The Elements of Discord

"A blizzard..." Applejack repeated Celestia's words bluntly.  "The end of the world's commin' and its a bucking snowstorm.  What kind of stupid...  Why would..?  Can't you just send in a weather team or two and have them clear it up?"

"I've lost two of my best teams to it already, Applejack," Celestia replied softly, casting her worried gaze over Rainbow Dash.  Rainbow had gotten the news about it yesterday and was not taking it well; she had grown up with some of those ponies.  Celestia knew that Rainbow had disliked most of them and that they had often bullied her, but for something like this to happen...

Celestia wanted to be able to talk to Rainbow Dash.  The Princess knew what she was going through and it pained her to see such a strong pony hurting like this.  She wanted nothing more than to just sit the poor mare down, one-on-one and let the pegasus cry on her shoulder.

She wanted to, but there was no time.  Every second the storm was growing.  Every second more ponies were swallowed by its slow but tenacious advance.  Hopelessness himself had arrived in Equestria and he was taking no prisoners.

"The Royal Librarians and I compiled a report and gave it to Twilight an hour ago.  She's finished reading it by now and already has a plan or two, knowing her, but please, there's no time left!" Celestia said to the group quickly, trying to usher them out the door.  When they had finally left, she ordered the guards out of the room, needing to be alone.  There were hundreds of things she needed to do from coordinating the relief efforts and organizing the remaining weather teams for cleanup, to preparing evacuation and battle plans just in case the girls failed.  So much work to do, but all she found herself able to do was sit in front of a window and stare at the northern horizon.  She couldn't see the storm yet, but she knew it was there.

She could feel the fury at the situation welling up inside her.  She had spent her entire life trying to prevent this.  She had worked tirelessly day and night for well over a millennium keeping the hopes and dreams of her people alive to stop this event from ever occurring.

Despair...  She thought to herself.  That which she hated the most out of anything.  The emotion which had brought down every civilization that had existed before.  The feeling that had driven her to send the pony she loved most to the moon for a thousand years.  The concept she had sworn she'd die before she ever let it infect her subjects.

And now here she was, once again feeling it herself.

This was going to be a long day.

"Too... tight..!  Can't breathe!" Pinkie Pie gasped as Applejack tugged the cord on her jacket.

"Sorry, Pinkie."  She gave some slack and suppressed a chuckle as Pinkie returned to her natural color.  "Ah'm just tryin' to make sure you stay warm.  You'll freeze in minutes out there, even with all yer bouncin'!"

"I still don't understand why Twilight and Rarity can't just use their magic to help!" Pinkie grumbled.

Applejack sighed to herself.  Maybe Pinkie'd understand the fifth time around?  No, she probably got it the first time around, she was just complaining for the sake of complaining.

"Because, Twilight doesn't know how long we'll be out there and she doesn't want to run out of magic in the middle of things.  Ah don't know about you, but Ah don't want to be caught out in the middle of this without magic or winter clothing."  She pointed a hoof to a quickly darkening window.  They had made it by carriage as far as they could before the snow started falling and were now holed up in one of the guard barracks.  A few minutes ago the window had shown nothing more than a few flurries, now snow was falling freely.

"I know, I know, I'm just scared..."

"We all are, Pinkie," she said, finally understanding her friends strange (well, strange for her) attitude, "but think about it this way.  No matter how it ends, we'll all be there together.  Now, come on.  Rainbow said we only had five minutes before she wanted to talk to us, and things are strange enough with Twilight putting her in charge." Of course she knew exactly why Twilight would put the weather pony in charge of a situation like this, but had hoped the words would be able to extract a smile from Pinkie.  They had served their purpose flawlessly.

She wasn't surprised to see that she and Pinkie were the last ones to enter the meeting room, Fluttershy had been talking things over with Rainbow while Twilight and Rarity had been planning some magic-related thing and had probably went running to Dash as soon as they had reached a snag.

"Alright, listen up, fillies!" Rainbow said rather loudly, standing at attention like she was a drill-sergeant.  She pointed to a large map on the wall, heavily marked by Twilight.  "Twi narrowed down our target to this area using... some form of magical gibberish!" she said, pointing to an area on the map.

