Not Going Quietly Into That Good Night
Sharp raps at the door helped rouse Santa Hooves from his long slumber. Sensation flooded him as sweet air filled his lungs for what felt like the first time in an age. His pulse raced, and he shivered, feeling the cold sweat matting his tan coat and his great, thick, curly white beard.
Another knock came, resonating through the small, cold, dingy wood-walled room. Santa frowned as he realized that the doors leading out into the rest of the cabin were gone; the front room was all that was left. And in that room, the cot he awoke in was the only solid piece of furniture remaining, save for a worn wooden coat rack standing next to the door. The room’s sole splash of color came from his fluffy red and white-trimmed coat, hanging on the rack.
Through the remaining windows he could see the steel-grey sky and blowing snow of his realm. That much, at least, had not changed. But in the absence of any other colors or signs of life, the cold light for once struck him as gloomy.
A pounding came at the door again, harder this time, and more insistent. Santa Hooves, you are bid to let me enter, boomed a deep voice carrying a chill of its own.
He rose with hooves like lead and plodded to the door. In better days it had been adorned with all manner of cards, drawings, and other sundry bits of decoration. Now, though, it was bare. He sighed, then opened it.
Death stared at him from the other side.
Or, more properly, Thanatos: a tall figure swathed in an all-encompassing black cloak, showing only the vague outlines of a pony skull with eyes of dim purple fire looming in his dark and cavernous hood.
Santa frowned. “Has it really come to this, Thanatos? Have I fallen so far that you’d take me without even using your scythe?”
It wasn’t possible for Thanatos to smile or frown; instead, he cocked his skull to the side. I have no wish to claim your essence. Know that I resist Logos’ bidding that I do so.
“I’m… grateful.” Santa looked first at the floor, then back at the nigh-empty room behind him. “It’s gotten even smaller since I fell asleep. Maybe I should’ve expected that. It’s just… strange to see. You know?”
Thanatos nodded. You slide deeper into torpor, and its clutches on you grow ever stronger. Your essence yearns to be reborn as something new and vibrant. Logos wishes this as well.
Santa laughed bitterly. “How many believers has he stolen from me since I—”
One remains. From the depths of Thanatos’ cloak, he raised an unevenly folded piece of crinkled, heavy paper upon a skeletal hoof.
“Just one?” Santa stared down at the paper with furrowed brows. “But… do they not still speak of me? Are there not still ‘Santas’ in each store for foals and fillies to tell what they want for Hearth’s Warming?”
The march of Logos is inexorable. Ponies still spread good cheer to ward away the Windigoes, for they can be proven to exist. But it is also proven that no single pony could make presents for all the foals and fillies in the world and deliver them in one single night.
“Well, I didn’t do it all myself. I had the flying deer, and the non-union labor…”
Thanatos shrugged. Logos has inspired his followers to calculate the impossibility of such a journey. And polling data suggests that modern store-bought toys are higher quality than hoof-made.
Santa shook his head. “They’ve forgotten that it happened.”
They’ve proven it could never have—
“They once knew that it did!” Santa stamped a hoof. “And their belief helped make it so!“
Thanatos gestured with the paper. Then look to the belief of this Petunia Paleo. I fear what may transpire if she is left wanting. But this could be a chance for you to regain a hoof-hold of belief, if it is done well.
Santa raised his hoof to take the paper. Thanatos hesitated, withholding it for a moment. It is in the nature of immortals to believe their contributions are important. What I do is… indisputable, and part of the natural order. Logos has found it easier to trivialize your contributions. But I remember the sense of wonder that you once brought to ponies’ lives, and I would much rather bring rest to happy souls than peace to souls who linger less fulfilled.
“Thank you,” Santa said, taking it at last. He unfolded it, and squinted at what proved to be a poorly spelled, crayon-scrawled note, accompanied by large, jagged-toothed drawings in the margins.
Santa blinked, then looked back at its outside. “How did this even get to you? There’s no address or return information, and it doesn’t look like it went through the Equestrian North Pole delivery service.”
Indeed not. That service was canceled some time ago. This came to me because it had ended up as a ‘dead letter.’
“Go fish,” Discord said, smirking across his hand of cards at the curious green pony sitting in the egg-shaped chair opposite him. Around them, whole schools of tiny flying fish darted to and fro through his living room, their tenuous ties to reality having been strengthened by the length of time that the duo had been playing.
