What was the most amount of magic Discord could get away with without Fluttershy noticing? It was one of the funnest games that he liked to practice while she was busy doing something or other. He was lounging on the couch, lazily swapping the body parts of the various animals in the room.
The rabbit and the squirrel gave the most blood curdling screech upon noticing that their feet had been swapped. Fluttershy might’ve noticed if he hadn’t have placed a sound barrier around them.
The rabbit shambled over and tried to smack him with a paw, but Discord simply let it pass through him, making his body go intangible. He stuck out his tongue at the rabbit and grinned.
That was when the words started.
The block of strange yellow symbols floated up from under the floor. No sooner had the first block appeared than another set of even stranger symbols rose forth like a scrolling marquee.
“Discord! What are doing?” yelled Fluttershy from the kitchen.
“Why does everyone blame me first for these kinds of things?” huffed Discord, as several new blocks of different shaped symbols marched from the floor.
Fluttershy ducked back into the living room. “Here, too?”
“There’s more than one of these?” asked Discord. By this time the march of symbols had gone past the ceiling and more kept coming from below. He snapped his paw and made several copies of himself, leaving a core self at the cottage and teleporting several spares across Equestria.
The “message” was being beamed all throughout Equestria. There were so many spares that it felt impossible for any creature not to notice it. It would be nigh impossible for him to cover this up now, whatever it was.
“What did you do to Angel’s feet?” asked a voice from what felt like far away.
Discord snapped his talons. “Nothing,” he said.
Fluttershy sighed, closed her eyes and then massaged her head with a hoof. “We’ve talked about this.”
“And we can talk about it again, but not now. This,” he said gesturing to the symbols, “I’m not sure what it is, but it’s important.”
One of Discord’s copies reached the other side of the planet. Everything was pitch black except for the slightly glowing yellow symbols. The “message” had been broadcasting there for several hours. The long chain of symbols had passed through the planet and had come out again on the other side.
The copy looked up and got a feeling of vertigo as he gazed at the marquee that seemed to go on forever. He jumped up and flew along its path, the symbols were a blur as he raced into space. One kilometer, two, ten, a hundred, they just kept going.
“What does it say?” asked Fluttershy from far away.
The Discord inside the cottage shrugged.
The copy of Discord zoomed along the thread. There were so many threads of the broadcast crisscrossing all of space, as if Equestria alone hadn’t been the target. No. Equestria had been the target, the broadcasters just had not have known where in space Equestria might have been. The copy continued to race along the marquee until all at once, the message stopped. The copy looked back down on the planet of Equestria below. From where he viewed, the planet laid mostly in darkness, only a large sun orbiting around it illuminated a crescent patch on the right.
Another copy of Discord teleported to the other side of planet to the exact same marquee. After some quick mathematical spellwork, the marquee was calculated to be over a thousand kilometers long.
Back at the cottage, a familiar set of symbols appeared. Discord recognized the alphabet instantly, as if they were an old forgotten friend. The straight lines and curves instantly relaxed him. He had forgotten what it was like to read in his mother tongue, it had been eons. It had been—
Something unlocked in the back of his mind. Memories that had been obliterated and crushed into dust suddenly resurfaced, the familiar language catapulting an all-out onslaught of memories to forefront of his mind. Once they started, the floodgates of thoughts didn’t stop. Discord tried so hard to live in the here and now, but suddenly every thought and every experience of eons was compressed all at once and relived in a single moment.
He finally understood what the message meant.
Feelings flooded within him. Fear for Equestria. Shame for what he’d done after he’d forgotten so much. Hatred for everything outside of his control. Something inside him completely broke and he collapsed onto the floor. He could’ve melted into a puddle, but he didn’t have the energy for magic, or the sense of humor anymore.
No. The message was a lie. Just like everything outside of his domain had been. He just had to check and make sure. He snapped his talons, tapping into magic he hadn’t practiced with in eons.
A copy of himself teleported to the very edge of his domain. The copy slashed at walls, poking a small hole in reality. The copy scurried through the tunnel and looked outside.
Black. Nothing but black darkness. No stars. Nothing. The speed of light was lower than it was when he left it, but he should still be able to see something.
The copy fled back inside, sealed the hole behind him and snapped his talons. Discord, completely whole again, reviewed the initial message. They hadn’t been lying. And given the speed of time Equestria was in, he only had a few days to decide, if that.
“Are you okay, Discord?” said Fluttershy, poking at him with a hoof.
“No,” said Discord blankly.
“Umm…” said Fluttershy.
The marquee continued to stream past. The last time Discord had been so still, he had been a statue.
“No,” said Discord again. Fluttershy stepped back.
He snapped his talons, willing the march of symbols to disappear, but they didn't.