"I tracked the traces of his magic, Dash," Twilight called out with a groan.

"Yeah, she did that," Rainbow said giving her a guilty look.  "Anyway, based on the cloud patterns, her work all adds up.  She's placing Despair at the center of the storm-front.  The weirdest thing though is the storm isn't moving at all, its just growing in one direction so that it looks like its moving."

"So, we decided that Despair himself has to be moving with the storm, instead of just controlling it from far away," Fluttershy said, finishing Dash's thought.

"Well, Ah'll give it to ya, it sounds like ya'll have everything planned out.  Between you and Pinkie, we should have this thing in the bag," Applejack responded enthusiastically, glancing at the other earth pony out of the corner of her eye.  Pinkie may have made it her permanent job to make sure everypony was smiling, but in a situation like this, she often forgot to smile herself.  There wasn't much AJ could do about this whole situation aside from provide support to her friends, but she'd gladly do it; even if it meant a full-time job of saving Pinkie from herself.

Applejack was pleased to see that she had accomplished her goal; it wasn't the wide grin she had been hoping for, but there was a smile on Pinkie's face nonetheless.  "Alright girls, there's no point stayin' in here.  The sooner we get going, the sooner we stop this and Ah'm pretty sure nopony wants this to go on for longer than it has to," she said, hoping to excite them.  Once again, her enthusiasm worked, the other five jumped up and trotted out the door with a cheer.  It really made her glad to see that.  Betrayal may have been behind her turning on her friends, but that didn't mean she wasn't going to do everything she could to make up for it.

Fifty miles away, Despair could sense the changes on the wind: his rivals were rallying; they intended to make him fight for every inch.  It didn't matter.  None of it mattered.  He was tasked by powers infinitely greater than himself with returning darkness to the world as he had done so many times before, and he hated to disappoint.  It didn't matter what this land was called, nor who inhabited it.  All must be destroyed.

He cracked the joints in his ancient neck and waved his blizzard forward.  He didn't think he would've liked it here even when he was alive, everything was too fake.  The seasons, the sunrise, even the happiness was artificial; all put in place solely to keep him out, and it was all for nothing.

They would pay for their hubris.

It had been only 18 hours since they had set out from the barracks, and for the tenth time Pinkie Pie couldn't feel her ears.  They had already stopped in several abandoned houses several times so what Fluttershy could treat them for frostbite and she herself had caught Rarity with a mild case of hypothermia just in time for Flutters to prevent anything serious from happening.

They were getting close though.  She didn't know whether it was her Pinkie sense or her connection to him, but Despair was close.  She felt it like a knot in her stomach.  He was close and he was angry.  She didn't want to do this; she was sick of the monsters and the misery, but she wasn't going to give up.  Her friends did their best to put on smiles for her, but she could see through their masks and they were all hurting.  As much as she was dreading facing her counterpart, she would do anything to put the real smiles back on their faces.

She felt him before she saw him.  He was standing on top of a nearby hill, glaring down at them, obscured by the snow.  She pulled on Twilight's tail and motioned with her eyes when the unicorn turned around.  Twilight immediately understood and nodded her reply.  She gave Pinkie a reassuring hug and stopped the others.  As one, the group turned around to face what none of them doubted would be their worst trial yet.

They found him exactly where Pinkie knew he would be, silhouetted as a black shadow against the grey sky.  She had never seen anything like it before outside of a few very old storybooks.  It stood on two legs, but was nothing more than a full suit of shiny black armor, trimmed in silver.  He turned to them and Pinkie finally got a full view, though she wished she hadn't.  The armor was shaped to resemble something out of a nightmare: horns, spikes and blades adorned it in its entirety.  The only openings were two eye-holes, inside of which Pinkie could only see a cold flame flickering, the same color of her own eyes.  One single thought burned its way into her mind: if true evil existed, she was looking at it.

"Alright, you," Rainbow began, but she was cut off.  Despair gently stomped a grieved foot and the snow under the pegasus exploded, sending her sprawling onto her back.

"Silence..."  It was the same voice they had heard back in Canterlot shortly after Malice's downfall, confirming what they already knew.  They opened their mouths to protest, but were silenced once more when he help up a hand.  They despised him, but the mixture of respect and fear that he commanded was nothing if not absolute.  They simply stood there quietly as he watched Dash dig herself out of a snowbank, coughing up slush.

Once she had retaken her place in the line, he glanced toward each of them in turn.  "There will be no grand speeches, nor will there be any epic heroics.  You will step aside and die comfortably in a manner of your own choosing, or you will die here and now by mine hand.  There is no other path."

His piece said, he raised an arm to the sky and a large object began to twist itself into being from the ether.  Within moments, a large mace, matching his armor in both color and wickedness had coalesced.

"Ohhh... That can't be good," Pinkie heard AJ mutter under her breath.

She felt a series of twitches shoot through her body that she had never experienced before.  She didn't know what it meant, but every fiber in her body was screaming for the same reaction.  "JUMP!" she screamed, and not a moment too soon.  Despair brought the massive weapon down faster than she had ever thought would be possible with such an unwieldy thing, slamming it into the ground.  A shockwave rippled through the snow-covered ground, ripping apart the trees in its path and passing harmlessly through the ground the ponies had been standing not moments before.

He brought it back up with a flourish and calmly placed his second hand on its grip before saying, "We begin..." and swinging it again.  A ball of ice easily twice the size of Spike exploded out of it, Pinkie shoved AJ out of the way just in time to avoid the freezing death.

The twitches were coming now as fast as she could comprehend their meanings.  She dove every which way, calling out to her friends without even hearing what she herself was saying, just trusting herself to keep her friends safe.  Even so, she kept thinking.  Twilight was much better with coming up with plans, but there was no time to let the brilliant unicorn do her thing.  Pinkie grinned to herself when she saw the look she had been waiting for enter Dash's eyes.  She had been doing her best to get the her in a position to flank Despair, and it had finally paid off.

Rainbow leapt as hard as she could at the armored menace, but just before she reached him, it all went wrong.  Without taking his gaze off of Twilight, he waved a hand in the charging pony's direction and a gust of freezing wind carried her off course and slammed her into the ground hard.

His next swing was with only one arm, much slower than his previous attacks.  Grinning, Applejack spun on the spot and dig in with her front legs.  She bucked with all of her might and immediately regretted it as her hooves connected with the frozen mass.  Pain wracked her body as something in her legs strained, but any feelings of doubt were removed when she felt the projectile change direction.

She looked over her shoulder, hoping to see Despair fall to his own attack and her jaw dropped.  Far from being harmed by it, he simply snatched it out of the air like some mind of misshapen baseball and hurled it back at her; no magic involved.  She closed her eyes and waited for the impact, but instead heard a shatter and a scream as Pinkie threw herself in the way.

As much as it pained her to do so, Twilight took advantage of the momentary distraction to teleport behind him and charged up a spell.  She released it and blasted him with everything she had, only for it to glance off her armor as if she had thrown a pebble.  He spun on the spot, grabbed her horn, and threw her over his shoulder, where she landed in a heap near the injured, crying Pinkie.  It was then that she felt a warm sensation on her forehead.  Was she bleeding?

No, it was her tiara!  She had forgotten that she had been wearing it.  She glanced around and noticed that all of her friends had gathered around her and the fallen Pinkie Pie, all glaring at Despair with nothing but the deepest loathing.  And that was not all, their necklaces were glowing.  Pinkie's selfless actions had finally brought them together enough for her to end this.  She grinned to herself as a familiar feeling of happiness, love and warmth spread over her body.  She felt herself being levitated and the air around her began to glow.  She was blinded by a bright white light for only a moment before a rainbow filled her vision.  Finally, she felt her hooves touch the ground gently, the ritual complete.

She opened her eyes, not even realizing she had closed them, and her heart sank.  Despair still stood there.  The smoke coming off the gauntlet he had used to block the spell was the only indication that anything had even happened.

At that moment, Twilight understood why he represented his Element.  They had given everything they had in what they were hoping was going to be the grand battle to save the world and he had simply batted them aside like some minor annoyance.

She should have been thinking of some new plan of attack, some other way to salvage this, but only one thing existed inside her.  One thing permeated every bit of her being: complete and utter hopelessness.

Another thought entered her brain.  One she had never thought would ever cross her mind.

We have to retreat...