you're correct about that. I could fake being mindless and snarly for a few minutes, but all it would take is one Wanted poster."

They didn't actually use Wanted posters anymore, but the PlaNet probably hadn't existed when he'd last been free, and Fluttershy actually had very little information technology in her home. Discord might not even know what the PlaNet was. He might have to be trained on how to use computers at all. Though the amazing thing about a talking draconequus was not whether or not he knew how to use computers, but that he knew how to talk.

"I'll make some arrangements." Applejack had been a farmer before she'd been an engineer, and farmers had to ship product. Maybe she knew someone discreet who could smuggle a person aboard a ship. "And I'll call you when I've got the details hashed out."

"I don't have a phone," Fluttershy whispered. "They're so loud when they ring."

She could change their ringtone, but Twilight was gathering that Fluttershy's anxiety levels were pathological. And wondered if she'd been this bad before she broke a prisoner out of Petrifax. And how she had done so, and how she had known of this particular prisoner, and why. But she wasn't going to get any of those answers tonight. "All right, I'll send Spike with a message, or come myself."

"Or you can send Rainbow. She knows Discord's smart."

Twilight breathed deeply. Rainbow had said that Fluttershy had a draconequus, but that he was "a royal pain to deal with." She'd been grinning when she'd said it. Dash was another spacer, used to draconequui; of course she'd known that Twilight would take her meaning to be that Fluttershy's draconequus was ornery, like every other member of the species. "I think I'm gonna have a little conversation with Rainbow about that."

"Wait, does this mean I get to work with the most stupendously awesome pegasus pilot ever, Rainbow Dash?" Discord clasped his paws in front of his heart, or where his heart probably was, anyway. "Be still my beating heart!"

"Discord, be nice," Fluttershy advised.

"Oh, I'm sincere. I'd very much like to see if that pilot is even half of what she claims to be." His clasped paws turned into a cat's cradle, steepling and running through each other, like Spike did when he had an idea that he thought was devious.

"If you can't work together with my pilot, you can't be my navigator, Discord," Twilight said. "Whatever's between you and Pilot Dash, can you keep it professional?"

"I am the very soul of professionalism. Besides, by the standards of every other draconequus out there, I could put a whoopee cushion on her seat every day and fireworks in her breakfast cereal and I'd still be infinitely more professional and easier to work with than they are."

He had a point.

Once they were out of Fluttershy's house, Spike took out the smartbook before Twilight even had to ask him to. "So I'm checking off xenomedic, draconequus, and draconequus handler, right?"

"And habiteur, don't forget." She grinned. "I think that's everyone. This is really happening, Spike! I'm really going to be the captain of a crew! Of my very own ship!"

"Well, it'd be kind of silly to register a ship in your name, get a backer, and hire crew members if it wasn't really going to happen," he pointed out.

Dick Cordry, Agent of P.O.N.Y. (Human, Sci-Fi)

Author's Note

This might be the first time I've played "humans in an MLP fic" straight when it wasn't a crossover.

The idea for this story is an unholy amalgamation of Charles Stross' "Laundry Files", Hellboy, LickleSoxy's "To Judge A Book" and "Discord Is My Big Daddy" by floweredangel on fanfiction.net. This segment would be the prologue.

I think, given the title and given that you all know who I am, I don't need to include a character list. They're all human OCs except one. Guess who.

Dick Cordry, Agent of P.O.N.Y. (Human, Sci-Fi)

Bob Thistlewaite had just gotten through the security checkpoint and was pulling into the parking lot of the secure government facility where he worked, returning after a late lunch, when an explosion tore through the center of the building in front of him, and a river of rainbow light poured upward into the sky.

Bob was a dignified, professioral sort of man, the kind of 50-something fellow who felt most comfortable being clean-shaven and wearing tweed and horn-rimmed glasses. He was native to the Midwest, and most of his colleagues would have been surprised to hear anything stronger out of him than an "Oh, gosh." Maybe, in dire circumstances, an occasional "damn."

Today, he stared at the light pouring endlessly upward out of the center of his workplace, and said, "Holy fuck."

Then he ran. Toward the building. If what he feared was happening was actually what was happening... first responders wouldn't be able to handle this, and the project couldn't survive untrained outsiders seeing such a spectacular failure, either. It was going to be up to employees like himself to rescue the others. He was sick with fear, but he ran toward the building to rescue his coworkers, because he had some idea what might be going on in there.

They'd been trying to find a way to access endless clean energy by exploiting the energy gradient between their own universe and one with different physical laws, full to bursting with far more energy than Earth life could ever have tolerated. And it looked like they'd succeeded.

The metal detector inside had turned into a menacing, metallic maw, twisting and groaning in its place, trying to wrench itself out of the ground so it could devour people. Bob assumed, anyway, from the gnashing of sharp metal teeth. He went around it, through what was normally the exit. All of the security people were stone statues, literally. The security desk was gone, or so he thought until he looked down at his feet and realized that the floor was now the exact color and texture of the desk, in blotches that looked like puddles. As if the desk had melted. In a corner of the room, Susan from HR was crying and screaming and holding her hands over her head. Bob caught the faintest glimpse of something the reddish-orange color of her hair moving under her arms. He jerked his head up, not looking at her, and shucked off his tweed jacket.

"Susan!" It was hard to run toward her without looking at her, but if his wild and uninformed speculation was correct, looking at her at close range would be fatal. He threw the jacket onto her head. "Hold that on your head!"

She grabbed it and wrapped her head with it. "Why?" she sobbed. "Why?"

There was no easy way to explain "because I think your hair is turning people to stone." "I have to try to get the others. Can you get out of the building? Carefully! Keep that jacket on your hair, don't let anyone see your hair!"

As she stumbled off, his jacket wrapped around her head like a turban, he went deeper into the building.

Every step he took, he saw a new horror. Jay Patel's face on the trunk of a tree, shaped in a soundless scream. Malcolm Johnson stuck to the ceiling, apparently unable to get down, his gravity inverted. Brenda from Accounting was blue and gasping for air, her legs fused together into a fish-like appendage, scaled. Acting on another hunch, he picked her up and staggered back the way he came – she wasn't light, and he wasn't either young or the sort of guy who works out – until he met up with two security officers who'd been spared from Susan's hair. "Get her to the water fountain!" he shouted at them, noting how every time she fruitlessly gasped, the skin on the sides of her neck realigned, flaps lifting and sticking out... like gills. "Put her head under the water or she'll die!" The fountain was hopefully still on. It was much too shallow to have sufficient air for a creature the size of a human for very long if the jets weren't aerating it.

Back into the building. Oksana Nikolaev was unchanged, but screaming, standing still with her hands up at either side of her face, shrieking. He shook her. "Get out of the building! Go that way!" He pointed.

"What's happening?! What's happening?!"

"It doesn't matter." Oksana was in IT and not cleared to know the full details of the project. "Get outside, fast!"

He passed other co-workers who were either beyond help, or who were like him, unchanged and assisting others. His key card didn't work to get him into the secure area, but Peter Andrews, who was built like a tank, was able to bodyslam the door open from the inside, and to move the security desk so it was now propping the door open, allowing anyone inside to escape. Peter stared at Bob as if he'd grown three heads when Bob attempted to go in. "What the hell, Bob? We need to get out, not in!"

"Have you been outside since this started?"

"No, but I've been trying to get there."

"I came in from the outside. There's some kind of unidentified energy coming out of what's probably Lab 0, going up. Given the nature of the project... someone's got to turn that damn thing off."

"You can't. You don't know what's in there – the things I've seen." He shuddered. "It'd be suicide."

"And what if the entire planet is destroyed because no one here wanted to shut off the tap?"