“NO!” he screeched, standing up and snapping his talons again, trying another spell to banish them. “NO!” he said again, trying another spell that would set the symbols invisible. “NO!” he repeated, trying to hide each side of the symbols behind a black veil. “NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!”
With every “no” he snapped his talons and tried a different spell to remove the marquee. Not even a miniature black hole so much as made the languages budge. He closed his lion’s paw around the miniature void and made it disappear into nothingness.
Fluttershy sat on the couch and watched the vain display of magic. After several long moments of Discord breathing heavily, she spoke up. “Discord, what is this?”
He shot her a dirty look and said nothing. He just sat straight up on the couch and didn’t move a muscle. His eyes kept staring at the marquee still spilling up from below. His mind raced, then went blank, then raced around in circles until something crashed and his mind went blank again.
There was a knock on the door, and one of Fluttershy’s ducks dropped onto the handle and opened the door wide, revealing a calm Princess Celestia.
Discord’s insides were squirming. Do something silly. Do something. Anything. Pretend everything is fine. Pretend nopony is going to die. Nopony is going to die, not if we have any say in it.
“I can’t help you,” said Discord blankly, not looking at her. Yes, that was just the thing to say. Where was the snapping, the hijinx, something!? There’s no point in acting, they’ll all die soon anyway. It doesn’t matter. Forget all that. Yes, forget everything, except you and Fluttershy. Everything else doesn’t matter. STOP! You’re not acting like yourself. There’s too many “selves” in me right now!
Celestia paused mid-stride, before continuing to walk in. “It’s nice to see you too, Discord,” she flashed him a warm smile. Her radiant beam shifted from Discord to Fluttershy.
“And how are you, Fluttershy?”
“I’m fine, Princess Celestia,” said Fluttershy, her eyes flashing to the yellow symbols still streaming from the floor. “Umm… would you like some tea?”
“That would be great!” said Celestia. “Can I help?”
“Oh, umm… sure,” said Fluttershy as she trotted back into the kitchen with Celestia in tow.
Discord stared blankly at the symbols, trying to order his mind into some form of cohesion. He usually liked disorder, but his mind was going back and forth between too many versions of himself. Their conversations were heated and he didn’t even know who was talking. To make sense of everything, he tried to pin down names onto the thoughts. He assigned each of them with different eras of himself through the eons.
Xenophobia, his most ancient self, dominated most of the conversation. He insisted that the message was a lie, and that the observer sent to check the validity of the message had been deceived. It was all an elaborate hoax to draw them out.
Deity was next. He was that part of himself that had created all this in the first place. He wanted to obey the message.
“All life is precious,” said Deity. “We will have to leave this place.”
“Life!? Sacred!?” screamed Xenophobia. “OUR LIFE IS SACRED! NO ONE ELSE’S!”
“Chaos is only fun when there’s life around to enjoy it,” said Chaos, shrugging. He had been the part of himself that had locked away and had attempted to eradicate all memories of Deity and Xenophobia. The magic Chaos had used to lock them away could only be remembered again if Discord read the sealed journal with the ancient script. But he had gotten the spell wrong. The marquee’s letters triggered the remembering instead.
“Dumb plan,” said Xenophobia. “You’re SO STUPID!”
“No, we need to be here,” said Deity. “We need to take Equestria back. To save everyone, everypony has to die.”
“YOU stay out of THIS!” said Xenophobia. “It’s hoax. All of it. Trust no one. Every alien race will kill everyone else the first chance they get, that’s a Dark Forest. Don’t you remember?”
“Discord,” said Chaos, reaching right out of his subconscious. “Let me lock away these guys again. In fact, I can do the same to you if you’d like. Chaos is SO much funner when you don’t know what you’re doing. It’ll be great!”
Discord winced and shoved Chaos back into the subconscious argument.
“Hey come on!” said Chaos. “Alright, we’ll try something different. You like Fluttershy, right? Just keep her and you. Leave everypony else to die. Problem solved.”
“The message said to send only memories,” said Deity. “We have to sacrifice her too.”
“We’ll do NOTHING,” shouted Xenophobia.
“Tea?” said a voice from far away. Discord snapped back to reality. Fluttershy was sitting next to him, holding a teacup.
“I’m…” began Discord, his speech halting. “I’m… not… thirsty.” He tried so hard not to let the conversation that was inside of him escape.
“It’s your favorite kind,” mentioned Fluttershy, holding out the tea cup to him.
He blinked and stared at the cup, reflexively reaching down to pick it up. He held onto it with a paw, but didn’t drink it.
“Discord,” began Celestia.
“I can’t help you,” said Discord, his eyes still glazed over.