“Wow, you’re really good at this game,” Tree Hugger said, leaning forward and drawing a card from the stack in the center of Discord’s coffee table. She took visible care not to brush her hoof against its steaming black surface, given that the table still hadn’t cooled much since Discord had brewed it. “Like… if I didn’t know better, I would swear that you had to be, like, cheating?”
Discord stifled a laugh. He wasn’t sure if it was funnier that the laconic pony kept playing games with him despite the drubbing he kept giving her, or that even after all the time they’d spent doing so that afternoon, her tone still carried no recognizable hints of sarcasm.
“Well my dear, what can I say? Chaos has deep influences in the realm of probability, though I suppose there’s still such a thing as—”
A heavy pounding at his door made Discord jump out of his seat. It was accompanied by shouts of, “Discord! Discord, please, I need to see you right away! DISCORD!”
“Luck,” he said, letting his face slide into a frown that hung down to his arms.
“Hey, no worries,” Tree Hugger said, reaching down and picking up her cup from the coffee table. After a quick glance at the empty cup, she dipped it down and scooped up some of the table’s surface.
“That reminds me, I keep forgetting to dig up that organic, gluten-free granola that you wanted.” Discord snapped his paw, flashing a long shovel into his claw. He offered it to Tree Hugger. “If you could start on that while I deal with whoever this is, there ought to be a vein of it running next to the cupboard?”
“No problem,” she cooed, taking the shovel.
Discord snapped his claw and instantly flashed across the grand total of five paces separating the card game from the door. He adjusted the tie he was suddenly wearing, turned the knob, pulled it free from the door, frowned, stuck the knob back in, turned it again, and sighed contentedly as this time the door opened with it.
“Discord! Oh, thank Vitae that I caught you here! I’m afraid I’m in a bit of a jam…”
A piece of paper was shoved into Discord’s face. He drew his head back, stretching his neck past the point where it ought to extend without breaking. He glanced over at the pony doing the shoving—
“Santa Hooves? Long time no see…” Discord studied the tan-coated, white-bearded figure, and his eyebrows climbed up and off his face as he focused on the way that the pony’s bright red overcoat hung loosely on his frame. “Well, whatever diet you’re on is definitely working. How’s the Mrs.? Still riding those deer?” He paused. “Sorry, I probably should have asked those in the opposite order…”
“Listen, Discord, I’d love to sit and chit-chat, but I don’t think I have a lot of time left. I need…” He bit his lip, showing white teeth just above his white beard. “I need a miracle, Discord. I’ve tried everything—literally everything—that I could think of with the… well, power level that I’ve got left. But it’s just not enough, and I’m running out of time! Hearth’s Warming is in two days, and if I can’t get this filly what she wants… well, it’s curtains for me!”
Discord stroked his beard with his claw. “I’m not much of an interior decorator…”
“No, no! Don’t get caught up in semantics! I just need you to make me a dinosaur!”
Suppressing a giggle, Discord snapped his paw. In a flash, Santa Hooves was gone; in his place was a tan-colored beast like a squat dragon with less-useful foreclaws, a heavily overbitten jaw, and a festive, ill-suited red overcoat.
The creature roared and snarled and flexed its claws at Discord, who lost his battle with the laughter laying siege. He doubled over, howling almost as loud as the saurian thing that howled back at him.
“All right, all right…” He snapped his claw again, restoring Santa Hooves to himself again, already in mid-tirade:
“—not what I mean and you know it! Can’t you see that this is distressing?! I’m going to die here if I can’t get this girl a Ponysaurus Rex or something!”
“Objection!” shouted Discord, suddenly wearing a slim blue suit, and with this hair in a slick black ’do that practically begged for senpais everywhere to notice it. “You’re not going to die, Santa; you’re immortal. You’ll just—”
“Fine, then; I’ll be recycled!” Santa wrung his hooves. “But don’t you see, Discord? It’ll be my essence, but it won’t be me! It’ll probably be one of Logos’ would-be child entities… he’s had it in for me for ages, you know?”
“Yeah… that whole logic-and-consequences, cause-and-effect, scientific-method-type schtick.” Discord blew a raspberry. “Why does everything always have to make so much sense with that guy? Where does he get off thinking everything should be so… measurable, and empirical…”
“Exactly!”
Discord tapped his chin. “Though, on the other claw, he’d probably argue that he’s bringing what we would’ve called ‘miracles’ in the good old days to basically everypony all the time, and that the relatively small investment that ponies have to sink into research and adoption of new things pays itself off pretty quickly in terms of quality of life and numbers of lives saved by it.” He shrugged. “Guy’s still a bigger tool than Celestia’s own ‘royal scepter,’ though; a thousand years of progress hasn’t made him the least bit party-cool.”