"Well. Okay, then. Good luck, and godspeed. I'll pray for you."

Bob was an atheist, but he took the offer in the intent it was made in. "Thank you. Be safe."

"There are blobs," Peter said. "Roving blobs of light, and if they touch you... something happens to you. It's different every time."

"I'll be careful."

Emergency lighting was active beyond the secure door, but it wasn't hard to see. There were indeed blobs of light that transformed everything they touched, floating aimlessly through the halls. The air was filled with what looked like fireflies. He almost slapped a mosquito before realizing it was a co-worker who was new enough that he didn't know the guy's name, shrunk to the size of a dragonfly and granted insect wings, that he'd been trying to use to escape. Stephanie Armundsen, who'd been merged with her wheelchair so now she was essentially a centaur with wheels instead of legs, offered to get him out of here. She was one of the few who'd been changed in a way to make her more functional; her wheels could scoot down the corridor far faster than either her original powered wheelchair or an average human's legs.

Bob kept moving toward Lab 0, dodging the blobs. When he reached the corridor with the labs – with three other scientists who had all apparently had the same idea, but one of them had been granted an octopus for a head and now Bob had no idea who he was – he almost jumped out of his skin, and he did jump backwards away from the corridor. Here, the floor was made of people, an undulating wave of crying, screaming heads of people he knew. There was no way to get to Lab 0 without walking on them.

Xing was the first one to dare it. "If we don't shut down the portal, this is the whole world," he said, gesturing at the screaming floor, and gingerly walked out on it. The faces cried and screamed harder as he stepped on them, no matter how carefully he tried to walk, but there wasn't any choice. He was right. The portal had to be shut down.

This wasn't the kind of energy Bob and his coworkers had been expecting. Something more similar to an earthly energy, maybe heat or electricity but flowing endlessly, because the power gradient between their own and the target universe was steep, according to the math. This energy was like nothing on earth. Like magic, a malign, chaotic, transformative magic that warped everything it touched. It was probably possible to harness it to solve Earth's fossil fuel problem, but it was obviously much too dangerous to do so. Bob only hoped it was possible to close the portal. According to the test protocols he'd read, it had been intended to be tiny, the diameter of a pinpoint. They'd underestimated the gradient, he was guessing, and the energy had blown the portal wide open.

When he got into Lab 0, there was no avoiding the light. The rainbow-colored energy, thick and viscous like no earthly energy ever, was boiling endlessly out of the portal, and not all of it was going up. He staggered and fell to his knees, feeling something happening to him, but he couldn't tell what. Above, the clouds had turned into black, menacing giants with cruel, angry faces, lightning lancing out of them constantly. The rainbow light spilled out against them and smeared, running this way and that across the bottoms of the clouds, as if it was a liquid, but spilling up, and as if the clouds were solid objects.

In despair he saw the apparatus, or what was left of it, home now to spindly metal monsters stuck to the ruins of the apparatus by their feet, engaged in beating each other violently. The portal wasn't being held open by the apparatus, and no earthly force could possibly shut it now. Octopus-head, who Bob thought might be Viram, tried anyway, staggering through the thick light over to the apparatus to try to—what, repair it? When most of it had turned into battling stick figures? Behind him, Margritte shouted. "I'm going to try to get the secondary prototype from Lab 2! Maybe we can use it to close this thing!"

"We can try!" Bob said, but he didn't go with her. Xing did, and the two of them could move it on their own. The prototype in Lab 2 had never even worked; there was no real hope it could shut anything down.

But there was something inside the portal. Something moving. And he could just barely make it out.

It seemed at first to be the shadow of a monster, something twice the height of a human and shaped like some kind of impossible snake. As he watched it come into focus, it seemed to shrink, and reform into a more human shape, and then shrink some more, and more. And then, the rainbow light began to dim.

The writhing multicolored light of wrongness in the center of the room shrank, just like the figure in its center had. It shrank, and shrank, and then light seemed to go rushing back into the hole, like a vacuum. And for the first time Bob saw the figure clearly.

It was a human boy.

He was tall and lanky and his face hadn't much body fat, so Bob's initial guess was that he was a teenager, but he was naked and his pubes were hairless and childish, so he hadn't hit puberty yet. He had black spiky hair in a mohawk, the high cheekbones of a Native American and the strong nose and chin of a classic Roman emperor. His race was impossible to determine, because his body was mottled with different colors, as if he were a chimera, embryos merged in the womb to become one person. While his face had the reddish tinge of Native American or Hispanic skin, his torso and half of one of his arms was the dark brown of a person with African ancestry, but his legs and half an arm were the golden tan of a European from the Mediterrenean, and one arm was pale beige like a Northern European.

His hands were up, like Oksana's were, but not positioned next to his face. They were held out, and flexing, pulling and pushing on invisible threads. His eyes glowed yellow and his body was sheened with sweat, his expression one of great strain. The screaming and moaning from outside in the corridor stopped. The stick figures battling each other in what remained of the apparatus fell over, limp. He and Viram both stared at the boy, and Viram no longer had an octopus replacing his head.

When Margritte and Xing returned, wheeling the prototype, they had news. "The people – on the floor – they're alive! They're not in the floor anymore!" Margritte said.

"Is the portal closing on its own?" Xing asked.

Bob wanted to ask them what they thought the boy was doing, but he saw that the boy had collapsed on the ground, folded over. The portal continued to shrink.

"It... might be?" he said.

"I'm going to see what I can do for the folks in the hall," Margritte said. "They looked like they were alive, but... I saw a lot of limbs missing."

The boy lifted his head. His eyes were no longer glowing, but they actually still looked yellowish.

"Do you people have any idea what you've done?" he asked in a shrill, boyish voice, reinforcing Bob's thought that he must be quite young, just very tall. "DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHAT YOU'VE COST ME?"

"Young man—" Viram burbled, despite having an octopus for a head, and stopped, apparently at a loss of what to say. Or unable to figure out how to say it with his new vocal chords.

The boy's colors weren't the only mismatched thing about him, Bob realized. One arm was long but thin, and had six slender fingers on it, with very long nails. One was shorter, muscular, and had four fingers. And one of his legs was longer than the other, and stronger; the shorter leg looked thin to the point of serious weakness, and had no toes. The larger one had some kind of bony growth pushing out of the back of his heel. There were also bony growths marring the smoothness of his forehead, like horns trying to grow out of his skull.

Had the energy done this to him? Was he from Earth at all? No one's son had been brought to work today, and no child could have gotten into the secure area. But the portal to the other universe had been more than wide enough for a living creature to pass through, the size of a human. Or larger.

"I can never go home now!" the boy screamed. "It took everything, everything I had, to fix your mistake, and all the magic's gone every which way and dissolved into your world and there's nowhere it concentrates, no way I can get it back no matter how much chaos, and it's all your fault!"

His legs gave out on him again. This time he went to his knees and started to sob. Bob went to him. The boy flinched slightly when Bob knelt down beside him, but didn't try to evade Bob's hand on his shoulder.

"I'm sorry," Bob said. "I'm not going to pretend I understood half of what you just said, but if our carelessness hurt you, I apologize. We never meant to harm anyone. We just wanted clean energy to save our world."

"Idiots," the boy sobbed. "You're all big idiots. And I'm a bigger idiot because I volunteered, but what was I supposed to do? None of the others would have had the strength to survive the trip in that turbulence, let alone have enough strength to get back. They're – they were my friends. I couldn't – I couldn't – it would tear them apart and I knew it and I couldn't–"

"Shh," Bob said. "It's going to be all right."