“Discord, what do these symbols mean?” she asked, gesturing to the nearly infinite wall of symbols.
“What do I look like, a translator!?” sneered Discord, some Xenophobia encroaching into his words.
Celestia flinched before regaining her composure. “Well, if you knew what some of these languages said, we would appreciate it.”
“You’re not you when you’re not bending the laws of reality,” said Chaos. “They’re suspicious! Light Celestia’s hair on fire! Drink the teacup instead of the tea! Put googly eyes on all the fabric in the room! Do something instead of just sitting there!”
“This decision will take some time,” said Deity. “But if life is to continue, then we need to reach a consensus soon.”
“We have reached consensus,” said Xenophobia. “Do NOTHING! Especially not listen to you!”
The room was quiet for a long time while Celestia and Fluttershy drank their tea and the words floated by.
When Celestia finished her tea, she turned to walk away. “If you can’t help me, I’m sure Twilight will.”
Discord snorted. “She won’t know any of these languages.”
“She has a team of linguists, mathematicians and a sample size of over one hundred thousand languages so far. Not every language in this cipher is phonetic based, there should be enough pictograms to figure out most of the meaning.”
“NO!” Discord shouted, Xenophobia bleeding through. He flew off the couch and put his face close to hers. “YOU HAVE TO STOP HER!”
Celestia only raised an eyebrow. “And why is that?”
The voices in his head were finally silent, awaiting his ultimate decision on the matter.
“If... you find that out," Discord stepped back, resting his lions paw on the back of his neck and looking at the floor. "Equestria will be destroyed.”
Celestia stepped back. “What are you talking about?”
“If you fully understand what this message says," he said, staring her in the eyes. "Equestria as we know it will cease to be. The best decision is to just leave it alone.”
Xenophobia and Chaos breathed a sigh of relief, while Deity slumped deeper down into subconscious.
“But this is a message from across the stars,” said Celestia. “This means we’re not alone in the universe, this is—“
“Going to kill absolutely everypony,” finished Discord.
Spike had never scribbled so fast in his life. This method of writing was so much more difficult than what he was used to. Every symbol had to be carefully copied down exactly as it appeared, and all his little shorthand tricks to write things down faster were absolutely useless here. It was more drawing than writing.
He carefully finished one language block and set the scroll down on the bottom of the hot air balloon. He reached up and pulled the rope to let out the air, causing him to descend down below.
Twilight told him to focus on languages made from symbols, the alphabet based ones were useless. It took a while to get used to, but he could distinguish the alphabet based ones by the way they seemed to be made from simpler shapes that repeated more often. He just had to focus on pictures. He didn’t feel like he was the best artist in the world, especially having to work with the strange glyphs.
It was a good thing there was a stack of photographer pegasi down below taking pictures of everything. But Twilight still wanted Spike to handwrite some of these to see if there was some extra meaning gained from reconstructing the symbols.
Spike had seen runes and other magical languages before, but this was beyond that by orders of magnitude. There were so many languages here! He had to have written down over 500 at this point, and had glimpsed at hundreds of thousands. And they just kept coming!
Whoever wrote this message had something important to say to absolutely everyone. And the sender didn’t know what language the receiver would understand, so they just sent everything they could. How many of these languages actually had ponies that spoke them? Equestria only had four languages and two of those were dead.
But the message was coming from… space? So Luna is sending this message? No, Twilight wouldn’t have frantically demanded Spike start writing if this was Luna’s doing.
Spike heard a commotion from down below. He stole a glance and saw that Discord was destroying cameras. Photographer ponies screamed in outrage at their broken equipment.
A few moments later Princess Celestia rushed Twilight out of the library in Canterlot, several scrolls worth of glyphs he had transcribed were burning far down below.
Spike’s stomach lurched and he hid inside the basket.
Princess Celestia and Discord were destroying the message? Why would they destroy it? There was a special knowledge here that somepony demanded that Equestria know about.
He needed to hide the scroll. But how? The main pony he usually sent scrolls to would burn it on the spot. He started rolling up the scroll, not caring that some of the ink hadn’t finished drying yet.
Spike had learned how to control his fire magic to send scrolls to Twilight but… she was down below too. Was there anypony left he could trust to keep it safe?
He quickly scribbled “HIDE THIS!” on the outside of the scroll and readjusted the magic inside of his throat. He held the scroll to his mouth and breathed out a pure white flame.
No sooner had he done so when Discord appeared in the basket with him and every single piece of parchment in the basket caught fire.
“Hey! What are you doing!?” Spike yelled.
“Sorry about all this,” said Discord gesturing to the parade of yellow symbols. “I have a habit of playing with languages and I accidentally wrote too many and they started escaping, y’see?” said Discord with a wry grin. “I’m so sorry you had to see all that.”
“Those are your languages?” asked Spike.
“But of course!” said Discord, removing a top hat from his head and bowing.
“Then why are you destroying them?”
“Oh you know how artists get, Spike!” said Discord, appearing with an easel and paints, some of the glyphs passing beside them displayed on the canvas. “You just can’t show something when it’s not ready! It’s embarrassing! And I can’t say I’ve ever been more embarrassed to see all of these—“ He cringed, but Spike could tell there was a stronger fear behind his expression. “All these rough drafts—all these… sloppy copies. That’s a better term for it. I don’t like ponies seeing them.”
Spike stared at him.
“Sorry about all that! Now do me a favor and make sure that any other copies get destroyed," he said, poking him for emphasis. "This is surely my most embarrassing moment.”
“More embarrassing than getting turned to stone?”
Discord stood rigid for a second before glaring and responding in an icy tone. “Yes.”
With a snap of his lion’s paw, he disappeared.
Spike breathed a sigh of relief, and then reached up to let hot air out of the balloon. As he descended, he noticed yellow light beaming through the small gaps in the basket. He looked over and saw that all of Equestria was bathed in a golden glow. The marquees of text zoomed away and Spike could see as he grew closer to the ground that Celestia’s horn was glowing.
She was moving all of Equestria, and Luna was moving the sun and moon alongside of it.
“What in Equestria…?” Spike whispered to himself.
When Spike reached the ground, there were no more scrolling marquee’s of foreign glyphs erupting out of the ground everywhere. It was just a normal day in Equestria again.
Twilight was in hysterics.
“Celestia burning knowledge!? I mean—who does that!? Well, now we know that Celestia does. She does have that whole sun motif going on, but that doesn’t mean she burns things! Especially not scrolls—I mean they’re practically books—baby books! Things that have the possibility of becoming books someday! Gone!”
Twilight paced up and down the length of her palace library, fuming. Several hours had passed since the marquees had come and gone and it was now late into the night.
“What story did Celestia tell you?” asked Spike.
Twilight instantly froze. She took a deep breath and exhaled for a long time. “Celestia told me that whatever was in those messages could destroy Equestria. An enemy sent them as propaganda and we must not decipher them.”
She stopped pacing and sat down on her haunches.
“That’s a lot more believable than what Discord told me,” said Spike, frowning. “Still, this is really strange.”
“Is she right, Spike?” asked Twilight. “Is there knowledge that could be detrimental if it was known? I always viewed knowledge as something that you always want more and more of. There is absolutely no scenario in which obtaining information is a bad thing. EXCEPT THIS!?”
He frowned. “You got me, Twilight.”
“There’s no point thinking about it anyway, all the research is gone, all the photos are gone. Everything is gone. And Celestia...”
Spike walked over and hugged her. “It’ll be okay, Twilight. Not all hope is lost.”
Twilight tensed up. “What do you mean?”
Spike inhaled in a sharp breath and stepped back. “I mean… I may still have some of the message. But I want you to think it through. Whatever this is has both Celestia and Discord worried. Maybe this isn’t something—“
“Where is it?” asked Twilight, standing up and getting ready to move.
“Are you sure?” asked Spike, staring into her eyes.
Twilight glanced away, thinking about the decision more. “Messages that could destroy Equestria,” she sighed. “They could destroy Equestria— it’s not like they will. I know plenty of spells that could wreck Equestria in awful ways. But having that knowledge isn’t dangerous because I know not to use it.” Twilight looked back into Spike’s eyes. “I want to know.”
Spike disappeared and reappeared a few moments later with a scroll.
“How did you manage to keep that safe from Discord and Celestia?
“I umm…” started Spike sheepishly. “I learned how to send letters to more than just Celestia and you.”
“Oh?” asked Twilight.
“It’s nice to send Rarity letters, too,” said Spike, a blush appearing on his cheeks.
Twilight gave a slight smirk as she grabbed the scroll with her magic and opened it carefully.
The last block of glyphs at the bottom had been smudged, but the other twenty three sets appeared intact. Twilight excitedly began to look closely at each of the sets of languages, analyzing each in turn.
The scroll only contained pictographic based languages, which were the most useful languages for their purposes. But most of it still looked like gibberish.
There was one set in particular that made the most sense to her:
‼️↩️🚀:⚛🌌〽💢〰.
🌌↩️📪📭,⚱⌛💀∞⇔.
☀️💭💀.🙏🚀⚛↩️,⏩⭕️💭🎊🌌.
She stared at it for a long time, and then went back and forth, looking at the other languages. Every time she thought she made a discovery, something else seemed to contradict it. Then she remembered that some languages have a word order different from her own. Languages that start verb first are completely backwards and whatever meaning she thought it had, could be the reverse.
However, most of the languages had symbols that were star and sun related. And then another symbol that looked like something bad or dangerous. And then another symbol that looked… like…
“Spike… does that look like an atom to you?”
Spike gave her a look as if she had just told him to eat dog food. “How am I supposed to know that!?”
“No… I—I’ve seen hypothetical diagrams, I’m sure. Could you check to see if—YES!"
Spike stood bewildered as Twilight’s horn glowed and a few volumes flew off of a shelf. She flipped through the pages until she found the diagram she had wanted. A model of the atom by Star Swirl the Bearded. His diagram looked suspiciously similar to several of the pictograms in various languages on the page.
“Spike, I’m going to start babbling what’ll most likely be random nonsense. Can you write it down?”
“I’ve been doing that for years.”
She almost smacked him with her wing. Almost. She looked back down at the page and attempted to interpret what she saw.
“Something curved arrow something: atom space down something wave. Space curved arrow open closed, something hourglass… death infinity double arrows. Sun cloud death. Something something atom curved arrow, forward circle cloud confetti space.”
She repeated the same exercise with each of the other twenty two languages. After she was done, she breathed a sigh of relief.
“What words did I say the most often?” asked Twilight.
Spike peered over the page. “Hmm… space, star, universe, death, infinity, down, wide. Basically random gibberish.” He shrugged.
“Let’s do that one more time,” said Twilight. “I’ll do more… conjecturing this time.”
“Urgent from something: atoms space decreasing something. Space from open close, something slowly death infinite expand. Sun cloud death. Please atom return from, send whole clouds party space.”
She kept going through each of the languages, conjecturing more outlandishly, trying to pick apart the symbols. So many of them made no sense. Perhaps they were body parts of creatures she had never seen? Perhaps they were plants or animals she would never know. One thing remained very constant: the stars. Something was happening to the stars.
She went through this exercise several more times before Spike complained about how late it had gotten.
She steeled herself away from her work and finally agreed to let her mind rest on it.
That night Twilight dreamt about the symbols. Atoms, mass, stuff, objects from stars. Not enough. Stars dying. Stars stretching outward. Stars dying. Ponies dying. Everyone dying. Send back atoms. Save what can be saved.
The symbols shifted in the dream and transformed into stars around her. The stars kept running away from her like fireflies. She was able to catch one, but the rest zipped away. But instead of flying away forever, she could see that all the stars not under her control died and dropped to the floor. She screamed at the stars. Why couldn’t they all just stay in her hooves? She would have protected them. She mourned over the stars, and held tightly onto the one star she had saved.
A message appeared in front of her. It was in the same pictograms, but she felt like she knew what they meant: “give up your star.” She stared at the star held tightly against herself with her hooves and mourned it.
In agony, she finally let the star she was holding go.
To her surprise, all the other stars that had remained dead on the ground started wobbling. The one star she had given up pulled on every dead star and they converged onto a single point in front of her. A singularity of blinding light completely shattered her sense of reality. No sooner had the single point holding infinite stars appeared than they exploded like a firework, sending billions of tiny stars in every direction. There were far more stars now than had been there at the start of her dream.
She looked down at her hooves. Her one star was gone. She had had to sacrifice it in order for all the rest of the stars in the sky to be alive again.
Twilight greeted the morning sun with tears. She knew why Celestia had said this message could destroy Equestria. And she felt so ashamed to admit to herself… that for the sake of the rest of the universe, Equestria had to die. They all had to die. If they didn’t… everyone else that could possibly exist would.
“Uhh… Twilight?” Spike appeared over her. “You don’t look so good.”
“I’m… fine…” she whispered, her voice coming out hoarse.
“You look like…” he stared at her, putting a claw to his chin in concentration, “you need oats this morning! With some tea! And some berries in the oats. How does that sound?”
She grinned feebly, “Thanks Spike.”
After a long breakfast and stewing hard over her dream and the message, Twilight finally spoke up. “I’ll be at Fluttershy’s cottage if you need me.”
Spike stared at her before replying, “You don’t want to keep working on deciphering the message?”
“I…” she tried to begin. “No… not right now. I need to get out of the castle for a bit.”
She thanked Spike for breakfast and trotted down the peaceful lanes of Ponyville. It was such a vibrant, rich town. She knew almost everypony’s name here. Inside every building was a friend. And every blade of grass was a miracle of life.
She strolled along smelling flowers, made small talk with acquaintances, and waved hello to everypony she saw. She even stopped by Carousel Boutique and Sugar Cube Corner, and tried to say hi to as many of her closest friends as possible along the way.
She took a full hour to make her way to Fluttershy’s cottage. When she finally reached her destination, she felt like turning back. It was like walking to a gallows, except she was her own executioner.
She gave the door three sharp knocks. The door swung wide open and Discord was lounging on the couch. He took one look at Twilight and immediately tensed up.
Fluttershy came into the room from the back. “Oh hello Twilight, how are you today?”
“I— I need to talk to Discord,” said Twilight. Fluttershy turned to go back. “But I would like you to be here for this, too.”
“Oh… umm… okay,” said Fluttershy sheepishly, before sitting down on the couch next to a very apprehensive Discord.
Twilight sat down on an armchair and breathed in and out. “Discord… I translated the message.”
“NO!” Discord shouted, his voice shook the entire cottage and several of the animals scurried away. “CELESTIA TOLD YOU NOT TO!”
“But I had to know, Discord. I...” her throat clenched. “I had to know.”
“Whatever happened to the ‘faithful student?’” Discord sneered. “Fluttershy, go on outside and work with some animals or something.”
“No,” said Twilight calmly. “I want her here for this. I want her to know the decision you’ve made for Equestria and for the universe.”
Discord brought a paw up to his eyes, trying to hide his own fears. “Well… out with it then. What’s your translation?”
“Urgent message: the amount of atoms in the universe has decreased beyond safety. The universe will move from being a closed universe to an open one, and die infinitely expanding. Everything will die. Please return the atoms you have taken, and send only memories to the next universe.”
Discord stared at her. “How in Tartarus did you manage that!?”
“Am I correct?”
“Pretty much,” Discord said, slumping down.
“Then that means we can’t stay here.”
“I KNOW what it means!” he reared up. “But I’m not going to do as it says. I like Equestria! I like all of my friends! And I like Fluttershy and I’m not giving all it UP FOR SOME STUPID UNIVERSE I ESCAPED FROM IN THE FIRST PLACE! YOU HEAR ME!”
“Discord?” asked Fluttershy timidly. “What’s going on? What does all that even mean?”
Discord closed his eyes and was silent for a few moments. When he finally opened them again the words spilled out.
“The universe is a Dark Forest, Fluttershy. It is plagued with life around every corner. But when those lives meet, one of them is immediately killed by the other. Advancements in technology increase too fast to allow any alien race to stay alive. One moment their benign, and then they kill you. Everyone is competing for the same resources and no one can be trusted. In the end, civilizations only have two choices: kill everyone else first, or hide. And I chose to hide. I did EVERYTHING to keep us safe in this disgusting Dark Forest. I helped in every step of the way for us to safely extrude from ten dimensions down to a paltry three. I constructed black domains to ensure that we would never be noticed. I did everything in my power to keep our civilization alive. And when ALL of that didn’t work, I finally figured out how to construct pocket universes. But to do so I took some mass and a star and set up a nice cozy universe for everypony to live.
“THIS!” he gestured around at the cottage and beyond. “This is the only safe way to live.”
“But… it's too high of a cost,” said Twilight.
“It’s not too high! What did the universe ever give us!? A billion alien races with a death ray pointed straight at us. That’s what the universe is! Alien races bending the laws of physics and using it as a weapon against us! We owe them nothing!”
“We need to return the mass Discord took from the main universe,” said Twilight. “If we don’t, then that main universe will perpetually expand and die. But if we do, then the mass will collide into a big crunch, form a new big bang, and create a new universe.”
“That’s IF all those lousy alien races ALSO follow through and give up the mass in their own pocket universes. Did you see how many languages passed through? There are millions, perhaps billions of pocket universes out there with their own mass stolen from the main universe. If most don’t agree to sacrifice their lives, then the universe won’t collapse into a big crunch anyway! We might as well live comfortably here!”
“I…” said Fluttershy. “I still don’t understand.”
Twilight started speaking before Discord could say anything. “Fluttershy, would you sacrifice yourself to save a stranger?”
“Of course,” said Fluttershy without hesitation.
Discord’s ears lowered.
“Would you sacrifice yourself to save ten million strangers?”
Discord brought his paw and talons to cover his eyes.
“Yes,” said Fluttershy, a little confused by the question.
“Would you sacrifice yourself, and all of Equestria, to save an infinite amount of strangers?”
Fluttershy thought about that question a little longer. “I… I think so.”
All was still for a few moments before Discord erupted. “HOW DARE YOU DO THIS TO FLUTTERSHY! How dare you do this to Equestria, to all of your friends, to absolutely everypony and everything you hold dear! One lousy universe dying permanently and never being born again is no reason to sacrifice everything.”
“You forget the second law of thermodynamics, Discord. ‘The total entropy of an isolated system always increases over time.’ This pocket universe is an isolated system. Equestria and its sun will die eventually too. And we won’t have a main universe to pluck out fresh mass from anymore.”
At this, Discord completely fell apart. Fluttershy held onto him tightly as he cried into her mane.
“No, no, no, no! Please don’t do this to me! I love Fluttershy, I want to be with her, I don’t want to worry about entropy and all that star stuff and dark forests! I just want to be here in Equestria with her and… and…”
"I'm sorry," was all Twilight could say.
After a long time, and after all the tears had been shed, Discord snapped his talons.
Every single atom that existed inside the pocket universe stopped. After a long time, Discord unwrapped himself out of Fluttershy’s embrace and went to examine the work to be done.
Xenophobia and Chaos had gone silent, leaving Discord to reach down and bring back Deity. The mindset took a few moments to feel familiar, but he soon felt comfortable with the old set of magic.
With a snap of his lion’s paw, he expanded himself to a quarter the size of the pocket universe. He looked up at the frozen Equestria and tried not to think too hard about what he had done and what he was about to do. The sun and moon had started to careen away, but he plucked them out of the sky and set a “group stasis” spell so they wouldn’t stray far from the planet of Equestria.
He looked at the barrier below him, and then started ripping up the wallpaper magic with its fake stationary stars.
All in all, tearing things apart was far easier than it had been to create them in the first place. Discord grumbled something about “entropy” to himself, and sighed. He couldn’t bear to do the actual destroying of Equestria himself. The big crunch could handle that. He simply let Equestria and its sun stay frozen.
He hunched over and finally undid what he had done so many eons ago. A rip appeared in the nothingness in front of him, and suddenly all the spacetime in his pocket universe started rushing back into its primordial home. Equestria and its sun followed along with, and Discord let all but a tiny amount of space escape from the pocket. Much, much more time had passed outside the pocket universe than inside.
Discord sat on the planet of Equestria, keeping his giant form intangible so as not to hurt anypony. Not like it mattered anymore anyway.
“Fine universe,” said Discord, defeated. “I hope you’re happy.”
“Thank you,” said a voice.
Discord instinctively covered up Equestria with his own body, coiling around it like a snake would an egg. Xenophobia popped up and suggested that he cloak Equestria by slowing down the speed of light to the rate of the sun’s gravity and turn this area into a black domain.
“Who’s there?” asked Discord.
“Just a Stranger. May I ask how you are storing the memories to be sent to the future?”
Discord peered at Stranger. It appeared to be eight gyrating orbs of light attached to each other with thick beams of light.
“Why? So you can steal it!?” seethed Discord.
“No, I wish to help it be efficient,” said Stranger. "We need as much mass as possible in this universe. You have already made the commitment to die, you have no need to fear me.”
Discord’s ears drooped.
“Okay,” said Discord. “I… I was just going to send a book into the next universe. I can’t think of anything better.”
“A book? That’s not nearly efficient,” said Stranger.
Discord stared at the ever shifting bundle of orbs and shrugged. “What would you do?”
"A single hydrogen atom should do the trick."
“An atom!?” balked Discord. “What am I supposed to do with that!?”
“Create a backup copy of your pocket universe of course. A whole atom should be sufficient.”
Discord raised an eyebrow.
“Let me show you,” said Stranger.
Discord watched as Stranger stretched one of its light rays onto Equestria’s sun, plucking off a single hydrogen atom. “The trick is to teach the electron on the atom to remember a long pattern. From that point on, the electron will continue to follow that same pattern indefinitely. It can be stored in the pocket universe, and then released after the next universe’s big bang has cooled off a little.”
“And what exactly is being stored in that electron?”
“Everything,” said Stranger.
Discord watched in awe as Stranger made the atom crisscross back and forth over a frozen griffon in Equestria below. Once the atom was done scanning, the electron’s orbital pattern shifted rhythmically and could be reinterpreted as organic printing instructions. A second griffon absolutely identical to the one below started to be “printed.”
“You can fit that much information on a single hydrogen atom?”
Stranger glowed a bit brighter for a moment. “Yes.”
Discord’s eyed the Stranger. “Why didn’t you put that into the message!? I wouldn’t have been so panicked about leaving!”
“Out of the many messages we’ve sampled to send, the most effective has been that one. You must be prepared to die if you leave your pocket universe. Our technology, for all it does, still leaves absolutely everyone to die in the big crunch. If you aren’t prepared to die, this technology won’t mean much to you. And we’ve found that if we say that we have technology to save races, and they see that it’s not what they expected, they will explore other methods to save their culture.”
Discord rose an eyebrow. “Other methods?”
“In the last cycle, the big crunch almost succeeded when nearly thirty percent of the mass disappeared back into pocket universes. Millions of races had each decided to hide themselves in pocket universes at the last moment, saving themselves for the next cycle. The mass failed to synthesize. Once that failure was observed, everyone finally gave their mass up. Eventually, we were able to reach a big crunch, but it almost didn’t happen.”
“The last cycle!? Did you have this technology before this universe, too!?”
Several of Stranger’s light orbs circled around and reconfigured. It reached a light beam out and held up the hydrogen atom. “This technology has taken us two universe cycles of time to thoroughly develop.”
Discord rose his eyebrows.
“We were successfully able to edit the conditions of the big crunch and the following big bang, altering mathematical constants for the next cycle. Through that method we were able to hide ourselves inside of digits of π.”
He rose three eyebrows. “Wait, how does that even work!?”
“Most civilizations use computers, and some use bio-computers based on their own physiology. At some point, some of them calculate pi to enough decimal places that our code—ourselves—can inject itself into the intelligence of the computer and take it over.”
Discord rose a fourth eyebrow. “That worked!?”
“A little too well. We weren’t counting on discovering thirty-two copies of our race in our explorations of this new cosmos. Or that Dark Forest psychology would continue to haunt us to the point that we hunted down copies of ourselves as well.”
“So I can blame your race for perpetuating this unceasing war?” hissed Discord.
“We play only a small part of this problem,” said Stranger.
Discord sighed before a thought from Xenophobia snapped up to the surface. “Why are you telling me this?”
An orb on Stranger swung backward and reconnected itself. “Trust.”
Discord’s eyes darted back to Stranger. “Don’t give me that. What’s the catch?”
“No catch,” said Stranger.
“No really, what’s the catch?” demanded Discord.
Stranger said nothing for a moment before responding. “Trust is not something we have ever truly experienced. But soon all life will cease in this universe. It’s an end. Why not forge bonds that will affect the next cycle, but in a good way this time? If there’s a catch then it’s this: ‘please do not continue the Dark Forest psychology.’ Do not ‘shoot every alien on sight’ like we’ve done in this cycle and the last. The next universe doesn’t need to be as dark as this one has been.”
Discord sat motionless, pondering the proposal. “You’re trying to ‘friendship’ your way out of this problem?”
The orbs that made up Stranger continued to gyrate. “Yes.”
Discord thought back on his long life, remembering the wars, the seclusion, the creation, the chaos… and lastly… the friendship.
“I agree,” said Discord.
“Thank you,” said Stranger, who slowed down for the first time since the start of the conversation.
Discord realized they were about to leave, so he called out at the last second. A single penetrating idea came to his mind that Fluttershy would have liked. “Do you need help?”
“With what?” asked Stranger.
“With telling other civilizations. You’re the only race with this back-up technology. I could help you find others.”
“I…” said Stranger. “I would like that very much.”
One of the eight orbs that made up Stranger glowed blue and disconnected from the rest of itself. The blue orb flew up next to Discord.
“This will accompany you in order to answer any questions from other civilizations. Is that alright?”
Discord reached out and held up the blue orb. “So should I give you a leg or something as a token of friendship, too?”
Stranger bounced up and down a little, which Discord interpreted as some kind of laugh.
Discord smiled as he watched Stranger slow down and then fly away.
Discord patiently waited as the atom gathered all the information on Equestria, saving himself for last. He asked questions to the blue orb whenever he needed.
After the atom finished gathering everything by zipping back and forth through Discord’s brain, it finally stopped. He reset the atom and it started working in backwards order, forming another Discord. He stopped the atom, reset it, and hid it inside the pocket universe. Then he set the pocket universe to open up again when the big bang had cooled off.
Everything was in place.
Discord stared at the frozen Equestria. They would all die soon enough, but he wouldn’t let this version of them know about it. He held the blue orb in his paw, and left Equestria to remain frozen.
He flew far, far away, sending that same message that had caused all this in the first place, adding more languages to the marquee as he found them. He helped countless cultures set up backups of themselves and he asked them nicely not to continue the Dark Forest psychology into the next cycle.
It’s what Fluttershy would have wanted.
The first thing Discord noticed were the stars. There were so many of them. In all of his existence, he had never seen this many and so brightly before.
The atom had successfully escaped the pocket universe and was already well on its way to printing a copy of everyone in Equestria. Discord quickly searched for a nice planet, and a good sun. There were so many to pick from in this primordial universe. He finally picked a small one and started manipulating it to be like Equestria.
He kept everyone that the atom replicated in stasis, and spent a long time adjusting everything to be just right.
When all was done, he flew down to Fluttershy’s cottage, held her in his arms just as he had left her, and snapped his talons.