Santa took a few steps toward him. “So can you do it, Discord? Can you—” He paused and looked to the side. Discord followed his gaze and found Tree Hugger, now half-buried in a widening mound of granola fed by a huge jet of the stuff streaming up and out of the floor.
“Hey there, Santa dude,” she said with a little wave.
The two immortals exchanged a look. “She… she acknowledged me!” Santa shouted, pointing and waving. “She believes!”
“Don’t get too excited,” Discord said, rolling his eyes. “She’s probably just… buzzing off your aura, or something like that?”
“Right on,” Tree hugger added with a broad smile.
Discord felt hooves on his chest, then was pulled nose-to-muzzle with Santa. “Discord, please,” Santa said.
“Okay! Okay, I’ll read your letter.” Discord raised his claw and snapped, bringing back the paper. He scanned it, frowning and pulling out a schoolfilly-to-common/common-to-schoolfilly translation guide as necessary.
Eventually he sighed, took off a pair of reading glasses that seemed to have appeared, and stroked his beard again. “All right, Santa, let’s get real for a minute here. Much as I would revel in the sheer delicious chaos it might wreak to drop a resurrected and very hungry P. Rex smack into the middle of suburban Ponyville…” The thought made him all but shiver with antici—
“You’re not going to do it,” Santa said with a heavy sigh. “I know, it’s not like you and me were ever really close friends or anything… I mean, you’re the last entity I thought to try…”
“Killer sales pitch,” Discord muttered.
“Maybe Logos is right.” Santa looked down at the floor. “Maybe I don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. I definitely can’t compete with Logos, and I never should’ve tried. I just…”
A wan smile worked its way across Santa’s muzzle. “I love to make them happy. You know? The colts, the fillies… I know that half of them manage to break the toys before the end of Hearth’s Warming day, but that moment when they tear off the wrapping paper, and the sheer joy in their eyes when they see their heart’s desire right before them…” He sighed again. “I guess… it’s selfish of me to want to hold onto that, right? Maybe Logos is right; maybe it really is time for me to just… make room for something new.”
“Whooooa there,” Tree Hugger said from right next to them. Discord startled; he hadn’t noticed her approach. Little bits of granola alternately clung to, or fell from, her green coat and dreadlocked red mane. She squatted down in front of Santa. “Would it be cool if I felt your chakras?”
The immortals looked at each other again. Discord shrugged and held his paw and claw up. “I can go do a… thing, in a place, if you guys are having a moment.”
Tree Hugger giggled. “No, like… on your temples, here?”
“Oh,” Santa said, huffing. “Um, okay.”
She leaned in and touched her forehooves to the sides of his head. Then she closed her eyes and hummed for half a minute or more.
Santa’s brow furrowed. “Discord?” he whispered.
Discord shrugged again. “I think sometimes this takes a while? I don’t really know because half the time I don’t pay attention to what she’s saying, but she’s fun to play cards with so we should probably just wait this out!”
Tree Hugger’s eyes reopened. She placed her hooves back on the floor. “Whoa.”
“Yes?”
“So like… when you say that what you’re doing is selfish, I totally feel that your words are coming from a place of authenticity. But, like… your chakras are so misaligned that I think the you in there—” she touched a hoof to his chest “—isn’t getting through to the real you.”
Santa glanced at Discord.
Discord cleared his throat. “My dear, why don’t we assume for purposes of discussion that neither of us understands a word you just said?”
“Right on, right on. So like, my buddy Fluttershy told me about this Discord-dude here, when he got so worked up about impressing her that he, like, practically faded away?”
“She told you about that?” Discord asked, frowning. “I thought that was private!”
Tree Hugger rested a hoof on his back. “No worries, we’re all good friends here.” She turned her smile back on Santa. “I feel like, down deep, you’re just really worked-up about how much other ponies might be thinking about you. But if you really like to make ponies happy, then wouldn’t you be freer if you centered yourself in that?”
Santa frowned. “Miss, you clearly mean well, but I’m afraid you don’t understand how things work with entities like me and Discord. We aren’t mortal… we’re embodiments of mortal thoughts and feelings.”
“Concepts,” Discord added, looking distant. “Useful abstractions.”
“Yes, yes. We’re useful, else we’re nothing. We’re born of mortal yearnings and imaginings, and our ongoing survival is sustained by their continued belief that we exist. And I… well… ponies don’t believe in me like they used to.”