"No, it's not! I'm never going home again! Never – never going to see—"

"I shouldn't have said that." He pulled the boy, very gently, onto his lap, more of a guide than a tug, but the boy went with it without much hesitation. "Of course it's not all right. But you're alive, and if I'm right about what just happened here, you saved lives. I don't know who or what you left behind, but we won't leave you all alone. We'll take care of you."

He hugged the sobbing child, fatherly instincts he'd never known he had rising up. He'd lived his life never expecting to have a child in his care; sure, it was possible for a gay man to adopt, but a single man of any orientation had no business adopting a baby, he'd thought, not if he has a challenging career, and if he's too focused on his job and too old to feel comfortable with this new world where he could be out and even get married if he ever met a guy he wanted to marry... how would he ever have time for a child? Besides, babies were annoying.

But he held a strange little boy in his lap as the child cried, and he stroked the boy's head, and murmured reassuring words, and somehow, it felt natural.

The boy screamed something against Bob's chest, but his voice was muffled, absorbed into Bob's shirt. It sounded like "Fuffershy" or something like that. Maybe the name of his dog? He then fell to sobbing even more hysterically.

Later, Bob found out that all the changes had mostly reverted. Brenda could breathe air again, and had two legs, but they were still covered in fish scales. Jay wasn't a tree anymore, but his brown skin was rough and more rigid than it should be, barklike. Susan's hair stopped turning people to stone, but it remained thick red tentacles on her head rather than hair. And as Margritte had observed, the people who'd been fused into the floor came out missing limbs when they were unfused. But they were alive and they weren't a floor anymore.

He didn't learn any of this until after the boy had cried himself to sleep in Bob's arms, until eventually the first responders did show up and started collecting people to go to the hospital, and the boy was one of the ones they took. A naked child with deformities turning up in the middle of a secure installation was a matter that required medical investigation before anyone was allowed to begin the more prosaic inquisition into his name and origin.

As it turned out, when Bob checked up on the boy, the child was claiming amnesia. He didn't remember his name, his family, or anything apparently, including how he got where he ended up. The hospital found nothing physically wrong with him and recommended transferring him to a psychiatric ward, due to the amnesia; but because the government was paying for it and the social workers were arguing against it, saying that if all he had wrong with him was amnesia then inpatient psychiatric treatment was an inappropriate placement, he ended up in limbo for four days, watching cable television non-stop in his hospital bed. By the time it started to sort itself out, he claimed that he'd remembered his name, Richard Cordry, but he wanted people to call him Dick. This, apparently, was enough to shut down any talk of psych wards.

When Bob next checked on the boy, he had disappeared into the foster care system, and no one was willing to tell Bob where he'd gone.

Chaos Battle (Last Draconequus)

Author's Note

Yes, I know, this isn't remotely anything I was supposed to be working on, but I have had such severe writer's block issues with everything I was supposed to be working on, I wrote this instead so that I'd be able to keep writing anything. This ficlet comes from the Age of Chaos, as I hope I have made obvious.

Chaos Battle (Last Draconequus)

With a huge, savage grin on his face, Discord faced off against the entities. They were creatures of pure magical energy, formless and faceless, and there were a lot of them. More than he could easily count, which didn't mean much because he was bad at counting, but still. There were distinctions between them; five or six of them were large, full of magic, pulsating with the alien energies they carried; another maybe five or six were smaller, and then there were a whole lot of much smaller creatures, darting around, zipping through the airless void. So, big bosses, middle management, and cannon fodder. He'd seen this pattern before on the last incursion, though there had been a lot fewer of them then.

Plainly he was going to have to do some knitting when this was over. The inner thaumosphere of the world beneath him protected against incursions like this; the entities that were able to come through the dimensional gateways were multiverse travelers, would-be world conquerors, and the like, not eldritch, incomprehensible creatures who could drive an ordinary pony mad if the pony only looked at them. But the outer thaumosphere, the magic that held and moved the sun and moon, had no such protections... which meant Discord was going to have to reinforce spacetime around here, to seal it up tight enough that creatures like this couldn't get through.

After he beat this group of bozos, obviously.

"Why do you stand against us?" the largest one, presumably the leader, said. "You alone of these creatures can comprehend us. Your nature is more akin to ours than to theirs. Why not join us?"

Discord laughed mockingly. "As if I don't know that you guys eat each other?" he snickered. "Listen, 'join us in villainous friendship' might work on sappy little ponies around here, but I can see it for what it is – a total scam to sucker me out of crushing you like bugs." His face hardened. "This world is mine. And I don't share. Leave, or face the consequences."

They weren't really speaking, of course. There was no air in space, and the entities weren't capable of speech, per se, anyway. The creatures conveyed ideas directly into his mind with infinitesimal flickers of magic, and he returned his replies to them the same way. So the fact that they interrupted his little speech with a massive working, all of the creatures feeding energy into the leader's spell matrix, and altered the strong nuclear force in a spherical radius around him several trots wide, destroying his physical body instantly, didn't prevent him from finishing his sentence.

Discord reformed himself as pure magic, no longer dependent on the ability of matter to hold itself together at the atomic level, and sent them the concept of a sneer. "Oh, please. You'll have to do better than that."

As he spoke, his magic intersected with their patterns, imposing the concept of compaction – solidifying the magic they were made from and making it denser. The creatures were unused to physicality, and thus to physical threats; he was able to grab several of the smaller ones with a giant scoop summoned from magic and throw them into an equally gigantic blender. Sadly, he didn't manage to get any of the bigger ones, but their time would come.

The creatures were intellivores, from a dimension of pure chaos where nothing was ever real except for magic and the order that intelligence could impose on it. They devoured each other when they had the chance, growing larger, more powerful, smarter and gaining the memories and experience of the one they'd eaten, so the largest ones were the most dangerous, not just because of their size or magical prowess but because they were also the smartest. The world below, with its enormous population of different sapient species, and animals so high on the sentience scale they were almost sapient, was a smorgasbord of riches for them, and since magic was one of the things they devoured, even the most powerful of ponies wouldn't be able to stand against them. Maybe the centaurs, themselves known to have magic-absorption abilities, would be able to fight, but Discord didn't plan to ever let it come to that. This was an unusually large incursion – he'd fought off much smaller groups of these creatures before – but protecting the world from entities from beyond it with the potential to destroy magic was one of the responsibilities of the Chaos Avatar, and he had every intention of doing just that.

Fighting against Celestia and Luna, and the occasional jumped-up unicorn who had yet another Surefire Plan To Defeat The Chaos Lord (none of which ever worked, of course), was certainly fun, and sometimes even challenging, but this was going to be a serious workout. His grin got wider. How long had it been since he'd actually been in danger? The fact that losing was a theoretical possibility made the heart he didn't currently actually have beat faster and sent thrills through the veins he didn't have either. Oh, this was going to be fun.

Or it wouldn't be. But he was committed either way, so he was determined to have fun with it.

As the larger ones spread out around him to form a loose sphere, several of the small ones he hadn't caught in his scoop flew at him, and he felt the pull as they entered his magical corona. They were trying to consume his magic. He manufactured a large straw, stuck it in one that didn't get away quickly enough, and pulled at the raw chaotic magic the thing was made of, sucking on the straw as he drew in the magic. He couldn't do that to ponies or other creatures made of matter infused with organized magic, whether harmonic or any other type, but these creatures had no matter in their composition; even when he cast solidification on them, they were still made of nothing but magical energy. The other small ones fled, recognizing that he was a bigger threat to them than they were to him if he could eat them before they ate him.

On the other hand, perhaps the blender had been a bad idea. The four small entities he'd thrown in a blender had merged into one of the medium sized entities and the conglomerate was currently working on breaking their way out of his blender. That hadn't worked the way he'd hoped.

Aside from the ones still trying to break out of his blender, all of the larger entities flung Confusion at him. Their magic worked roughly the same way his did – rather than structured, controlled patterns of magic programmed to cause a result, like unicorn magic for instance, theirs involved the direct application of raw magic against the patterns of reality, which meant they were throwing concepts at his existence. But two could play that game, and he was far better suited for it than a unicorn would be. He threw up a shield that essentially exemplified the foal's chant "I'm rubber, you're glue, what you say bounces off of me and sticks to you." The concept of confusion bounced off his shield and scattered across all of the creatures, dazing them. The larger, more powerful ones easily shook the confusion off, but the smaller and medium sized ones were hit disproportionately, considering that the spells had originated from the powerful ones and had been intended for Discord himself.

The larger ones were still firing spells at Discord, concepts like "death" and "dissolve" and "shield shatters" that his own natural shields were well capable of dealing with as long as he didn't get hit with too many of them at once. The others couldn't focus their attention, which made it a lot easier for him to dodge or deflect all of the attacks, since fewer of them could attack him at the same time. Ricochets off his deflection hit some of the larger creatures and did damage, but didn't kill them any more than they'd be able to easily kill him.

Discord cast his own confusion spell, a fog to dull senses beyond the immediate near range. It wasn't a literal fog, of course; in space that wasn't possible. Besides, the creatures didn't use vision, primarily; they were directly sensing magic. They'd get free of that quickly enough, but this opened Discord up to use his signature attack.

Separately, he whispered in the ears of most of them, in the illusory guise of another of their kind. Why don't we ally, and sit this fight out? Either the alien will defeat our leaders, but he'll be weakened by then and vulnerable, so we can take this world for ourselves without the leaders to take the best of everything and leave us the scraps; or, our leaders will defeat the alien but they'll be weakened. Why not fall on whoever survives this battle, when they're vulnerable, and consume them?

The entities had no concept of loyalty or friendship; they held power over one another solely by force, fear and self-interest. The strong consumed the weak to get even stronger; the weak followed the strong in hopes of being able to gather enough scraps to increase their own strength. Discord was honestly amazed they'd managed to put together a force this large; there might be as many as forty of the entities, all told. Their leaders must be particularly powerful to be able to attract so many followers; either that, or Discord's world was just that attractive to them.

He couldn't influence them by playing any positive emotions against them, as he did with ponies all the time, but their complete lack of loyalty to each other was a huge weakness for him to exploit and do what he did best, stir up his namesake. Some of those he targeted recognized that it was him, and cast spells to banish the illusions he was generating in their mind; others recognized that whatever entity he seemed to them to be impersonating wouldn't actually make an attempt to make that deal with them, perhaps due to internecine rivalries; still others didn't recognize that it was an illusion at all, but were offended at being approached by what seemed to be a lower-status entity, and tried to devour the imaginary entity. But he managed to get several to drop out of the fight and hang back, including one of the larger ones and a few of the medium size.

And then the most powerful one, no longer fogged by any confusion spells, hit Discord directly with fear.

He'd overextended himself, whispering soft dissension to so many of the entities; the fear spell penetrated his shielding completely. Suddenly terrified of the creatures, Discord teleported away, but they found the thread of his teleport and followed him, surrounding him as he reappeared. A tiny part of his mind knew this was a spell, that he wasn't really about to be horribly devoured, at least not as long as he kept his guard up and kept fighting, but his emotions screamed at him that he was about to be killed, that he had to do something now, now now NOW!

Emotion amplified his powers, and Discord had the entire thaumosphere of the world he was protecting to draw from. Consumed by unreasoning terror, he threw all of his power at the fabric of reality, and created an entropy vortex.

It was a mindless, churning hole in reality, similar to the blender he'd created earlier crossed with a suction cleaner, except that what it sucked in and "blended" was the fabric of existence itself. Like the tornados he'd once used against the dragons, but made of pure entropy, the fundamental force of dissolution and decay. It spun wildly through space, without course or direction, and any of the entities unlucky enough to get too close to it were sucked in, screaming. All the creatures dodged frantically, attempting to put as much distance between themselves and the swirling death as they could.

Two other entities, a large one and a mid-size one, attempted to retaliate by generating their own entropy vortices, copying his spell... a mistake on their parts. Without the thaumosphere of an entire planet to fuel them, they didn't have the power to create an entropy vortex. The smaller of the two simply burned all of the magical energy it had trying to power the spell, and fizzled out and died because if you tried to cast an entropy vortex and you didn't have the enormous amounts of energy needed to create something so antithetical to existence itself, it would drain everything you had... and the creature, being nothing but magic, burned itself out like a candleflame flaring and consuming its entire candle in a single moment.

The other entity had enough power to bring the thing into existence... for the mere second it took for its own creation to instantly devour it, because it hadn't had enough strength both to make the thing and to cast it away from itself. Without its creator to fuel it long enough to fully establish it, the vortex that had eaten its maker faded.

A third entity, another of the large ones, tried the same stunt, learning from the example of its dead compatriots by casting the thing away from itself as it created it. The vortex snapped into existence near enough one of the medium sized ones that the creature fled toward the vortex's maker... the last thing it ever did, because the large entity was so badly drained by making the vortex and casting it at a distance that it would have died of lack of energy if it hadn't desperately intercepted the fleeing entity and devoured it. Its vortex, too, fizzled. None of them had the power they'd need to create such a thing; Discord himself would have burned himself out completely, even with the power burst that terror had granted him, if he wasn't bound to the magic of an entire world. Every magical creature on the world beneath him would have experienced a nanosecond of a microscopic dip in their magical potency... a dip that not even trained magical researchers were likely to notice, because the enormous energy it took to create an entropy vortex that lasted long enough to do damage was still a drop in comparison to the vast ocean of magic of all life, animal, vegetable and mineral, on the planet.

Despite the fact that he wasn't made of matter and didn't have lungs or a heart, Discord panted, imaginary lungs heaving in the airlessness of space to draw in air that didn't exist, while his imaginary heart pounded frantically and his imaginary head and neck beaded with imaginary sweat. The shape he took when he was made of magic was by default based on the mortal creature he'd been born as, and it mimicked that mortal body's reactions. The fear spell was winding down, its creator more concerned with escaping the entropy vortex Discord had made than maintaining its spell. He was still more frightened than he could remember being in centuries, but not so terrified that he couldn't think straight, not anymore.

The fighting cadre in front of him was heavily whittled down; only three of the big ones remained active, only one of the mid-size, and what looked like maybe half of the original complement of small ones. But that was still more than enough to kill him if he dropped his guard. They were limited in their energy resources – there wasn't much they could draw from the outer thaumosphere, where the magic was thin, so for the most part all they had was what they could eat and what they had brought with them. Just like him when he went world-walking, they didn't have access to the energies of their own dimension now that they were no longer in it, and had to work with what they'd carried and what they could garner here. But any of them that managed to drain any of his magic would weaken him and strengthen them, and now that his own vortex was starting to fizzle, unable to dissolve enough prey to fuel its unnatural existence, they were recognizing weakness, firing spells at him that he was hard put to dodge.

He was exhausted; while he had access to a whole planet's worth of magic, his own personal magical life force would be drained any time he performed a working that large, and it wouldn't regenerate as instantaneously as his physical form would. The spells that the creatures were firing at him would hit, sooner or later, and he wouldn't be able to deflect or resist them all. He needed to change this up some, move onto territory where he had an advantage.

He flung unreasoning pride at one of the three largest entities – not the biggest, the leader, and not the one who'd had to eat a compatriot to survive, just now. The larger entities had the most ability to resist his spells, but he'd been sizing up the creatures for some time, just as they had him. He couldn't count them, but for the bigger ones, the ones who had enough magical mass and intelligence to have distinct personalities... he was beginning to know his enemies. And this one would be vulnerable to pride, yes. The glory of making the kill for itself, the potential to surpass its hated rivals by being the one to taste the alien protector's blood and drain it. So he flung his spell like a lance, and ran for the planet, flying at top speed, letting the entity dive after him, as the leader of the entities shouted admonishments to return, not to be drawn out by the alien, that it was a trick.

Discord's target, convinced that things were the other way around and that Discord was its target, shouted back something at the leader that Discord couldn't get all the nuances of, since the communication wasn't aimed at him. Something like "Stay back, this kill is mine!"

Perfect.

The inner thaumosphere of his world had protections of its own. As soon as the entity crossed into the planetary thaumosphere, spells woven around the world intended to keep malevolent intruders out began sapping the creature's magic. If it could get down to the planet's surface and take prey, that drain wouldn't make a difference; there was so much magic and so much sapience to be devoured on this planet. If the creatures managed to overcome Discord and came down in force... the tiny entities might not make it all the way to the surface before being drained to death by the world's protections, but the bigger ones would, and nothing on the planet would stop them. Aside from maybe a centaur. But there couldn't possibly be enough centaurs to deal with entities who'd managed to feed on ponies, he was fairly sure.

Celestia and Luna would throw themselves into combat against the things, and they would fall, be devoured and make matters much, much worse. As amusing as it would be to see the look on their faces when they realized they were up against something that love, friendship and harmony, not to mention alicorn powers, couldn't make a dent against – well, something besides him – he wasn't going to let that happen. They made marvelously entertaining enemies, and he wasn't entirely convinced part of him didn't still love them, from back when Celestia had been his one true love and Luna had been his little sister of the heart.

So drawing even one of the creatures into the thaumosphere was risky, but he knew the rest would hang back to see how badly the world's protective spells ate into their comrade before they followed. There was a reason none of them had broken ranks to try to descend to the planet already, despite that being where all the food was.

He struck with the concept of compaction again, making the entity dense enough that the gravity well could actually affect it, and it started to fall. An uncontrolled fall wouldn't harm it – it wasn't matter enough to be splattered when it hit – but he knew from previous battles that the creatures absolutely hated being moved by forces outside themselves. For entities from a dimension of pure chaos, they were certainly control freaks. The creature burned more magic to negate the pull of gravity and stay on the trajectory that followed Discord, as much sideways as downward. Discord compacted it some more. It used more magic to resist its heavier, more matter-like attraction to the ground. Then Discord went up again, and it had to change its trajectory, which was somewhat difficult for it when it was so close to being matter.

Of course, it fired killing spells at him the whole way. He dodged, deflected, and unraveled the spells, depending on how close they got to actually hitting him. Some got through and wore against his personal magic stores, bringing disruption that he had to spend his own magic to heal. Through a series of loops up and then down, Discord led the creature out over the ocean, where if this didn't work or went bad, he'd have more of an opportunity to recover before it would find any life to drain. Oceans teemed with life, but mostly not near the surface.

It hadn't spent any of its own reserves in reversing the compaction Discord had inflicted on it; it was single-mindedly focused on killing him. Good.

He imposed on it the concept of solidity, transforming it into matter. Outraged, it blasted him, tearing tiny holes in the pattern of his magic, embedding concepts that would slowly dissolve him from the holes outward. That actually hurt. The sudden fury he felt as pain tore through his magical essence amplified him, increasing his strength, and he pulled on the thaumosphere again for the power to perform an impossible working.

An entropy vortex within the world's inner thaumosphere would be the worst idea possible and Discord would never take that risk. Instead, he inverted the entity's matter.

Inverted matter had killed him once, the first time he'd died. It had been dragons who'd created it, pooling enormous energies and sharing them via some sort of ritual that he was pretty sure was now lost to dragonkind, and as far as he knew he was the only being left in the world with the spells to do it. In the split second that the creature still existed as a being of inverted matter, Discord gazed – from a safe distance, but longingly – at the impossible mass, at matter that vibrated at a rhythm the exact opposite of all other matter, so beautifully disharmonious and perfectly antithetical that neither it nor anything it touched could survive. His heart hurt with the beauty of it even as he remembered, quite clearly, how that beauty had killed him, ascended him, and torn from him the last semblance of a normal mortal's life and loves.

The creature exploded, all the inverted matter he'd just changed it into converting into wild, raw energy, along with all of the air and water vapor that touched it. It was more of a series of explosions, really, if you watched it with time slowed down to a crawl; the substance of the air touching the surface of the beautiful disharmony of its nature would cause both that layer of air and that layer of surface to explode, and then, nature abhorring a vacuum, more air would rush in and annihilate the second layer, and so forth. An onion of perfect destruction. He wished he'd had the forethought to summon a magical recording device so he could watch it happen over and over. Discord didn't necessarily enjoy the chaos of destruction all that much, most of the time, but that was because it tended to harm the living creatures of the world, and ensuring that they lived guaranteed far more chaos. When there was spectacular destruction and nothing he cared for was being harmed... now that, he loved.

Even made of magic, he could feel those shockwaves. The first time, he'd been at ground zero and hadn't lived long enough to feel them; he'd held the beautiful thing in his paws, gazing upon it in awe, feeling for the first time the presence of something so much larger than himself that it could be deemed worthy of worship – the pure and fundamental concept of Disharmony, expressed so exquisitely and impossibly in the form of a crystal made of matter oppositional to matter. And then the dragon mage who'd been keeping it penned in a magical force field had dropped the force field. Discord wasn't even sure there had been time for it to actually fall into his paw before the bloom of annihilation had torn him apart, annihilating his very atoms. It had all happened so fast.

There weren't any dragon mages anymore, or if there were, they were hiding really, really well.

As he started to exert his magic again to heal the holes in his pattern, he felt a pull where there shouldn't be. One of the smaller entities had taken the opportunity to drop into the thaumosphere and latch onto him while he was distracted, and now it was bloating like a tick, leeching his magic from him. It was a small one, and couldn't drain him very fast, but it was rapidly getting bigger... and it was licking and sucking at his mind, fogging his brain, driving his thoughts into the type of chaos he liked to inflict on others but hated to experience.

In a surge of unreasoning panic, confusion clouding his senses too badly to come up with any more carefully calculated plan, he used an enormous quantity of magic to grab the thing, pull it off himself with brute force, and fling it. Too late, as his senses cleared, he sensed the delight and amusement of the creature. It was laughing at him. It was also, now, almost the size of one of the medium-weights. The reason such a massive quantity of magic had only managed to fling the creature a short distance away was that it had eaten most of the magic he'd thrown at it.

It charged at him again. Discord dodged, but his reactions were slowed; he hadn't fully recovered yet from the creature trying to eat his intelligence. It laughed at him again and wheeled around for another pass. Discord smacked himself in the head, trying to wake himself up, but it was as if he was stuck for the moment in a half-asleep state, his consciousness temporarily damaged by the creature. If it got him again, it might knock him unconscious, and then he'd never wake up.

He threw up a barrier around himself. The creature ate through it, clinging to the barrier so Discord couldn't fly away, because he hadn't thought to make the barrier independent of himself like a wall; it was a bubble around himself. It was getting bigger and bigger, reminding Discord of a tick, bloating itself on his blood. Except it was his magic, not his blood.

His half-asleep mind wondered, What happens if a tick drinks too much, too fast?

Without the ability to reason out why this might turn out to be a very, very bad idea, he started feeding the creature a high-intensity stream of pure magic, a firehose of raw mana. Eagerly the creature drank, getting bigger and bigger, rapidly bloating to the size of one of the large creatures, and beyond. He heard it laughing triumphantly, mocking him for his stupidity or perhaps the ease with which he'd given up and surrendered to it, giving it exactly what it wanted.

And then it exploded.

For several minutes Discord floated there, breathing heavily even though he shouldn't technically need to at all. He converted himself back to matter, gathering the loose fragments of magic that had been released in the explosion and using them to make an oxygen bubble for himself, since he was high enough in the atmosphere that there wasn't enough oxygen to supply a matter-based draconequus body with its normal needs, let alone while he was hyperventilating.

Some part of him must have recognized that the creatures weren't likely to have any adaptations to prevent overeating, in a universe where they had to devour each other to get any mana at all, he thought. It seemed unlikely to the point of near-impossibility that any of them would ever have an opportunity to devour as much magic, as fast, as he'd just thrown at that creature. He convinced himself that this had been a clever plan based on a recognition of the creature's weaknesses, so deeply buried in his subconscious that he'd had no trouble intuiting them while he was fogged and half-conscious from the creature feeding on him, rather than admit to himself that he'd just done something spectacularly stupid and had been incredibly lucky that it had worked.

As he rose back out of the inner thaumosphere to continue his fight against the rest of them, he noted that several of the ones he'd convinced to stay back and attack the winner at the end were gone... and that the two largest of his opponents were significantly bigger and stronger than they'd been before. All of them circled him warily, their personal shields at maximum strength.

Without trying to take any of them on, Discord teleported to the rift they'd come through. He left behind an illusion of himself so they wouldn't realize what he was doing, but the largest ones were strong enough now to see through the illusion instantly, and barked their orders accordingly. The entire swarm fell on him, trying to prevent him from sealing their escape route – not that they'd yet come to the belief that they'd need one, but they hadn't survived such a savage place as their home universe by being overconfident. He suspected that up until this moment they hadn't realized he had the power to seal dimensional rifts.

Discord teleported out of the swarm before they could land on him, but only a short distance away. They followed. He teleported again. And again. Multiple hops, increasing the risk every time that one of the creatures following him would land straight in the maw of another; none of them trusted their comrades not to devour them. With good reason, considering the absence of about half of the ones he'd tricked into hanging back. The risk was too high for most of them; they started fanning out, teleporting to form a wide sphere around him rather than practically on top of him. Which meant that he had a precious second or two to cast the spell that would seal the rift before he had to throw his shields up again. They also hadn't realized his range; he didn't need to be on top of the rift to seal it as long as he knew it was there. Given that he could reach the sun from any point on the planet below, at any time, without having to have a special connection to it like Celestia did, his effective range was... not limitless, but far, far wider than they'd probably guessed. A brief touch of his energies against the rift so he could fully grasp its pattern, and he hadn't needed to stay there, touching it, to seal it.

They fell on him then, radiating fury. The small ones and the only remaining midsize who wasn't hanging back clamped onto his shields, eating their way through. He couldn't shake them by teleporting again. The larger ones were sending waves of emotion at him – concepts like fear, apathy, despair, and weakness. Discord strengthened his shields against the barrage. In the long run, all that was going to do was feed his attackers, but he needed to buy a little time.

He generated an illusion of himself faltering and collapsing, while he sent the concept of triumph, the joy of victory and the pleasure of feeding at them. Most of the creatures fell for it, eagerly devouring nothing in the belief that they had him in their grasp, freeing him to teleport away from them. The largest one shrieked in rage, having seen through his illusion right away, and flung more mana than he thought any individual one of the things had at him, warping space around him.

Suddenly he was in a space made of impossible angles, where the fabric of spacetime itself bent around him in ways that would have broken a pony's mind. Discord's physical brain might not have been much better at comprehending this twisted space; reality had folded over itself, again and again, creating a labyrinth of dimensions that no three-dimensional creature could process or understand. But right now, Discord was made of magic, and fully in sync with his own nature as a creature of Chaos; he didn't need to truly comprehend. His perceptions brought information into his mind, unfiltered, and he responded without the need to impose the familiar on what he saw.

The smaller entities pursued him into the maze. They were much more adept with the physical laws that had been imposed on the space around him than he was; he was reacting on instinct, accepting what his senses told him no matter how impossible his experience might say it was, but they were familiar with this kind of space and knew how to maneuver in it. There were places where spacetime folded in such a way that a creature he had evaded could go in the opposite direction from him, down a tunnel that pointed away, and then reappear above him or to his side, blocking his path. Two of them managed to chase him into a blind pocket, a dead end that there was no escape from.

He could feed them until they popped, again, but if they were smart enough that they'd figured out how to disengage from seeing what he'd done to their comrade, all he'd do would be to make them more powerful.

When all else failed, Discord was fond of simple solutions to complex problems. He tore a hole in spacetime. The density of space here, after multiple folds, made it impossible for him to make a shallow cut, the kind that would take him into a world where the laws of physics were at least vaguely similar to here; instead, he managed to cut his way into one of the Deep Dimensions, near the core of reality. Discord entered the rift, but only partially; there was a monobloc, a supermassive black hole the mass of a universe far below his rift, radiating magical energy and all the other kinds as well so intensely he'd be disintegrated long before the gravity pulled him in.

A black hole would, eventually, suck everything in that came near it, but the corona of the black hole, at the edge of the event horizon, held so much energy that even its gravity couldn't quite cage it all; they radiated more intensely than any star possibly could, when they were this big and this powerful. Plus the laws of physics didn't work the same here. This was a universe immediately prior to a Big Bang, where all the matter and energy that there would ever be in that universe were gathered in a single impossible sinkhole. If Discord lost his grip on the rift and fell fully into the proto-universe, he wouldn't survive more than a moment.

The creatures pursued him, falling for his ruse, and couldn't slow down or change direction in time as they came out in the other universe; they were instantly blasted by the quasar below. First the energies filled them, bloating them until they exploded; then those same energies imploded, crushed by the weight of all of a universe held in a single point, and were sucked down as strands of spaghetti. Had Discord been fully in that universe, he'd never have seen all of that; it was only because his timeflow was bound to his own universe that he could see what would take millions of years in a place where gravity was so intense that time itself could barely move. But then, had he been fully in that universe, he'd be dead quickly enough that even with time slowing to a crawl near the event horizon, he'd still have no opportunity to react or save himself.

He pulled himself back out of the rift – and almost fell back in, pushed hard by the concept of gravity, setting "down" as his rift. One of the larger creatures must have sent that one, letting the spell ooze along the "walls" of the folded dimension until it found a target. Only by stretching himself across the rift, frantically pulling it back together as he braced himself against his own reality, could he manage to avoid being shoved in.

As his rift closed enough that he could let go without falling in, he fled the cul-de-sac of impossible angles and folded space that he was in, dodging as more of the small creatures came at him. The entities were going all out, now. His senses for magic told him that the ones who he'd tricked into sitting out the battle had come back in; now all of the mid-size and all of the larger ones were ranged around his labyrinth, blocking the exits, as small creatures zipped through the corridors of non-Euclidean geometry, hungry for him.

They had learned. They would hit him, grab a draught of his magic and life force as they struck, and then zip off before he could retaliate. He threw concepts at them, but ineffectively; they understood the geometry of this place, and every time they hit him they dazed him, biting into his intelligence. Meanwhile, the large opponents keeping him boxed in were sending more concepts, loneliness and heartbreak and exhaustion... things too close to his actual weaknesses, the things he felt deep down, for him to have any good defense if they hit him.

And the labyrinth kept changing. The creatures weren't so overwhelmingly powerful that they could keep feeding power into it to change it, but Discord's instincts told him it wasn't random; they were using some sort of complex mathematical algorithm. Simple math was almost impossible for Discord, who could barely count and had a hard time remembering the results of simple addition or subtraction; but complex, highly advanced math was something he seemed to understand by intuition, particularly when it related to patterns. He understood Order. An agent of Chaos had to, else how could he disrupt it?

He flew, dodging both the small creatures and the spells ricocheting off the walls, mapping out the pattern of the labyrinth's changes. In this space, he couldn't reach or draw from the planetary thaumosphere, and every time his opponents landed a hit on him they drained him and strengthened themselves. They had no route home anymore and no way to get more mana except by devouring it, but there was only one of him and still a good number of them. This wasn't sustainable. He had to find a way to defeat them and get out of here, but there were only so many exits from this twisted space, and his experience in trying to cut his way through told him that he wasn't going to be able to get to anywhere he wanted to go and it was going to take way too much energy to try. And the exits were blocked by entities. Some of them were only middleweights, but after his first fight with a small one that had tried to devour him, Discord didn't want to fly directly into one of them any more than he wanted to fly directly into one of the large ones.

They had him completely bottled up.

Which gave him an idea.

As two of the small ones came toward him, Discord made no attempt to flee. Instead, he generated a Klein bottle of spacetime out of the passageway in front of him, and sealed it behind the two creatures as they skidded into it. He contracted it so it could easily fit in the tiny dimensional spaces that had been created by the folding space, and imposed his will on it to accelerate time inside.

There were things he could do out here, far from the planetary thaumosphere, that would be so dangerous within the inner thaumosphere that for all intents and purposes they weren't even in his repertoire there. An entropy vortex was one such thing. Time acceleration was another. When time was accelerated in a sequestered space, the heat energy released by normal entropic decay would have nowhere to go; it couldn't dissipate across the time differential. The more matter was trapped in fast-time, the more heat would be generated. Magic didn't tend to decay into heat, it decayed into raw, unpatterned magic, but the same thing would happen. Within the accelerated Klein bottle, the tiny amount of hydrogen that could be found in the vacuum of space wouldn't be sufficient to get really hot, whereas capturing any portion of the atmosphere of a planet would heat to solar fusion levels very, very quickly if the time was accelerated as high as he was doing now. But the magic of the two entities trapped within was a different story. The creatures would expend a great deal of magic trying to escape, and then they would starve to death and dissipate completely into raw magic, and the temporal pressure would ensure that the magic would reach explosive levels at some point.

The idea was not to be all that close to his Klein bottle when that happened.

It was a huge expenditure of magic on his own part, and he couldn't compensate by drawing from the thaumosphere, so this was a large risk, but it had to be done. He had to escape this maze of dimensions and impossible angles, or they'd wear him down and win by attrition.

He charged for one of the exits, one guarded by the smallest of the mid-size creatures. As he ran/flew/skated across reality, he wove a fear spell around his bottle, designed to be powered off of any raw magic it encountered. The creature saw him coming, but stood its ground, pseudopods of energy extending to try to grasp him before he could get close enough to escape. He folded space and gravity so that the creature was "down" and the Klein bottle rolled (more or less; it wasn't made of matter, so it couldn't actually roll) toward the creature, who, of course, punctured it to try to drink the magic it was made of.

The resulting explosion did not actually kill the middleweight; it was still alive after so many of its comrades had died in this battle, largely because it had excellent reaction time. But it couldn't avoid the fear spell that was flung outward by the explosion, powered by the raw magic contained within the time bottle. Shrieking, the creature fled, terrified.

There was now raw magical energy all over the place; the living creatures that had contained most of that magic before were gone, their patterns disrupted to nothingness. Discord sucked in the magic as he cleared the edge of the labyrinth, crossing the realicline into familiar three-dimensional space.

The labyrinth collapsed. Apparently something had been fueling it, and that something had been himself. Discord was shocked to realize how much weaker he was than he'd thought when he was in the labyrinth; somehow the space itself had been drawing energy from him, sustaining itself off of his magic. If he'd known, he might not have created that Klein bottle. Although, considering that he'd have still needed something spectacular to escape with, maybe he would have.

Without the labyrinth sitting in the space between him and them, all of the creatures now had a clear, straight-line shot at him, and he was weakened. The entire swarm, including the large ones, charged at him.

Discord fled.

Many of the attacks they flung at him landed; he didn't have the strength to dodge or shield from everything. He only blocked or dodged the deadly ones; the ones that were just intended to crush him emotionally and beat him into submission from the inside got through. He laughed, and cried, and screamed in terror, sometimes simultaneously, as their attacks bombarded his emotions, but he kept running. This isn't real, he sobbed when the sudden despair hit and the desire to just give up. They're doing this to me. I don't want to let them win. And then anger and overweening pride, almost enough to make him give up his flight, turn around and attack them. Almost. The sheer number of emotional attacks blasting him made his emotional state too chaotic for him to be able to decide to do anything except what he was already doing, because no emotional state could last long enough for him to make a decision to change tactics.

Behind him, he flung land mines of doubt, caltrops of confusion, spiked pits of hunger. He cast illusion after illusion, but none of them were good enough to make the creatures lose track of him. When one of the largest ones barreled into his hunger concept, it stopped to devour some of its comrades that had fallen prey to his other traps, a middleweight and two small ones that were consumed with confusion or doubt. There were few enough left now that he could count them, six or seven or something like that, but most of the ones left were large and powerful.

Ahead of him, he cast another illusion, but it looked exactly like what was really there, so he didn't think they'd noticed. He hoped, anyway.

One last large working. Do or die time. If this didn't work, he'd have nothing left, but time wasn't on his side here. The energy that had been stolen from him was his essence, the energy he was made of in his magical form, not anything he could quickly or easily replenish, and every spell he cast drew on some of that regardless of how much energy he could draw from other sources to power the spell itself. He needed a decisive win, quickly, or they'd wear him down. The creatures had only performed one working as large as his entropy vortex, or his Klein bottle of time, or his transforming a creature into antimatter, and that large working, the imposition of the laws of their spacetime on a small section of his, had somehow been keyed to power itself from him. He'd killed most of them, but none of the ones who were left were anywhere near as drained as he was.

When he reached the place where he'd placed his illusion, he stopped and turned, gasping despite the continuing lack of a need for oxygen in his magical form. A scattershot of spells toward them, small entropy spells and fear concepts and a hunger or two. None were supposed to hit, though he would hardly be unhappy if they did. The point was to hide the larger working he was performing.

His spells didn't hit. And then they were on him, surrounding him, warping space around him so he couldn't teleport. The dimensionality remained the same but space thickened, toughened. Now he could only run by physically moving through space.

Only seven of them. Not enough to form a sphere. But they took up positions roughly approximating a dome, moving in on him. Recognizing that he was too tired to keep running, he guessed. He'd chosen to make a last stand here, and thus they were behaving as if he was cornered, and in some senses he was.

Far away, something large and ponderous groaned, resisting the pull of his magic with its weight and inertia.

Even farther away, he felt the towering rage of a pony, a disharmony so near to his heart that he could sense it from even this distance, and magic trying to resist his.

It was useless, of course. His magic was already in motion; he'd put enough power into the spell that nothing was going to stop it.

With what little was left of his strength, he shielded against the creatures. They attacked full force. Again, he blocked the deadliest spells, but part of his mind recognized them as a feint, something they knew he'd waste his strength on defending against, so that the spells they actually intended to hit him would get through. And they did. He was struck with a barrage of futility, despair, exhaustion, recognition of weakness. The sense of being defeated, of resignation, of surrender. He knew the emotions came from their attacks, but he was generally ruled by emotion; he had little defense against his emotions turning on him.

He was close to giving in, dropping his shields and letting them end him, when a thaumosphere rushed at him, similar enough to the thaumosphere of his world that its touch invigorated him. A magic created by chaos churning, the fire of creation blazing, reshaping the elements of matter themselves. The others felt the rush of magic before the gravity, and the gravity before Discord's illusion broke down and they perceived the blinding light.

With all of his strength, Discord dodged out of the way, shooting straight down out of the plane of his weapon's approach. It wasn't enough. The corona caught him, fire and heat and magic so intense even he was hard-put to hold himself together, but the magic created here was raw and chaotic and part of his world, and he'd felt that magic so many times before – in battle, in love, or when he reached to touch it and use it of his own accord, as he'd just done. It was destructive but it was familiar and he took as much strength from it as it took from him in burning him.

The entities were not so fortunate.

A tiny star, a blazing fusion reactor held together by magic, barreled into them, swallowing them, pulling them into its core. The ones that tried to feed on the magic exploded. The ones that tried, desperately, to hold themselves together in the face of such overwhelming chaos... failed.

One managed to hold itself together – and then, far-distant Celestia caught her star with her magic, her rage at Discord's tearing it from its orbit causing the star to blaze hotter than ever, and all foreign magic within it was crushed and swallowed and torn by Celestia's will bearing down on it, purifying the star. With what had to be a mind-boggling level of effort, her magic wrenched it back, pulling it away from Discord and back toward where it belonged. A good thing; he wasn't sure he'd have had the strength to flee its gravity, himself.

Other planets had full-size stars, and he'd tested himself against some of them. They were much, much too far away for magic wielded on a planet to manipulate, and much, much too massive for even his magic to do much. His world had a star so small, it wouldn't fuse atoms or hold itself together if it weren't bound to itself by magic... but it was still a star. Still a raging, massive fusion reactor, considerably larger than the moon and much further away. It had taken everything he had to pull it here. He wouldn't have had the strength to put it back.

Luna was helping. Distantly he could feel her magic as well, pulling on Celestia's sun, helping Celestia wrestle it back to its proper spot. Good. He hadn't wanted to save the world from entities that would devour magic and thought, only to have it die of the cold and darkness with the loss of its sun.

Discord drifted in space, too weak and tired to do anything else. He didn't have the strength to reach out to the thaumosphere and pull in more energy. He was only alive because the sun's magic was inherently chaotic.

Maybe eventually he'd regather enough of his strength to return to his world. Maybe he wouldn't. Right now, he no longer cared. The spells that had gotten through, at the end, would have devastated him if he weren't so tired. If he tried to marshal his thoughts, to think something constructive, all he could think about was how no one on that world below would ever believe he'd just risked his life to save them all, and none of them would care, and if he did die up here they'd all either throw a party or simply ignore his death completely, and no. Much easier to drift, without thinking, without remembering, without trying to feel anything at all.

And then a rectangular box, upright and apparently made of wood, appeared in space.

That's my time machine, Discord thought, his emotions too emptied from the attacks he'd endured to feel anything more than mild surprise. It changed to slightly more intense surprise when a brown Earth pony wearing a tie stuck his head out of the box, and shouted into the airlessness of space. "That's him! Great whickering stallions, he looks terrible!"

You probably wouldn't look so great yourself if you'd just hit a bunch of mind-devouring eldritch horrors from another dimension with the sun, Discord thought, but was too tired to actually say it. Wow, Celestia is going to be so angry with me. I can't wait to see it. The thought cheered him up slightly, restoring just a fraction of his energy. He wondered how an earth pony was shouting into the vacuum of space, but not enough to bother using his perceptions to detect the pony's patterns and figure it out.

"Of course he looks terrible, he's just nearly been killed fighting off creatures that would have devoured every mind in Equestria, and everywhere else in the world as well," a very familiar voice that Discord had thought he'd never hear again said, and Starswirl the Bearded stuck his head out of the time machine. "Well? Don't just float there, boy! Swim on over here, we're here to rescue you!"

Discord prided himself on the ability to adapt to anything, absorb any new information, and never, ever reject anything he saw with his own eyes or heard with his own ears as "impossible", but his old teacher and an obviously non-magical pony attempting to rescue him, in his own time machine no less, was apparently over his limit. Who knew? He stared at Starswirl uncomprehendingly.

"He's plainly been through a lot, Star," the earth pony said. "Maybe you should reel him in."

"Hush, Turner. He's perfectly capable—"

"He seems to be missing most of his left half," the earth pony pointed out. "He might be less capable than you think, at the moment."

"Oh, all right." Magic tugged at Discord, pulling him toward his time machine and the two stallions. Wait, my left half is missing?... Huh, so it is. Must've forgotten to rebuild that. I wonder when it got zapped. Discord mustered up enough energy to regenerate most of his missing left side, but couldn't be bothered with his goat leg yet. The talon was important though. It was so much easier to snap his talons than it was to snap the digits of his lion paw. Too soft.

As he tumbled into the time machine, the earth pony shoved the door closed, and the aura of Starswirl's magic winked out. Today it was bigger on the inside, which was interesting, because Discord could never get that spell to hold while he was actually using the thing to travel in time, which meant Starswirl had managed to pull off something he couldn't and he really needed to learn how the stallion had done it. Later. "My time machine," he said, his voice hoarse and gravelly. Apparently he hadn't come back into the form of matter as complete as he'd been when the creatures had first annihilated his body. His vocal chords didn't seem quite right.

"We've got him!" the earth pony said. "Let's get back to Equestria. Allons-y, as they say in Prance!"

"I haven't got it in me to do a warp," Starswirl said. "We'll have to take the long way home, unless Discord can manage to pull himself together enough to teleport us. How about it, boy? Got a teleport in you, or no?"

Starswirl had disappeared over four hundred years ago. Discord and the alicorns had thought he was dead. "I'm pretty sure I'm older than you," he managed to croak out.

"Yes, yes, most likely, but to me you'll always be that crazy boy who kept trying to dump snails on my head. Do you need a doctor? Because the closest we have is the Doctor here, Ti—"

"Spoilers, Star! Just call me Dr. Hooves. We know each other in the future, you see."

"Why do you have my time machine?"

"Sorry, that's also spoilers! Though it's a magnificent piece of work, completely brilliant. I have to admit, when I knew you in the future, you always struck me as more of a goof than a genius, but this is amazing! How did you do it?"

"Chaos," Discord mumbled, waving one paw aimlessly.

"He'll never explain how he did it," Starswirl said in a cranky tone. "He probably doesn't even remember. Genius boy, but disorganized and fluff-brained to the point where you wonder why he doesn't lose his head."

"Well." The earth pony – Dr. Hooves? – hit some buttons on the time machine, and Discord felt it come to a complete stop in space, an absolute stop rather than a relative one, which meant that the planet was now rushing toward them at thousands of gallops an hour as it whirled through space. "By my calculations, it should only be a couple of hours before the world catches up to us, and then we can activate motion again and head on down!"

At some point Discord was going to want an explanation as to how Starswirl knew he was in trouble, and where he got Discord's time machine, and why he was traveling with an earth pony from the future, and why he wasn't dead, but right now he was too tired for any of that. He knew he shouldn't let his guard down around any pony, even Starswirl, but right now it was impossible to care. Discord closed his eyes and curled up on the floor of his time machine. "I want a blanket," he mumbled, and didn't bother staying awake long enough to know if they'd given him one or not.