Tree Hugger’s face took on a curious expression. Discord wondered if it was the look of an unflappable pony being brought perilously close to flappability. But then his subconscious knee-jerk reaction to the previous thought was to conjure a small flappy bird that went flapping past them.
“Well, so what?” Tree Hugger slowly enclosed Santa in a full-bodied hug. “If you can make peace with yourself, then you’ll always have one pony on your side.”
Santa hesitated, but then returned the hug, albeit a bit limply. “I… I don’t know. I do care about what they think. Being well-thought-of isn’t a bad thing.”
“But it isn’t the main thing,” she said, still with her face against his chest.
He bit his lip. “I know. But is it bad that I’m still kind of selfish?”
She pulled away and looked into his eyes. “I don’t want to send you a negative vibe, but I think the biggest bad thing is how much you worry. Like… ponies would call you out if you overstep, right?”
Santa shrugged. “I guess?”
“Like Discord here saying that the P. Rex would harsh lots of ponies’ good times on Hearth’s Warming morning?”
Discord blanched. “You set me up! I wouldn’t be the voice of reason if you hadn’t led me into it!”
Santa nodded and licked his lips idly. “So what you’re saying is that I can… believe in myself?” He looked at Discord. “Can we do that?”
“Don’t look at me. I cornered the market on entropy pretty early-on, and all the Logos in the world couldn’t make that sucker stop paying dividends.”
At last Tree Hugger stepped back from Santa. He looked up at Discord with a smile. “You know what, I don’t need to go all the way up to a P. Rex. There were lots of different kinds of dinosaurs; we could just get her a smaller one!”
Discord reached into a nonexistent pocket and pulled out a gold-edged encyclopedia. He flipped through it before pointing a claw at one page in particular. “Here you go: small dinosaurs. Hmm… there’s Componysathus, though that one’s carnivorous and might get large enough to take a bite out of more than just crime… ah, here you go, Ponivicursor! Still carnivorous, but probably more like an insect-eater.”
“So you’ll do it?” Santa’s eyes were wide and gleaming.
After a glance at Tree Hugger, Discord sighed. “Oh, fine. But this is just a loaner; don’t go thinking you can just show up here at all hours needing dinosaurs or rubber chickens or… cups of flour?”
Death paid a visit to a small filly’s home that Hearth’s Warming day. But, happily, he didn't come alone.
It does my essence good to see what you have done here, Thanatos said, turning to his companion. Santa Hooves stood beaming from within his clean white beard and somewhat better-filled overcoat. From their unseen and unheard vantage point within a non-detection field they’d conjured in the family’s kitchen, they watched the elated blue filly dart around the living room, weaving around furniture and her own bewildered-looking parents as she chased a leg-high saurian creature to and fro.
Thanatos looked at Santa and wished that he could echo his smile.
He continued: This Fluttershy whom Discord says can help to rear the dinosaur is very well-connected. Ponies of all ages will see it or hear of it. Your believer-count is sure to grow from this.
Santa nodded. “I suppose it will.”
Indeed. This is a hit, or will be. Consider what it will do for your waning solidity, and to help stave off the torpor.
“Mmm,” Santa said. “That sounds nice.”
Thanatos tapped skeletal hooves against the haft of his great scythe. ‘Nice?’ Few things are sweeter than the taste of such success. This will make for a dramatic reversal in Logos’ efforts to reclaim your essence. This could even be used to undermine him, if we can secure Discord’s silence; the appearance of a dinosaur in modern Equestria would be difficult for him to explain rationally.
His companion frowned. “I don’t wish Logos any ill will. He brings his miracles in his own way, and ponies reap the benefits.”
Yes, but you are far from the first of us that Logos has sought to ‘disprove.’ I've heard it whispered that Logos even seeks the secret to supplant me.
“I don't know.” Santa stroked his long beard. “I don’t think I’m the kind of entity who needs to make a big, earth-shattering splash with what he does. It’s tiring keeping track of which entities are on top now, or who seems like they’re on the ascent. Besides, the last time I got that deep into the game, I lost it. Big time.”
Then what will you do?
“I want to be me. I want to do this. And I don’t think it has the power to stop me anymore if I don’t have the biggest believer-count, as long as I’m doing what I love to do. I forgot just how glad I was to be here among these mortals, believers or not. I mean, I’m probably not above angling for a little recognition every now and then, but it’s not going to define me anymore. It never should have.”
Thanatos nodded. Then perhaps you needn’t worry about Logos after all?
Santa smiled. “Maybe not, old friend.”
Author's Note
Inspiration:
