Earth

Chapters

Portal
Ice - 1
Ice - 2
Ocean - 1
Ocean - 2
Beach

Portal

Author's Note

I was supposed to work on my original novel, or at least a chapter of one of my existing stories, so instead I wrote this because no one tells me what to do, including me. Which is very inconvenient sometimes.

This isn't a one-shot, this is going to be the over-arching story that includes the one-shot pieces I've done of this story before. However, since guidelines don't permit me to just take an existing story and roll it into a chapter of another story without taking down the existing story, I have to completely rewrite "Ice" (the original will remain on this site as its own story). That'll be the next chapter, then "Ocean" from "Eating Dessert First", and then onward.

Portal

"Don't you think you should wait for Starlight to come back from her trip?" Spike asked nervously.

Twilight laughed. "Don't be silly, Spike. I've been doing magical research for years with just your help. I don't need another unicorn to spot me."

"Yeah, but..." His eyes flickered over the stack of books, the materials, the preparations. "You yourself said this is a completely new spell. Nopony's ever done this before."

"That might not be true. The whole reason I got the idea was those books from the Crystal Empire I've been reading." She lifted one in her magic, taking a few merrily prancing steps toward it to meet it halfway. "Look, here, this is the first hint I've found in any record as to where Starswirl went, and it strongly implies he opened a dimensional portal. 'Then to defeat the evil did Starswirl banish himself and the Pillars to a world of darkness.' How do you banish yourself to another world without opening a portal?" She put the book down. "Discord insists that he's the one who created the gateway to the world Sunset's in, and all Starswirl did was anchor it into the mirror and put in containment spells to keep it from opening up just any old time, and after I saw what Discord did at the Gala that one year, I believe him. But Starswirl himself must have figured out how to create portal spells himself, because Discord says he doesn't know anything about this banishment to darkness thing and he himself was in another dimension when it happened, so he couldn't have created the portal in this case."

"But you haven't found any evidence of an incomplete spell in the Starswirl Wing or in the Crystal Empire."

"Right, and that's why this is so exciting!" She reared back on her hind legs and kicked her forehooves a little, unable to contain herself. "This will be new magic! Completely new magic, not like fixing a spell somepony else started!"

"And that's why I think you should wait for Starlight! She has experience creating completely new spells."

Despite her best efforts, Twilight's mood soured slightly. "Yes, her cutie mark removal spell. That was groundbreaking. Plus, she fixed one of Starswirl's spells herself when she got the time spell working. Starlight's amazing. That's why I want to do this now."

"You want to do this without her because she's amazing."

"Yes!" Twilight paced. "Spike, I had all the advantages. I was Princess Celestia's student. I had the run of the library. My job was just to learn magic, for ten years. I was so good at magic I became an alicorn. And Starlight, who never went to Princess Celestia's school at all, who didn't have nearly the same access to books of spells and theory that I did, managed to both fix one of Starswirl's spells – which is the thing I did that made me an alicorn – and create completely new magic from scratch, which I've never done. Don't you see, Spike?" She stopped pacing and looked at him. "She's better than me! At the thing I'm supposed to be an expert on!"

"I thought you were supposed to be an expert on friendship," Spike said. "And anyway, Starlight is ten years older than you. She just had a lot more time to learn magic and practice it."

"Yes, I'm supposed to be the friendship expert, but who was it who reformed the entire Changeling race? Starlight!"

"Actually I kinda think it was Thorax..."

"Well, okay, but because of advice Starlight gave him!" Twilight sighed. "I'm not jealous of her, don't get me wrong. It's not good to be jealous of a friend."

"That didn't stop you during the whole thing with Discord and our friends after the book sortation..."

Twilight ignored that. "She solved a friendship problem between the Princesses. She's... maybe not perfect, but she's mastered this whole friendship thing and reforming ponies after just one year of me teaching her. It took me three years to get to the point of becoming the Princess of Friendship! Four, before I figured out that was what I was princess of!"

"Starlight's still not a princess, and have you considered that maybe she learned faster because she had a teacher, and you had to do all the research on your own with your friends' help? I mean, why are you looking at this as 'Starlight learned about friendship faster than I did' when you could look at it as 'I taught Starlight about friendship so well she could reform the Changelings in only one year of study, when she started out as a supervillain?'"

"I'm not sure Starlight ever qualified as a supervillain, that's kind of a comic book thing—"

"She destroyed the world seven times, I think it counts."

"Okay, okay, I know what you're trying to say and I understand. And I shouldn't be jealous of Starlight, and yes, she's older than me so she's had more time to learn magic, but..." Twilight sighed. "Magical research used to be what I was known for. It was what I wanted to do with my life. This whole princess thing? I never expected this. I wouldn't change it, but... I don't feel like I'm really me anymore. I never get to do what I love, the first thing I was good at."

"I thought the first thing you were good at was reading."

"You know what I mean." Twilight brightened up. "So that's why I'm going to open a portal to another dimension, without Starlight's help, and prove beyond a doubt that that's a thing harmonic magic can do!"

"Okay, but if you won't get Starlight's help... don't you think at least some unicorn should be here to spot you in case something goes wrong?"

"I don't think Rarity or Sweetie Belle would be much help. Or anypony else in Ponyville, really. And besides, I have a lot of experience with this!" She raised her forehoof and pawed at the air, making imaginary check marks on equally imaginary ticky boxes. "Firstly, I've opened dimensional portals before. I was in the Realm of Chaos at the time and it's a lot easier to do it there than it is to do it here, but I know how it feels. Secondly, I was right there at the Gala when I saw Discord open a portal, and... the thing about chaos magic is that it's raw magic. Discord's so much more powerful than any of us because he can just talk to magic and get it to do what he wants without using any of the energy in building a constraint structure. But once he gets it to do a thing for him, I can see how the thing is built and figure out the constraint structure that would be needed to make it happen. Plus, thirdly, my counterpart in Sunset's universe opened a lot of dimensional portals without any trouble when she'd absorbed all the magic from my friends over there... which means she was probably about alicorn level at the time."

"I thought there was a lot less magic over there overall? Can anypony – sorry, anyone over there get to alicorn level?"

"Well, if she wasn't alicorn level then it's even more obvious that I should have enough raw power to do this!" Twilight gestured at the place where she was going to bring a portal into existence.

Spike sighed. "All right, fine..."

Twilight took a deep breath. It had long been held by the greatest minds in Equestria that it wasn't possible for harmonic magic, the type that unicorns and alicorns cast, to open dimensional portals, and that Starswirl had taken advantage of naturally occurring ones. Except Discord had confirmed that that wasn't true. A naturally occurring portal would have still been around for Discord to find if Starswirl had used it to banish himself, or the evil, or whatever it was that that passage was actually claiming he did. In fact, it had turned out the main reason Princess Celestia had wanted Discord reformed was his power to find and close the portals. Starswirl's had to be closed or Discord would have found it by now, and if Starswirl could close a portal, odds were he had opened it in the first place.

So Twilight's theory was that yes, harmonic magic could open portals, and that she could devise a spell that would do so.

She was about to make history. Well, okay, she'd made history several times by now, but she was about to do it again. Twilight checked her saddlebags once again, making sure that everything she'd planned to pack was still in them. Once the portal was opened, after all, she definitely wanted to go through it and explore the world on the other side, as long as it was safe for equine life over there.

She concentrated, shaped the spell in her mind, and fired it from her horn.

A distortion wavered in the air in front of her. Success! It wasn't something she could clearly see through, like the portal Discord had opened at the Gala or the one bound in the mirror, but it was definitely there. "YES!" she shouted, excited. She started to trot over to the distortion to stick her head in and see what it looked like on the other side, but common sense prevailed – once the horn that created the portal went through it, it might just close and spit her entire body out on the other side. "Spike, can you stick your head through and see what it looks like on the other side?"

"Sure." Spike walked toward the portal. "Uh, Twilight?"

"Is something wrong?"

"It feels like... something's pulling..." Spike tried to step back – and fell on his tail instead, whereupon he slid forward toward the portal. "It's pulling me in!"

"No!" Twilight grabbed onto him with her magic. The portal was definitely yanking at him. And at her magic. Her grip on Spike was weakening. It felt as if her magic was draining away from where it contacted him, toward the portal.

She charged forward and grabbed Spike's tail with her hooves, trying to use the earth pony strength of an alicorn to pull him back, but she had no traction – the crystal floor was smooth and polished, nothing to stop either of them from sliding forward. She tried using her wings, but it was too late. With a pair of screams, they both slid the last little bit across the floor and through the hole into another world.

From his home in Chaosville, Discord couldn't necessarily detect all the ebbs and flows of magic in Equestria, but something as significant as a dimensional portal made him sit up and take notice.

He'd been playing a card game with himself in which he changed the rules constantly. The other Discord adapted to the rule changes instantly, of course. It was a semi-detached alternate, like Specs but with less personality, so that he wouldn't immediately know its cards. But it wasn't very smart or good at this game, so it wasn't much of a challenge... or, honestly, much fun. This promised to be much more interesting.

The other Discord and the cards popped out of existence, and Discord himself appeared... right outside Twilight's castle. Oh, now, he should have guessed. If a random dimensional portal opened in Equestria, it would probably be either Twilight Sparkle or Starlight Glimmer's fault, and they both lived here. He couldn't teleport into the castle because of the harmonics, but he could certainly locate the portal. Quickly he flew there, already thinking of the funny things he'd say to Twilight or Starlight, whichever one of them was muscling in on his territory.

Except there was nopony there. Just an unstable portal, floating in midair. An unstable portal that was exerting enormous negative magical pressure on the room, attempting to suck in anything that contained enough magic to be pulled by the pressure. Discord was used to this kind of behavior, and had already magically anchored himself far enough away that the pull scarcely bothered him.

He saw skid marks from hooves and dragon claws on the floor, but no magical pony and no Spike.

A quick summoning brought him a scrying crystal that had been hardened against the harmonics. It found Starlight, in the Crystal Empire, spending quality time with her coltfriend. It did not find Twilight. It would have found her anywhere in the world, which meant she wasn't in the world.

Several thoughts and emotions ran through Discord all at once. Fear for Twilight and Spike, who were his friends. Deep irritation, bordering on anger, that Twilight had been such an idiot as to try to use harmonic magic to create a portal – that wasn't what harmonic magic was good at! You wanted a portal, use chaos! Excitement at the thought of being able to rescue Twilight, rub her nose in the fact that he'd saved her, and get praise for being a hero. Unease at the fact that he could see the branes in the portal separating, growing further apart slowly. Already, the return portal would have separated from the entrance portal, so Twilight wouldn't be able to just turn around and come back. She'd have to be told to find the return portal, that it would be separated... but if he waited too long, it could splinter again, and then the closest exit portal wouldn't be a return portal anymore and Twilight and Spike could end up having to play scavenger hunt to find their way back to Equestria at all.

He could tell from the characteristics of the portal that it opened to a place with gravity similar to Equestria's, with breathable air, where the laws of physics were roughly similar to Equestria's, but where there was very, very low magic. He could even tell that the world the portal opened onto was one he'd either been to before, or its close cognate – one of the myriad worlds of humans that populated the multiverse, not the pony-like humans from the world Twilight had visited but real, fully alien humans. There was no translation matrix, so they'd be over there as a pony and a dragon... in a world where there was one dominant tool-using sapient species, and they thought of all the other species as non-sapients.

Having been mistaken for a non-sapient being in his lifetime and having suffered greatly as a result, Discord didn't handle that thought well.

A low-magic world would drain him badly and he might not have the strength to get them back directly, without using Twilight's broken portal, but he should be able to replenish quickly enough from the ambient chaos in the environment that he'd at least be able to teleport to the exit portal. He'd have to end up in a place where there was no chaos he could reach at all – deep inside a cave system or in a frozen polar wasteland or something – for it to drain him so quickly that he wouldn't be able to help them. And the thought of leaving them there – of facing Fluttershy and telling her that Twilight was gone, that all they could do was wait for her to find her way back, of leaving brilliant Twilight and snarky little Spike in a world where the denizens would think they were animals, and where animals were routinely hunted for food... no.

All of this passed through his mind in a second. Without hesitating any further, he threw himself at the portal, planning to retrieve Twilight and Spike and bring them back home.

Ice - 1

It could be worse, Twilight reflected. They could have ended up in space, or an active volcano, or in the middle of the ocean.

“This is really cold,” Spike said, his teeth chattering. “Where are we?”

“I… don’t really know.”

They were standing on an ice plain, in darkness. The sky was full of stars and a moon with very different markings than the one at home had ever had. She wondered who might be trapped in that moon. The moonlight glittered on the ice. There were mountains in the distance, none as tall as the Canterhorn. Nothing living was visible.

When Twilight had packed her saddlebags, she’d used magic to hyper-compact a blanket large enough to cover herself and Spike. She’d thought they might end up camping on this side of the portal. Well, that wasn’t going to happen. The cold was bitter, and she knew it would affect Spike more than her – pony fur and alicorn feathers would do a better job of holding the heat in than his scales. He was hotter than her to begin with, but he also needed to be hot. She tried to pull the blanket out of her saddlebag with her magic… and got it, eventually, after a full minute of struggling with it, a task that should have taken seconds. Her magic was sluggish and barely responsive.

“There’s no magic here. That’s a serious problem. Let’s go back and recalibrate.” She put the blanket around Spike, since she had it out anyway, and turned back to the portal. Its magic felt wrong. “Come on, you go first.” She didn’t want to risk the portal closing as she went through it and stranding Spike.

But right after Spike stepped through the shimmering anomaly, she heard his voice. “That didn’t do anything.”

“That – what?”

He came back. This time he was visibly not coming through the portal so much as stepping through the space it occupied. “When I went through, the portal wasn’t even visible. I could see you just fine, but you weren’t looking at me, so I thought maybe the portal was still visible on this side and you couldn’t see me through it.”

“That’s… really strange. Get on my back, I’m going to try it. Since I created it, it might behave differently for me.”

She tried to use magic to levitate him onto her back, but the lack of easily accessible magic had already weakened her to the point where she couldn’t lift him. Sighing, she crouched down. “Gotta do this the hard way. My magic isn’t working right.”

“Right.” Spike climbed on her back. “Do you really think it’ll work differently for you than me?”

“It’s possible.” She trotted through the portal – and came out on a dark ice plain, with the exact same moon and the exact same mountains visible. And when she turned around, she couldn’t even see the portal. It looked as if she’d just trotted through open air.

“Uh. Oh, I wish I had my books! I know I read about something like this happening – something about portals breaking in two? So there’s an entry point and an exit point and they’re not physically congruent anymore? But I don’t know how I’d go about finding the other half…”

At this point, Discord came flying out of the portal and landed hard on the icy ground, face first. Twilight had been too startled by his sudden appearance to be sure, but it looked like he had… fallen.

“Oh, for – ice? Really? Really?” He got to his feet, unsteadily.

“Discord? What are you doing here?”

“There’s no time! You need to go through the portal and go home right now, before it separates even further!”

“I… think it already did that,” Twilight said. “When you say ‘separate’, do you mean that the entrance and the exit separate so you can’t get back through the portal you just came out of?”

“Oh, no,” Discord said. He facepalmed. “Do you know where the other side of it is?”

“Uh… no. We just figured out now that it’s separated. What are you doing here?”

“Really, Twilight. You tear a hole in reality and you think that’s not going to attract my attention?” He wrapped his arms around himself, shivering. “Ice. Why did it have to be ice?”

“Can you snap us out of here?” Spike asked.

Discord shook his head. “I would have been able to, easily enough, except that you somehow managed to end up in a frozen place on a low-magic world. There’s no chaos here for me to draw power from, and I’ve already lost so much power I can’t safely teleport.” He glared at Twilight. “This is all your fault, you know. Why did you think it was a good idea to try to create a portal without notifying anyone who knows what they’re doing, who could help you or at least make sure you didn’t create a broken one and then get sucked into it?”

“Uh… because I don’t know anyone who knows what they’re doing.” A large red, blinking arrow appeared over Discord, pointing at him. “I know you can do it, but I was trying to do it with harmonic magic, and anyway, if you’re low on magic shouldn’t you be holding off on using it for jokes?”

“Oh, I suppose,” Discord said grumpily. “And just because you were trying to do it with harmonic magic doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have told me! Didn’t you think I’d want to see it? Harmonic magic being used to create something as disharmonic as an interdimensional portal?”

“Well, I’d have shown it off to you and the rest of our friends once I had it working, and I still might, if I can get it working correctly, but I sort of need to get home first.”

“I told you you should have waited for Starlight,” Spike groused.

“Never mind that now. Discord, you can detect magic, right? Can you tell where the other end of our portal went?”

Discord closed his eyes, and shuddered. Twilight said, excitedly, “You found it?”

“No, I’m simply freezing to death. Brr.” He tried sitting on the ice, apparently found that intolerably cold, and stood up again, looking miserable.

“Discord, you ought to stay on all fours if you can.”

He opened his eyes and glared at Twilight. “Do these paws look like they’re rated for winter sports?” he asked, shaking his lion paw and eagle talon at her.

“No, but even with all that fur on your chest, exposing that much of your body to the wind here is probably a bad idea.”

“There’s wind?” Discord’s eyes went comically huge.

“Hey.” Spike nudged him. “Ixnay with the agicmay, ok?”

“What?” Twilight stared at Spike.

“It’s Pig Latin. It’s a code, but a really dumb one. We use it to talk about Ogres and Oubliettes in front of ponies like Rarity or Applejack who don’t play it, because otherwise Big Mac gets embarrassed.”

“Oh, okay.” She turned to Discord. “And there might be wind. We don’t know where we are. Just because the wind’s not blowing right now, doesn’t mean it can’t.”

Discord looked up at the moon. “Oh. Actually, I do know where we are.”

“Really? Where?”

He sighed. “The name won’t help you. They call it Earth.”

“Like… land? They named their planet Land?” Twilight asked, disbelievingly.

“What’s our planet’s name?”

“Terra… oh. Oh, yeah, I see what you mean.”

“If I was pretending to be you, I would point out, pedantically, that Terra is actually Romish for Earth, and that those of us who travel dimensions know our world as Terra Fabula… Magical Earth, basically. This world is more precisely known as Terra Mundi, which literally means ‘earth world’, but in this context, it means it doesn’t have magic.”

Spike said, “That’s a pretty good job of pretending to be Twilight.”

“It’s a terrible job, I should at least have turned myself purple.”

“It’s so dark, Twilight looks gray, and anyway, you have to save your magic. You got the tone right, though.”

“Discord, can you find the other half of the portal or not?”

Discord closed his eyes again, still shivering. He made a coil of his tail and sat on it. After a moment, he pointed. “Thataway.”

“Okay! That’s great, we’re getting somewhere! Let’s go!”

The three of them set off across the ice. It was not even thirty seconds later when Spike fell noticeably behind, because Twilight and Discord could both go to four legs and move faster that way, but Spike still had the bipedal build of a baby dragon and couldn’t do that.

Twilight stopped to let him catch up. He was out of breath. “It’s so cold,” he said. “Even with this blanket.”

“How about you ride on me? I don’t like your paws being in contact with the ice, anyway.”

“Oh, but you were fine with my paws being in contact with the ice,” Discord said.

“Yes, because you are not a dragon and your life doesn’t depend on an internal magical fire, also because one of them is a talon so that’s very little ground contact there, one of them is furred, and one of them is a hoof. Only one of your paws is a dragon paw.” She sighed as Spike climbed onto her back. “Not that I’m not grateful for the help, but why did you come after us?”

“Well, to begin with, if you’d gone anywhere else at all — an ice plain on a magical world, or a not ice plain on a non-magical world — I’d have had the magic to snap you home immediately. But mostly, I was intensely curious. I’ve never seen harmonic magic open a portal without a framework.”

“A framework?”

“Starswirl eventually figured out how to enchant mirrors into portals in general, after he took my portal to a linked dimension and embedded it in a mirror.”

“Well, that’s more than I knew before, but I know the alternate me from the mirror dimension — the one you say you created — opened a lot of portals once she was brimming with magic, and since she’s an alternate me, she must have been using harmonic magic!”

Discord started laughing. “Harmonic?” He fell over on to the ice, which stopped his laughter immediately. “Ow. Brr, that’s cold.”

“What’s funny about her using harmonic magic? They have harmonic magic in that dimension, that’s how they take on pony traits and use magic.”

By now Discord was back on four legs. “Stop stopping, Twilight, we’ve got to get to that exit portal. We don’t have a lot of time,” he said. Most of this was called behind him as he trotted forward rapidly, his neck craned backwards.

“I was stopping for you!” Twilight said indignantly, and tried to trot fast to catch up, but as soon as she came close to a canter, her legs went out from under her and she skidded. Discord caught her and Spike before she could pitch over onto the ice or Spike could fall off.

“Also, hooves aren’t ideal for this environment,” Discord said, setting Twilight back on four hooves and then Spike onto her back.

“No kidding,” Spike said. “Wish we had ice skates!”

Discord lifted a paw, started to snap… and stopped, and sighed. “No. Not even going to try. I know it’s not there, and if I did it and then they popped like soap bubbles, that would do us no good at all.”

“Why are you losing your magic so quickly?” Twilight asked, trotting forward, painfully aware now that she couldn’t move faster than a trot without losing her footing.

“I’m the Spirit of Chaos,” Discord said, pacing her.

“I know, but what does that have to do with—“

“Did you ever wonder why Equestria needs a Spirit of Chaos?”

“I didn’t actually know Equestria needed you,” Twilight said, and then at the expression on Discord’s face, hastily added, “I mean, any more than Equestria needs me.”

“Didn’t Starlight Glimmer destroy the world seven times to prove how much Equestria needs you?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I really don’t.”

“I think she destroyed the world seven times because she was trying to prove the opposite of that,” Spike said.

“Yes, and she failed, because the world needs Twilight. Well, the world needs me too, because chaos creates magic.”

Twilight blinked. “Really? I thought magic just welled up from underground!”

“Did you think it was a perpetual motion machine? That magic was uniquely not subject to entropy, of all forces? That magic just appears?”

“I can’t say I’ve ever really studied where exactly magic comes from.” Twilight turned her head. “Spike, you have anything you can take notes with?”

“Yes, but my hands are too cold to hold a quill.” He held them out from his body, under the blanket. Twilight could turn her head just enough to see them shivering violently.

“Oh, for the love of everything, Twilight, I’ll tell you all this over again once we get home if you insist. You don’t have to take notes. There won’t be a quiz.”

“Fine,” Twilight said. “I’ll hold you to that. It’s not like you go around telling me things about how magic works every day.”

“Because it’s more fun to watch you figure it out.”

“You were telling me about chaos and magic?”

“More precisely, change creates magic. Constant change. The stronger the change, the better. Chaotic upheavals of everything create more magic than they consume.”

“That sounds like a perpetual motion machine.”

“It’s not, though. The magic I’d use to make the sky a skating rink is less than the amount of magic that doing something that ridiculous would generate… but most of that magic seeps away into the ground, traveling the ley lines to the poles, where it goes underneath the bedrock. The magma layer and the constant shift of tectonic plates keep the magic moving and keep adding to it, until it comes up out of the ground via geysers or volcanoes, enters the atmosphere, and is used by almost every living thing on Terra Fabula. And a significant amount of that magic flows through me. I keep magic from being used to ossify the world and make it perfectly orderly, because doing that would destroy magic. I keep the magic moving, because when it pools, it can take on… hmm… unpleasant characteristics. Like the Mirror Pool.”

“I see. But then why didn’t magic disappear while you were in stone?”

“Magic was still flowing through me, Twilight. Flowers and grass planted too close to my statue would mutate. Oh, that drove the groundskeepers absolutely batty. Birds that landed on me too often would transform, or their chicks would. I just didn’t have any control over it.”

“Oh, wait.” Twilight stopped for a moment. “So… your magic isn’t yours? You just have all of the magic in Equestria flowing through you?”

“Don’t be silly, of course my magic is mine, and stop stopping! We need to reach that other portal in time!”

“In time for what?” Spike said. Did he sound sleepy?

“Spike, are you falling asleep?”

“It’s… kinda tiring me out, being so cold…”

“Don’t go to sleep! Ponies who go to sleep in the snow never wake up!”

“He’s riding on a mammal,” Discord snorted. “You are not snow, Twilight. He can fall asleep on you.”

“Well, what if he falls off?”

“I’ve slept on your back before,” Spike mumbled.

“Yes, and you’ve fallen off! And I’ve caught you with my magic!” She turned her head toward Discord. “So if your magic is yours, why are you losing it so fast?”

“Because I have a very, very large pool, but I’m designed for magical flow. Not conservation. I’m trying to dam the flow, but there’s so little magic on this world, and the Spirit of Chaos exists to keep magic moving. If it moves out of me, it dissipates completely and I can’t get any of it back, not on this ice plain where nothing ever changes. And I’m… having a great deal of difficulty keeping it inside me.”

“That’s not good.”

“A brilliant observation, Twilight, I can see why you were Celestia’s star student.”

“Don’t be mean.”

“I am the Spirit of Disharmony, after all.”

“I’m still wondering—“ Spike yawned broadly —“why it’s so important to move fast. I mean… yeah, this cold is awful, I hate it, everybody hates it, but is there a reason besides ‘we want to get home as fast as we can’?”

“Isn’t that enough?” Discord was sounding just a tiny bit breathless.

“I guess so…” Spike yawned again.

“How far ahead is this portal?”

“Do I look like someone who knows numbers and distances?” Discord said irritably. “You’re an alicorn, Twilight. You’re not as attuned to magic as I am, but in this forsaken magicless place, even you should be able to feel the portal ahead.”

“Oh. Really?” She reached out with her magical senses. “I don’t feel it.”

“You might have to stop for a moment to fixate on it,” Discord suggested. “It took me a moment.”

“All right.” Twilight stopped. Spike shifted on her back as if he hadn’t been paying attention, and slid a little from inertia.

Focus. She knew what the portal felt like, she’d created it. She’d been sucked through it. She should be able to feel it. It was hard to stop when it was so cold, hard to open herself up to anything. She wanted to roll into a ball like a pillbug to keep the cold out. But she had to do this. Discord was right, he was terrible with numbers and distances. Someone with an analytical mind needed to know where the portal was as well.

She closed her eyes, and breathed deeply — which made her cough, as the ice cold air hit her vulnerable lungs. Ok. Not doing that again. Shallow breaths, through her nostrils so the air would be warmed by the distance through her snout before it hit her lungs. Unfortunately her nose was already feeling frozen, and this didn’t help. So many distractions from the cold. How could she focus?

Maybe she was looking at this wrong.

Twilight let her mind drift. Let herself experience the cold, and the deep unpleasantness of it. Her cold body, the drip from her nose. The feel of Spike’s warm body on her back, the only source of warmth in the entire world.

Another pinpoint of warmth, behind her. That had to be where the entrance from Equestria was. Where was there something like that, up ahead?

There. There it was. Far ahead. She didn’t have any more idea than Discord how far away.

“Spike,” she said, “can you open my saddlebag and hand me my compass?”

Discord hadn’t actually stopped. He was up ahead. Twilight felt frustrated; why had he told her to stop and take a moment if he wasn’t going to wait for her?

Spike was sluggish, but still faster than Twilight’s nearly numb hooves, as he pulled the compass loose and showed it to her. Twilight took a deep breath. “North,” she said. “We need to go north. That’s where the portal is.”

“How much farther?” Spike asked sleepily.

“Not too much,” Twilight lied. “Can you tie the compass around my right foreleg?”

“Okay.” Spike did so, strapping it into place. Now she’d be able to check it just by lifting her foreleg and looking.

He got back on her back, lying down and wrapping himself in the blanket, conserving both his warmth and hers.

Twilight looked up. Discord was coming back, his thin body a shadow in the moonlight. “You realized you were leaving us behind?” she called to him, and coughed. Shouting in this cold was not a good idea.

“Oh princess of little faith. I never intended to leave you behind,” he said, drawing even with her. “I just need to keep moving. It’s far too cold to stand still here.”

“I managed it.”

“You have fur all over your body.”

Twilight poked his furry chest. “You seem pretty furry to me.”

He poked her back with his scaled tail. “Only half of me.” And then started walking forward again. “Did you feel it?”

“I did. We have to conserve as much magic as possible; I don’t know if the portal is just hanging open, or if we have to activate it, but if we have to activate it, we’re going to be in trouble if neither of us has magic.”

“A fair point. How far ahead is it?”

“Not too far,” she lied again. Keep up their spirits. Don’t let anyone give in to despair. It didn’t matter how far away it was, they had to get there, or… or they’d die here. It really sank in, then, for the first time, that this incident might kill them all. And she hadn’t left behind a note to explain where she’d gone, so unless Starlight could reconstruct her lab notes to re-open the portal, no one would know what had happened to them. They’d die over here, their bodies preserved forever on the ice, and no one from home would ever find them.

No. She wouldn’t allow it. She wouldn’t. This was her mistake. She’d screwed up the spell somehow, so the portal had separated, and so that it sucked people in instead of letting them just choose to enter or not. She was not going to let Spike die here because she’d messed up. Or Discord. Or herself.

Spike’s breathing changed. “Discord! Can you help me keep Spike awake?”

“No,” Discord said. “But I can do this.” He closed his eyes, screwing them tightly shut as if in intense concentration, and produced a thin, strong rope. “I’m going to tie him to your back. He’s a dragon; he’s going into torpor. If you force him to stay awake, he’ll burn through his reserves and that will kill him. He’s falling asleep so he can conserve his inner flame and stay alive.”

“Oh.”

“Baby dragons are typically born here. Well, not here here, but back home, they’re usually hatched either in volcanoes or near the poles because of the intensity of magic needed to hatch a dragon egg. But baby dragons have a lot of fat reserves they can live off until they find their way to a source of food. A vein of gems, or things they can prey on. Because of magic, there’s abundant life all over Equestria.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“There are a lot of things you don’t know, Twilight.”

“If baby dragons are born here, then why…”

“Why is this happening to Spike?” Discord finished tying him onto her back. “Because he’s not a baby anymore. Most of his fat reserves are gone. He may still look babyish, but inside, he’s preparing to become a teenage dragon. A lot of what looks like fat is muscle. Teenage dragons do not do well in the cold, that’s part of the reason for the dragon migration.”

“But he’ll be all right if he sleeps?”

“He should be.” Discord looked at Twilight hard. “Assuming that you’re not lying about how far away the portal is, and actually, it’s so distant from here that we’ll never be able to make it on foot before we succumb to the cold.”

Twilight laughed nervously. “Of course not! We’re going to make it. No question.”

“Good, because my next Tuesday Tea with Fluttershy is in only three days, and she’ll be very disappointed if I don’t show up.” Discord started foward again, in the direction of the portal. “Onward march, I suppose.”

“Onward,” Twilight agreed, and they continued.

***

The moon set, but the sun did not rise.

Twilight was exhausted and so, so cold, but she couldn’t sit down and rest. Every time she stopped, the cold started creeping into her very bones. She felt like they’d been walking forever.

“Is this, like… some kind of alternate reality where Nightmare Moon won?”

Discord lifted his head wearily and looked at her. “What?”

“It feels like we’ve been walking forever, but the sun hasn’t risen. The moon set a while ago.”

“You have no idea where we are, do you?”

“Uh, yes, correct, that is exactly right. I have no idea where we are, but you said you did.”

He sighed. “This is a polar continent. South pole, if I’m correct about the planet we’re on. During the winter, the sun never rises, and during the summer, it never sets.”

“Oh.” That was surprising. “Is that magic?”

“No. It has to do with the position of the planet versus the sun. The same thing happens back home, but there, it’s Celestia’s fault. Well, Celestia and the position of the sun vs. the planet.” He was definitely trudging slower than he had before. “It’s so cold. I feel like my tail is going to freeze solid and break off.”

“It is cold,” Twilight agreed. “But we have to keep going. The portal can’t be too much further ahead.” She checked her compass. It was hard to read in the dark, but the lodestone had been magicked to glow in the dark slightly, so she could make out that they were still going north.

“I certainly hope so, because I don’t know how much longer I can make it. My whole body is turning to ice.”

“I know how you feel—“

“You have fur, so I doubt it.”

Twilight ignored that. “My hooves feel like they’re going to fall off. We’ve been walking for so long, I’m exhausted. Look, over there. That’s a rock face that’s not covered in ice.”

“I’m not sure what relevance that has.”

“Let’s take a rest for a few minutes. Share body heat. I can sit down, you coil around me and Spike, and we all get a little warmer.”

“Rock is not going to be significantly warmer than ice in this place.”

“Not a lot warmer, but it’ll be a little bit warmer than ice. And there’s no risk of our body heat melting the ice and getting us wet.”

“All right.”

The two of them trudged over to the rocky outcropping. It was not even slightly comfortable; Twilight had a very hard time arranging herself on it in a way that didn’t leave rock digging into her legs or her belly. Eventually Discord sat on the rock in a way where the back of his abdomen, his hips, and the top of his tail were on the rock, most of which had protective fur, and all of which, according to him, had dragon scales, a lot of which had fur on top growing around the scales. The brown fur on his body was extremely thick, and significantly warmer than her own pony coat, and with the dragon scales apparently the rock didn’t hurt him as much as it had been hurting Twilight. She sat on him, lying on his fur, and he coiled his head around her and then his wings around them both and then his dragon tail on top of that, making himself into as much of a ball as he could without his magic. Spike’s still-fiery little body in the center made Twilight feel almost warm enough.

Abruptly she woke, with a jerk of terror, and realized she’d dozed off. Ponies died in the cold if they fell asleep in the snow. “Discord!”

“Hmm?” He didn’t sound startled.

“Did you fall asleep?”

“Me? No, not really. Drifting a bit. Resting my legs. I’m still so cold.”

“We can’t fall asleep. We might never wake up!”

“I wasn’t really worried about that,” Discord said. “As long as I’m awake, you were safe to sleep. But now that you’re awake, we should get moving again.” He yawned. “I’m worried about the other side of that portal.”

“Worried?” Twilight extricated herself from him, carefully. “Why?”

“Because if it split once, it might again.” He yawned again. “I wanted to try to make it there as fast as equinely possible before that happens, but I was too tired and plainly so were you. I hope it’s stayed in one piece.”

“Me too.” She prodded him with her hoof. “Come on, get up. Let’s get moving.” Her stomach growled. “The sooner we get to that portal, the sooner we’ll be back home, in the warmth, and we can get something to eat.”

“Yes, that sounds good.” He got to all fours, stretched, and then thought better of it and contracted again. “Oh dear. That’s very cold.”

“Yeah, it didn’t get any warmer while we were napping.” Spike was still asleep. But still alive. She could feel him breathing, slow and deep. Feel his warmth on her back, all the warmth that was left in the universe. The portal was still up ahead of them. It still felt impossibly far away. “Come on. It can’t be too much further.”

“I think we will find that it can,” Discord grumbled, but followed her as she trotted.

Ice - 2

Author's Note

This chapter previously appeared as the standalone story Ice, but that one was dialogue only. I have rewritten this to include POV thoughts, dialogue tags and actions. Also some minor changes to the language -- "Ice" was written in 2013, and Discord's character and relationship with other characters has evolved since then, so some of the language from the original had to be altered to make sure it is currently in character.

I do not have any intention of taking down "Ice" -- it has comments I want to preserve, it records the date I originally published this and my original intentions, and a dialogue-only story is substantially different in many regards than the same dialogue with thoughts and actions included. Also the cover art was one of the first pieces of Photoshop I ever did, and it's kind of shit but I'm proud of it.

Ice - 2

Discord had been growing steadily more certain that he would die in this icy wasteland. Maybe Twilight and Spike, too, but he would be first.

They’d been walking so long, and the cold was slowly devouring him. First, it had been the profound discomfort of cold. Then it was agonizing aches as the cold started doing damage. Now he was going numb. Like turning to stone, he thought, except much slower. Also, he’d never been turned to stone in the winter, so the experience had never included cold in the start, though he had certainly been able to feel cold when the winters came, if it got bitter enough.

He couldn’t stop whining about the pain. It was humiliating. Back home he was godlike, reality his plaything. Here, he was slowly dying, and crying about it like a foal. But when he whined, it made Twilight’s emotions spark with disharmony — guilt and fear and pity and deep irritation — and the disharmony was like tiny flashes of warmth, just for a moment. He knew it was wrong to crave his friend feeling bad, and he doubted it was significant enough to prolong his life, but it was the only thing that felt remotely close to good in a universe of ice and despair, and he couldn’t make himself stop.

"Just to let you know, Twilight, I can't feel my tail anymore," he said.

"Square cube ratio says that the areas with the least volume in comparison to the surface area will lose the most heat first. So that's probably why," she said hoarsely.

"Must you describe our impending doom with mathematical equations? Ugh, my last few minutes of existence and I have to listen to logic. And math." His own voice was equally hoarse. It was an effort to talk, but not talking felt very lonely, and talking made Twilight feel disharmonious and gave him the tiny tiny boost from that, so he did it anyway.

"We're not going to die. We're going to find the portal. It's got to be near here."

By now he knew she was lying. He didn’t know whether she knew she was lying, or if in her efforts to keep her own spirits up she had convinced herself it was true, but he had sensed the portal some time ago, and he’d been able to tell then that it was still a long way off. Maybe a somewhat shorter way than it had been when they’d started, but by no means close by. They hadn’t made that much progress since. "We are in semi-total darkness and the temperature is so far below freezing I expect the oxygen to start crystallizing any moment now and I don't know about you but I don't think I have any magic left. Or body heat. So I can't help but think your optimism's misplaced."

"But when we get close to it, we'll feel its magic,” she said. “We don't need to have our own to find it. And when we touch it, we should be able to activate it, and get home. Where it's warm."

"My tail will still be frozen."

"You can regenerate your tail. We can heal anything if we live through it. I'm more worried about Spike."

He probably shouldn’t have told her that teenage dragons can’t handle the cold even though baby dragons were born in it. She was obsessing over Spike and honestly, he would probably live longer than either of them. Twilight was a mammal, but pony coats were designed more for quickly getting rid of heat than holding it in, and dragons had powerful inner fire. "He's a dragon. He'll just sleep and outlive both of us."

"There's no magic in this dimension. He won't survive either. And he's a reptile. Without magic to generate his heat, he can't just make body heat like we can," Twilight said earnestly.

"Speak for yourself. Or did you forget that the tail I can't feel anymore is also draconic?"

"At least some parts of you can make body heat. You can survive losing your tail."

Discord thought about that for a moment. "I might be better off if I did. You don't happen to have a knife or sword, would you?"

"Why exactly would I have something like that?"

"No reason. I forgot that you put all of your trust and faith in abstract concepts like Harmony and Friendship and it never occurs to you to bring weapons into a dangerous situation. How is that working out for you, by the way?"

"I didn't see you bringing weapons, either," she snapped.

"I have claws." And magic. That normally worked fantastically well. If only they hadn’t ended up on an ice plain. Almost anything would have been better. Outer space or an airless planetoid like the Moon would have been worse, and the middle of the ocean would have been very bad for Twilight and Spike — but not for him. He had gills, sea dragon heritage, and the ocean was pure chaos. He could have rescued Twilight and Spike if they’d fallen in the ocean. Even the desert would have been better, for him; he wouldn’t have lost his magic nearly as quickly in a place where wind shifted dunes of sand and some things were alive. The ice plain was the only terrestrial environment that could drain him this quickly. He cursed himself silently. He’d known he had no idea what he was getting into. He should have prepared. He could store magic better if he knew he was heading into a place that would drain it.

"How are they working out for you?" Twilight asked sarcastically.

"I can't feel the talon either. The paw is just in agony every time I step on it. I can't help but think I really shouldn't have taken your advice about going four-legged."

Didactically, Twilight said, "If you think you're cold now, imagine exposing your entire torso to the wind here. I know your forelimbs aren't built for walking on ice without magic to keep you warm, but you could survive losing all four of them better than you could survive losing all the heat from your core body."

"Except for the part where if I lost all four limbs I couldn't keep wandering through this Tartarus-damned ice plain looking for this mythical portal with you, and without your magic it's hardly as if you could carry me."

He had stopped being able to sense it a while ago. In this place without magic, without chaos, any source of magic whatsoever should be lit up like a faraway lantern, but he was standing next to the bonfire of an alicorn and the campfire of a dragon, impairing his metaphorical sight. And he was in agony, worse pain than he’d suffered since he’d destroyed Matrisse and gotten lungs full of Order dust. His ability to concentrate was more or less gone.

Twilight claimed she could still sense it. He hoped she was telling the truth, but he suspected she wasn’t. Except possibly she might have just admitted to him a minute ago that she couldn’t anymore either.

"I don't know, maybe I could make a travois and drag you," Twilight said.

He wanted to smile. It was too cold to smile. "With no magic. Or tools. Or anything to make a travois out of since there's nothing around here but ice."

"At least you don't keep slipping on the ice." Several times, she’d tried to speed up, approaching a canter. Almost every time, she’d slipped on the ice before even fully shifting gaits.

"Yes, do be careful and don't break your leg. They shoot ponies who break their legs here."

"Who do?"

"The sentient denizens of this world,” he said. “Who don't live anywhere near here because this region of their planet is far, far too cold for them. Or us. Whose brilliant idea was it to manufacture this portal again?"

"Whose brilliant idea was it to go through it?" Twilight snapped.

"I'm only a quasi-immortal ancient spirit of chaos. You're supposed to be a genius, genius. Nopony expects me not to do something stupid."

Twilight sighed. "I'm sure Princess Celestia will be really mad at me and when we get home she's going to yell at me and send me back to magic kindergarten and right now I don't care. She could banish me to the moon. I bet it would be warmer."

"She could turn you to stone," Discord said.

"I think that would be warmer."

"Yes, you'd be correct. When you stop feeling body parts because they're stone, they feel like stone, not ice. Right now I am turning to ice. I would honestly prefer stone."

"I'm sorry."

But he had never been this cold in stone. He had begged for death at times, but he’d never been so certain it was coming for him. He’d never had friends to disappoint with his disappearance, or his inability to rescue them. "Actually maybe not."

Twilight stopped in her plodding for a moment to glare at him. "Maybe I'm not sorry? I am sorry!"

Well, that was a nice burst of disharmony, but it made him feel bad. If he was going to wind Twilight up and get her upset, he wanted it to be intentional. "No. Maybe I like this better. Once I turn to ice I'm fairly sure I won't be conscious anymore. I'm a little surprised I'm still conscious now. And if I'm frozen and I'm not conscious, at least I won't be…"

"Lonely?" Twilight said, when he trailed off without finishing the sentence.

"I was going to say bored."

"And lonely."

"That would ruin my reputation,” Discord said. “If I were you, I wouldn't expect me to admit to something like loneliness unless I was fairly certain I was about to die." Because if he’d gone around admitting it, it would have given ponies a weapon over him. Because he’d never been able to convince himself that anypony but Fluttershy could be trusted with knowing his emotions like that.

"Just keep moving. The portal can't be that far away."

Oh yes it could, he thought. "Did I mention I can't feel my tail?"

"Several times."

"Oh. Well, I can't feel my dragon paw, either. Or my talon." He lifted his talon up and shook it. He wasn’t sure he even had enough sensation in the dragon paw to lift it that high.

"You're still walking on them, so it can't be that bad." He couldn’t see Twilight’s face — the moon had set forever ago, and the sun wasn’t ever going to rise on this south polar continent until spring came. But she sounded skeptical.

"Just warning you. If they suddenly buckle out from under me I won't be able to get up again."

"You have to.” Now she was impassioned. “I can't lift you."

"Of course not,” Discord grumbled. “If I can't go on you leave me here, idiot. What do they teach them in school these days?"

"I'm not going to leave you," Twilight said. Her voice was hoarse, but loud, as if she could make it more real by shouting it into the icy emptiness.

"That's touching, but stupid." He was so cold. Why didn’t she get it? Why didn’t Twilight understand that he was dying, right now?

"I don't have enough power to activate the portal by myself,” Twilight said. She sounded exhausted. Of course she was exhausted. She wasn’t in much better shape than he was. “If I leave you behind I can't go home. And since I don't see any cottages around here with friendly aliens ready to invite me inside for a cup of tea…"

"Hot cocoa."

"What?"

Discord looked over at her. Twilight was a shadowy blob in the starlight. "As long as we're imagining friendly aliens inviting us in and feeding us, let's imagine hot cocoa. Lakes of hot cocoa. Hot cocoa springs bubbling up from under the ice."

Twilight laughed weakly. "I will never say this again for the rest of eternity, but right now, I like the way you think."

"Swimming in hot cocoa."

"You could do that,” she said wistfully. “When we get home."

"Yes, after flying monkeys with glowing faces and big white pegasus wings descend from the heavens singing to us."

"They could sing Winter Wrap Up. And make all the snow melt."

Discord smiled weakly. "And then Celestia would come through the portal and fire rainbow sunbeams at us. Which don't turn us into stone."

"No,” Twilight said dreamily. “They'd just be sunbeams. All nice and warm. And then she could come swimming with us in the hot cocoa."

"Floating on an island of cake. Until she eats it all and sinks."

He could hear the scowl in Twilight’s voice. "Even in your fantasies, you're mean."

"Disharmonious to the end, dear Twilight. Promise me you'll have them put that on my tombstone."

"Since I can't open the portal without you, what makes you think I can have anypony put anything on your tombstone?" she asked crankily.

"Oh, I don't know.” Discord felt as if, the moment he stopped bantering with Twilight, he would probably drop dead. Part of him wanted to. If he was dead, the pain of the cold would stop. But he’d never see Fluttershy again. But, on the third paw, that was likely to happen anyway. “Once I collapse you could probably cut my body open and stick your little dragon inside me to keep him warm with what remains of my body heat, and then you'd be able to make better time and possibly find that portal."

"A, that's disgusting and where do you even get these ideas, and B, did you forget the part where I don't have a knife?"

"Just saw me open with your horn."

"That's gross,” Twilight said. “Can we get back to the hot cocoa fantasies? I liked them better."

He was so tired. "I'm serious, Twilight. I can't keep going much longer."

"Neither can I." She sounded tired too… but not as tired as he was. Twilight’s optimism had saved Equestria so many times. Could it save her, and Spike, now? He hoped so… but he was fairly sure it wasn’t going to save him.

"You're not carrying half your body mass as reptilian deadweight," he muttered.

"I am carrying reptilian deadweight. He's just not half my body mass."

Discord said archly, "You could leave him behind.”

Twilight took a deep breath. "You just want me to scream at you and threaten to hit you, don't you?"

"I admit it, the disharmonious energies of your rage might keep me going another thirty seconds or so."

"One hoof in front of the other, Discord." She demonstrated this by ostentatiously raising and lowering her hooves as she walked forward. It had been a long time since either of them had had the strength to trot, but she was still faster than he thought he was capable of.

"I only have one hoof. Ironically I think it's the only limb I have I can still feel."

"The portal can't be much farther." He was beginning to think she was trying to perform some sort of word-based magic. That she thought, if she repeated it often enough, it would be true.

"It could be, actually. It's dark, there are no landmarks, we have no magic to navigate with and this isn't our world. We could have passed the portal entirely."

Twilight lifted her leg, and starlight gleamed off something with a very faint glow to it. "The compass says we're still going north."

Discord stared at Twilight for several moments, and then started laughing. Weakly, hoarsely, and it hurt, but it was so hard to stop.

"Why are you chuckling like that?"

"This is a south polar continent, Twilight,” he said. “Every direction is north."

She said, very quietly, “Oh.”

"Still think we're going to get home?"

She was silent for several seconds as they plodded forward across the ice. "…If I give up here, it's not just me. Spike will die. He's counting on me."

"Ah, the magic of friendship,” Discord said, trying and failing to hide his bitterness. “When you absolutely, positively have to be wracked with agonies of guilt before you die because you know your death is a failure and dooms your friend to go down with you."

"That's very cynical for a guy who gave up being evil because of friendship," Twilight said.

"Why do you think I'm so glad it's you with me here and not Fluttershy?" he said.

"You're sweet, Discord."

"I do try."

For several minutes they were both silent, their throats too hoarse to keep talking. Too much concentration needed to keep putting one foot in front of another, hoof hoof hoof hoof, hand foot hand foot, paw hoof claw paw.

Finally Twilight said, “I think I can feel it up ahead. Can you feel it?"

In a dull voice drained of all his normal vivacity, Discord muttered, "Can't feel anything."

"Maybe if we get closer."

"No. I mean I can't feel anything, Twilight.” He stopped. Twilight’s fantasies about the portal being close were hurting more than inspiring, because he knew he wasn’t going to make it. “I'm done. I can't keep going."

"You have to!"

"The fact that I have to doesn't change the fact that I can't. I'm so tired. I just want to lay down and sleep." He lay down, coiling himself to avoid the worst of the cold. His tail was already so numb it didn’t matter if it froze any more, so he could lay himself on it almost comfortably.

"But you can't! You have to keep going!" Twilight was almost hysterical.

"For the record… yes. Yes, it is very, very lonely being stone,” Discord said, sleepy enough that his voice was starting to slur. “I think being ice will be much better in the long run."

"You can't give up now, Discord!” She pushed at him with her forehooves. “I can feel the magic up ahead! The portal is there! I know it!"

It was not, and he knew it. If he couldn’t sense it anymore, neither could she. They would never find it. "You go on without me," he mumbled.

"No!"

And then Twilight did one of the dumbest things he’d ever seen her do. She knelt down, still with Spike on her back, and tried to use her forehooves to lever him up. He glared at her, and then remembered she probably couldn’t see that in the darkness. "Don't be an idiot! You can't carry me!"

"You.. gave… up!” She panted, gasping. Her hooves probably barely worked anymore; ponies used tactile telekinesis through their hooves, and her magic was almost gone. “You don't… ugh… get to… tell me… what… I can't… do!" She was trying to shove her head under his body, like she was trying to put him around her neck.

"It's objective fact! You already have a small dragon in a sling on your back… I'm three times your size, Twilight, you can't carry me!"

"Discord… leave logic… to… professionals… okay? You shouldn't… be trying… to make sense." She staggered, falling on her face in the ice, and then went back to what she’d been doing, trying to get him onto her back.

"Well, fine. Kill yourself and your baby dragon in a futile effort to save me. See if I care."

"I'm… gonna.” Her horn poking into his ribs hurt, but only for a moment as she slid it down, inserting it under his body. “Gonna… get… both of us… killed… trying to… save you. Unless… you… keep moving."

"Twilight. I. Can't. I'm so cold. Can't feel my tail or my wings or my legs. Just want to… sleep."

And then she got to her feet, and she’d managed to actually get her head and withers under him, so the middle of his body was draped over the back of her neck, though his head and tail would drag on the ice if he didn’t lift them. "Square… cube… ratio,” she gasped. “Too… skinny and… long. Losing… your heat… too fast."

"I know. Put me down."

"Not… gonna."

Now he was angry. Just because he was dying, what right did she have to risk herself and Spike to save him? "Put. Me. Down."

"Make… me," she panted.

Anger gave him strength from somewhere, and he lifted his head and tail off the ice, with great effort, and then rolled himself tailward, until he fell on the ice. "…there!" he said triumphantly, as Twilight shrieked; he’d sent her into a skid. "Twilight, skate!"

He didn’t have the strength to catch her, like he had multiple times before. She continued to shriek, unable to pull herself out of the skid even if she was managing to stay on four feet, until she smacked into a rock outcropping, and Spike flew off her back and smacked into it too.

"Ow!" Spike, now sitting on the ice, rubbed his head.

"Spike! Spike, are you ok?" Twilight had hit the rock outcropping with her hooves first, and managed to twist her body so her withers and side had been shoved into it, not her head. In the dark Discord couldn’t see if she was scraped or bleeding, but he could see that she was bending over Spike.

"Ow, I'm awake! What did we just hit?"

"A big rock. Discord pushed me."

"He pushed you?" Spike asked disbelievingly.

"Because I was trying to carry him on my back. Spike, go back to sleep, it's really cold, you can't take this weather."

"Did you break a leg yet, Twilight?" Discord called, and regretted it, his throat much too raw to make his voice carry like that for the sake of a joke.

Twilight seemed to think he was serious. "No, but I woke Spike up!"

"You did tell me to do that," he pointed out.

Wearily Twilight and Spike came back over to him. "Discord?" Twilight said as they came close.

"Hmm?"

"If you could push yourself off me hard enough to send me flying across the ice like that… you're not as tired and frozen as you think you are. You can keep going a little while still."

Discord rolled his eyes. "Oh, you're going to be that way, are you?"

She turned to Spike, who was walking rather than riding her. "Spike, I want Discord to carry you."

"Twi… no."

"Yes. He's freezing. So are you. If you wrap yourself around his neck and I tie the blanket around you both, you can share the remains of your dragon heat with his body warmth and keep both of you going longer."

"But what about you?" They were close enough to him that DIscord could see Spike’s wide eyes glitter in the starlight, looking up at Twilight.

"She's going to nobly sacrifice herself for the reptiles in the party and ensure that we all go down together, despite the fact that she's entirely fur-covered and has a much better chance at survival if she abandons us both," he said irritably. Why did she keep trying to save him? He was done. He’d told her. He couldn’t keep going. Why did she keep tying her survival and Spike’s to his? If he died, Equestria would select a new chaos avatar, and Fluttershy would grieve, but get over it eventually, and no one else would really care. If she died, Equestria was doomed. He knew how important Twilight was even if she refused to believe it herself.

"I'm not abandoning anypony!” Twilight shouted at him, which had to be ruining her throat. “Or any dragon! Or draconequus! Or whatever! All three of us make it to the portal or none of us do, because neither you nor I will be strong enough to activate it on our own! Not on this stupid planet with its stupid lack of magic and its stupid south polar continent where everything is north and the compass doesn't work and it's all covered with stupid ice!” She kicked the ice, for emphasis. “Either all three of us make it back to Equestria or none of us do!"

"I think I'd have a tear in my eye if my eyeballs hadn’t frozen over," Discord said sardonically, but did nothing to stop Spike climbing onto him, or Twilight tying the blanket around them both. The rope he’d made hours ago had vanished. Occupational hazard of chaos mages. Things he made were rarely permanent.

Let her figure out he wasn’t actually going to go anywhere. Then she’d move Spike back to her own back and come to her senses. She was much more important to Equestria than he was, and she plainly had enough energy that maybe she could survive and find the portal. He couldn’t.

"Stop whining about how cold you are, Discord, and move!" Twilight shoved him with her forehooves again.

"Yeah, what she said," Spike said, tiredly.

"Be quiet, Spike, I have just enough strength to do a barrel roll," Discord muttered.

"Uh huh. And I have just enough strength to do this."

Sudden extreme pain shot through Discord’s back, directly above his wings. "YOW!" he screamed, and twisted his head to look… at Spike’s sharp dragon teeth digging into his flesh.

"Spike! What did you—" Twilight started.

Staring disbelievingly at the dragon on his back, Discord said, "You bit me! You actually bit me!"

"Uh-huh,” Spike said. “And the next time you fall down on the ice and decide you're just gonna die now, I'm gonna do it again."

"Barrel roll. I'm serious."

"So am I. Twilight won't leave you and I'm not gonna let her freeze to death because you're a wimp."

Discord snapped, "I am not a wimp, I am freezing. You'd be in worse shape than me if Twilight hadn't been carrying you in that blanket."

"And now I'm in better shape than you,” Spike said. “So I'm gonna keep you alive and moving until you actually keel over dead. Because that's what friends are for."

"Friends bite you?"

Twilight said, "He's the perfect friend for you, Discord, don't tell me you wouldn't bite Fluttershy to keep her alive if you had to."

"I'll bite you even if I don't have to," he growled at her.

"You'd have to catch me first, draconequusicle." She started trotting away.

"That could be arranged,” he said, getting up and following her. “I skate better than you."

"So do it. Move. Keep moving."

"How far away is the portal, Twi?" asked Spike.

"A million miles away,” Discord said. “We'd need Celestia to banish us there."

"Don't listen to him, Spike. It's just a little farther up."

He wondered if that was actually true. He couldn’t sense it at all anymore. Could she? "You're simply not going to let me die in peace, are you?"

Twilight said, "No."

"Nope," Spike added.

"Torturers. I can see why you aren't the Element of Kindness, Twilight."

Spike said, "I'm a dragon. I'm supposed to be mean and cruel. Now keep moving or I'll bite you again."

"I'm fairly sure the magic of friendship wasn't supposed to involve biting."

"You'd be amazed at what the magic of friendship can involve,” Twilight said. “Now keep moving! One for all and all for one!" Her voice was hoarse and raw, but there was so much more energy in it than there had been before. Where had she gotten that energy?

Maybe disharmonious emotions could charge up ponies, too, they’d just never been willing to admit that to him.

"I'm turning you both into wombats when we get home,” he said. “Just so you know."

"As long as we can be wombats swimming in a lake of hot cocoa." The dreamy note was back in Twilight’s voice.

Spike leaned forward toward Twilight, from Discord’s back. "Twi, are you feeling well?"

"No, Spike, I'm freezing to death and it's making me so delirious, Discord's fantasies about hot cocoa lakes are sounding logical and fun."

"Uh, ok, count me in then. Hot cocoa lakes are sounding good to me too."

Discord growled, "I won't make you one if you bite me again."

"I won't bite you again if you don't give up and lay down on the ice and decide you're too tired to keep fighting and you're just gonna die."

"I hate you both."

Twilight said, "Good, didn't you say disharmony might keep you alive another thirty seconds?"

"I did, yes."

"Well, if needing to hate somepony will keep you alive longer, then Spike and I are perfectly happy to make you hate us."

"Right. What are friends for?" Spike said, entirely too cheerfully given that they were all freezing to death.

Discord sighed. "…Why did I think this friendship thing was a good idea?"

"Because you thought Fluttershy was really cute?"

"SPIKE!" Twilight sounded like she might die of embarrassment, not the cold.

"What? If I can like Rarity maybe he can like Fluttershy?"

Discord chuckled weakly. "I take it all back. This is much too entertaining for me to die now. Besides I'll never get my revenge on the two of you if I don't survive this."

"Right!” Twilight said. “So let's find that portal!" She set off at a faster trot.

Discord murmured to Spike, "…you do know she has no idea where it is and we're probably going around in circles and we're almost certainly going to die, right?"

"Yeah. I know," Spike whispered back.

"Well, if you know, what did you bite me for?"

"Because if anyone's gonna beat the odds and save us all, it's gonna be Twilight, and she won't leave you behind. So I guess if we die we're all gonna die together."

"Charming."

"Have a little faith,” Spike said. “It doesn't make any sense that Twilight could find the portal in this mess when we've been looking for so long, right?"

"Yes… that was my point…"

"So, Discord, if it doesn't make any sense why are you arguing it can't happen?"

He could not think of any salient comeback to that. "…I still hate you, dragon boy."

"Still got teeth here."

"Come on, you two!” Twilight called from up ahead. “Just a little farther! Let's go!"

Discord knew it wasn’t going to be just a little farther. He knew they weren’t going to find it before he, at least, dropped dead. Probably all of them. But despite his better judgement, and with energy he had no idea where he was getting it from, he managed to increase speed to keep pace with her, the little dragon on his back and the blanket returning some of the warmth he was dying of the lack of.

Twilight had saved the day so many times, many of them times he had personally been sure she couldn’t possibly. She had saved him. More than once. Maybe she could do it one more time. What was the worst that could happen? She’d fail and they’d all die, which would definitely happen if he gave up and she wouldn’t leave him behind.

For the first time in hours of marching through this dark and icy nightmare, Discord felt a slight pinprick of hope.

Ocean - 1

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 starlight, since the moon had set a while ago, 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 originally appeared as part of Eating Dessert First, an anthology of pieces of unfinished stories that sorta kinda stand on their own.

You can thank a fellow who goes by Neverborn on Patreon for the generous gift that made it possible for me to get off my ass and write more of this story. :-)

Ocean - 2

Discord was distantly aware of the thrashing chaos of the waves all around him, of the rain pelting his back and his wings, but he was sleeping. For him, sleep usually involved being in this sort of half state where part of him was aware of his physical position, and what surrounded him. It turned out that in this world, death had been a lot like that as well, a slow slide from half-wakefulness to the full darkness of deep sleep, aware the whole time what he was succumbing to, and not caring anymore. It had been too painful to be alive, in the cold. Now he was surrounded by chaos.

The water, while possibly a little bit chilly by objective standards, was so much warmer than the ice had been, and the salt filled some deep, mostly forgotten place within him, where he was a draconequus and not a chaos avatar. Descendant of Eastern dragons, water, fire and air, not earth, fire and air like those of Spike’s species. The draconequui had once ruled the sea around Equestria, inhabiting most of the islands from the latitudes of Manehattan down through the tropics and down around the fat side of South Amareica, trailing off and growing rarer down toward the tip. He’d gone looking for them, once he was knowledgeable enough about what had happened to them to understand where he might still find some, but all he’d ever found were bones and abandoned ruins. What the cold of the windigos hadn’t destroyed, the quetzalcoatls looking for sacrifice to feed their false sun had, and ponies and buffalo had polished off the few remaining.

So he bobbed up and down in the storm and the high tide, aware only of how pleasant it was to sleep in the center of this soothing cacophony, how the ocean water was a balm to a part of him he almost never bothered to acknowledge. When the rain changed from wild, thunderous sheets whipping in a furious wind to a steady drumbeat, he noticed the change, and it roused him a little — he was very sensitive to chaotic patterns becoming more orderly, for obvious reasons — but the waves were still fierce and unpredictable, and his body ached badly when he was awake enough to notice, so he went back to sleep.

Eventually, though, low tide came and deposited him on a sand bank, halfway in a tidal pool, where some angry small crabs were expressing their displeasure at his intrusion by pinching his tail. He wouldn’t have noticed that — his tail was covered with dragon scales and fairly impervious to the worst the crabs could do — except that he’d stopped moving very much, and that was too great a change in the pattern for him to ignore.

Discord opened his eyes, observed that his head was underwater, and lifted his neck. He had a fuzzy headache, probably the result of breathing through damaged gills all night. The first breath of air in hours, redolent with salt and moisture but not nearly as much of either as had been going through his gills, started to clear the headache away. He rolled to a sitting position, observed the crabs angrily pincering his tail, decided that he ached too badly overall to put up with that, and plucked them off, tossing them back into the tidal pool he’d been half-stuck in.

The moon was down again, as was the sun — hazard of them being out at the same time. Half the clouds had cleared; the rest of the sky was starless and dark, but that was the half out over the ocean. There were stars visible in the sky above the island. He could see Twilight and Spike on the beach, up above the high tide line, lying together in a hollow.

Just to make sure, he limped up the beach on all fours, feeling like a night of healing and exposure to the ocean’s chaos hadn’t quite yet fixed the damage Twilight had done to his midsection when he was frozen and she’d bent him. Better not to try to stand up right now, let those muscles take a break. No inching like a snake either; that’d be worse. His legs were not in horrible shape; his talon didn’t entirely want to take his weight, but he was able to manage with the other three.

The hollow was wet but not full of water; all the water it would have collected during the storm had drained through the sand. Twilight’s wing over Spike rose and fell with her breathing. Discord couldn’t check on Spike’s breathing without moving the wing and waking Twilight up, but he thought it was likely that Twilight herself would have woken if Spike had stopped breathing. Good. They were both alive.

Maybe they all had some hope of escaping this planet and getting back home, then.

His body’s magic was working. Discord’s body’s magic held the capacity for any of his organs to behave like the organs of one of the animals that made up his body. So his eyes could have eagle accuracy like a pegasus, or be dark-adapted like a batpony, simply because he had a pegasus wing and a batpony wing. It didn’t work with dragon scales, unfortunately — only the parts of his body actually protected by dragon scales behaved like they were protected — but it was useful for seeing in the dark. Discord was easily able to see the large number of halved coconut shells full of water. He drank half a dozen of them, and ate several that still had coconut meat inside.

Despite the coconuts, his stomach grumbled. Usually that only happened when it was funny. Without magic, it meant he genuinely needed food. And unfortunately, with the amount of healing he’d done and the amount of damage left to fix, he knew what kind of food he needed, and coconuts wouldn’t cut it.

Funny. When he’d been tiny and his mother had taught him not to eat animals, she’d called it the Way of Harmony. He’d rejected harmony about as thoroughly as anyone could do, since then, but killing creatures and eating them still made him feel guilty. Maybe some of those crabs would be big enough? He felt a lot better about arthropods than vertebrates…

…no. The crabs were tiny. A dozen of them would be barely a snack, and while he could crunch through their shells without difficulty, he only liked them that way when he was suffused with chaos magic and could eat nearly anything, including glass and rocks. Discord sagged a little.

The first pet he’d ever tried to keep had been a fish, given to him as dinner. He’d been a captive and a child, then, still honoring his mother’s Way of Harmony, so he’d rescued the fish by putting it in his water bucket, and later, had attempted to escape, and save the fish. Neither had worked. Two thousand years later, he’d done so many terrible things he felt so little remorse for that the memory of River the fish rarely came back… except at moments like this, where he had to do what his child self had refused.

Well. In the absence of gems, Spike would also need protein. And while ponies of any kind could function indefinitely on just vegetable matter, unicorns — and alicorns — had high enough metabolisms that, without magic, they were better off eating meat as well, else they might need to eat near-constantly. So this wasn’t just for his benefit. Spike and Twilight needed this too.

He went back down to the shore, waded in until the waves were coming in over his wings, and then pulled his legs in toward his body, lowered his head into the waves, and started swimming the way a sea serpent would, wiggling his body through the water. With the shade of the clouds up above he couldn’t see very well under water, despite his eyes being dark-adapted right now; there was a nictating membrane over them protecting them from the salt water, eliminating any dark-seeing advantage he should have had, and even batponies couldn’t see all that well on moonless, cloudy nights. But with his head underwater, Discord didn’t need to see. He could hear the movements of fish and other living creatures all around him. Of course, now his ears were full of water, and he wouldn’t be able to hear anything on land until he dealt with that, but it wasn’t going to be a serious problem. Unlike ponies, Discord could contort his neck to position his head any way he wanted to, to shake water out.

If he’d had magic he’d have changed entirely, taken on a form made up of aquatic animals. Webbed digits on his limbs, fins instead of wings, a fan on the end of his tail instead of a lion’s tuft. But if he’d had magic, he wouldn’t need to be doing this.

Discord swam far enough out to sea that he could hear and feel fish all around him. Fish of decent size, that could feed a creature as big as he was. Then he drifted, barely moving, mimicking a log. Eventually fish who’d have feared a creature his size, and avoided him, started treating him like background noise, or maybe a potential source of food to be investigated.

His claws and talon were fast, and he knew exactly where to bite to kill a fish instantly and humanely. Fluttershy had shown him. On the rare occasions when he’d had to do this in the past because of lack of access to magic, he’d killed them as quickly as he could, but he hadn’t known the exact spot to bite to sever a fish’s spine from its brain and end its life. Fluttershy actually caught fish in the stream on her property, with her mouth, for her raccoon friends, who she didn’t trust to dispatch the fish as painlessly as she could. He’d never expected to have to do this again — he could just snap up fish that had never been alive, for the raccoons, or himself when he wanted to taste some meat — but he’d watched her, and learned.

Fluttershy hadn’t let him make fish for the raccoons anyway; she had a concern about the consumption of too much chaos magic. He’d tried to explain it didn’t work that way, but Fluttershy had just dismissed every part of his explanation with “But I still worry about it”, with huge blue eyes he could never resist, and he’d never tried to push the issue after that.

They wouldn’t be back in time for Tuesday Tea. Not unless time passed very differently here, which he doubted. When he closed his eyes and floated and tuned out all the distractions, he could feel the next half portal. And he could feel that it wasn’t anchored to land. He could reach it, right now, if he put all his effort into swimming there; he could get there in half a day. But there was no guarantee it would actually take him back to Equestria. These splintered portals could splinter dozens of times. They’d stick to the gravity well and they’d stay where the pressure was close to the pressure the origin portal was under — which was Twilight’s castle, so they wouldn’t sink deep into the ocean or climb high up a mountain or float a great distance in the air — but within that range, they could be anywhere on this planet, and they could move.

Spike had been near the shore, Twilight a good ways away. Discord himself had woken up in the ocean, still on the same continental shelf this island occupied, so he hadn’t sunk into the real depths, but far enough from land that he knew there was no way he and Twilight could have ended up there, but Spike close to land, if the portal hadn’t moved. The one he sensed now was also probably moving, drifting farther away. But he had no way to get Spike and Twilight there without some kind of raft he could tow, because neither of them could swim any significant distance, and while he’d been able to drag them both to shore when shore had been less than a hundred heads away, there was no way he could carry them both a trot or two.

So. A raft. Difficult to make one that would be stable; they’d need wooden logs and vines to lash them together. Honestly, probably it’d be easier to find one substantially large log, hollow it out with Spike’s claws, and use it as a canoe. He’d have to keep monitoring where the portal was going. It was unlikely to drift closer to its mate here on the island, but it might drift laterally rather than moving further away. He’d also have to observe the winds. In his travels to other dimensions, Discord had been on a few sailing ships. He was hardly an expert sailor, but he knew a little bit about it.

I don’t need to solve the whole thing myself. It was an almost alien thought. The idea of working with others was still almost new to him. It was difficult to work in groups when you were practically omnipotent. And when he wasn’t — when he’d traveled worlds, finding places where his powers didn’t work, because living with the cheat codes to reality all the time was deeply boring and there were times he had to stretch himself or he would go bananas — he’d been alone every time. He’d met people along the way — ponies, humans, various other races — and sometimes worked with them for short periods of time, to accomplish a single defined goal. But they hadn’t been friends, he hadn’t trusted them, and so generally either there was a problem that was his problem and he wouldn’t explain it to them well enough for them to help, or there was a problem that was their problem and he had very little to do with it. Including battles, where his main strategy had always been to run away, if he hadn’t had his powers. The party he was with could handle killing monsters; he was usually there for some other reason. Even in places where he had no magic, his lengthy life experience and some of the perks of being the chaos avatar often translated to giving him some value.

But this time he was with Twilight and Spike. He’d made Spike solve dozens of problems, as the leader of their party in Ogres and Oubliettes; generally Discord would split himself into the DM and Captain Wuzz the elven archer, and Captain Wuzz mostly followed Spike’s lead because he didn’t want to risk spillover between his two halves contributing to spoilers. And Twilight — Twilight had solved every problem he’d ever seen thrown at her. Defeated Nightmare Moon, himself, Chrysalis, Sombra, Tirek, Starlight, the list went on. He could trust them. He didn’t have to dump the whole problem on them and simply sit on the sidelines and watch — his knowledge would be important to getting them home — but he didn’t have to solve the whole thing by himself, either. He could work together with them.

It was a thought both heady and terrifying. Discord did not entirely know how to work with others when he was neither in charge, nor letting someone else do all the thinking. He hadn’t done anything like that for any length of time, for any real stakes, since… Celestia and Luna and the dragon war, so so long ago.

But Twilight had gotten Starlight Glimmer and Sunset Shimmer, both enemies and equals to her, to become her friend and follow her leadership. She’d gotten five ponies who had literally nothing in common with each other to work together and be best friends. If anyone could figure out how to help him work with others, it’d be her. And he had faith that as long as she didn’t do something stupid that got her killed, she’d get them all home, eventually.

When Discord climbed back up onto the beach he had four fresh fish in his claws, and a problem. How was he supposed to cook these?

Put a stick through them and suspend them over a fire, yes, all very well, but where was he to get a fire when the dragon was out of magic and so was he? Discord hadn’t had to start a fire on his own since he was a very tiny child, and he remembered it taking hours, before he’d figured out how to do it with magic. The first fire he’d set had come from a tree burning after a lightning strike, and most of the time, he’d taken care of his fire like it was a pet. Starting one from scratch was like getting a new pet after the old one died.

Discord sighed. Perhaps this was where the working in groups had to start. He arranged rocks in the sand to create a firepit, got wood that had been under other wood and therefore slightly drier, put it in the circle, and then found taller Y-shaped sticks, stuck them in the ground, impaled the fish through, and put the rods the fish were spiked on into the Y crooks. A perfect setup for campfire cooking, if only he had a campfire.

The sun had started to rise. Time to wake Twilight and Spike up, and see if either of them could start a fire.
And that way, he could avoid thinking about what had happened when he’d died, and the terrible implications of that.

Beach

“Wakey-wakey!”

Discord’s voice was not cute, like Pinkie Pie’s, and to be honest Twilight would not have appreciated Pinkie Pie standing over her yelling to wake her up either. And as uncanny as Pinkie could be sometimes, usually she could not dangle her head so it was directly over Twilight’s and the first thing Twilight saw when waking up.

“Twilight and Spike! Rise and shine! Or don’t shine, that’s hardly an obligation on this adventure, but do rise, at least!”

“Discord!” Twilight yelped, trying to come to her hooves, except that she was lying sideways in a sandy hollow with Spike crammed between her four legs, sheltered against her chest and belly. She thrashed the one wing that was still free, trying to get leverage to get up. “What are you doing?”

“Waking the two of you up!” he said, entirely too cheerfully for the position of the sun and also the amount of moaning he’d been doing yesterday when he’d come to shore.

“Mmmuh,” Spike mumbled.

Twilight extricated herself from the young dragon and stumbled to her hooves, then tripped as she tried to get out of the sandy hollow and faceplanted onto the sand. Which could have been worse; there were rocks jutting out of the sand all over, but none near her. “What’s going on? Why are you waking us up?”

“Well, the sun is rising, my belly is growling, and the other half of our portal isn’t going to stroll up to this beach and yell, ‘Jump through me!’” He spoke in a ridiculously high voice as he “quoted” the imaginary portal, as if it were a child.

Twilight sat down on the sand. Her bottom on the sand and her head in the air worked much better for her than the other way around. “Eat some coconuts if you’re hungry. I know we have to worry about getting to the next portal, but you almost died—“

“I did die.”

“Okay, you died, Spike and I almost died, I think we deserve some recovery time.”

In an uncharacteristically sober voice, Discord said, “Spike won’t recover just from sleeping. He needs something to eat.”

“Right, but he doesn’t think there are gems on the island, so he’ll have to make do with coconuts or seaweed or whatever else we can—“

“Twilight.” Discord frowned down at her. “I know more about dragon biology than you do. He can’t manage with just coconuts and seaweed. Neither can I. And you can, but you shouldn’t; you’ll need more energy than seaweed can give you.”

“What are you saying?”

“Well, wake up and come over here!”

Sighing, Twilight got up onto four hooves and plodded over to where Discord had… what were those things? They looked like… well, they kind of looked like very small bits of the tatzlwurm, pale whitish-pink and fleshy-looking with wooden sticks pushed through them longways.

And then she noticed a pile of fish heads and scales and fins and who-knew-what-else lying nearby on the beach.

“Discord!” She drew back. “Those are — those are fish?”

“All prepared and ready to roast over a fire,” Discord said. “But it turns out, without my magic, I can’t light a fire. I’ll need help from you or Spike.”

“We can’t eat fish!”

“I assure you, all of us absolutely can, and for Spike and myself, it’s a must.”

“But Spike doesn’t eat living creatures!”

“I should hope not, they should always be dead before you eat them.”

She shook her head. “I’m not gonna tell you what to do for yourself, Discord, but eating animals is disgusting. I’m not doing it, and I don’t think Spike will want to either.”

“Hmm. Well, you are hardly the naturalist Fluttershy is, so let me explain something to you.” He opened his mouth wide, and stretched his head forward, so his open mouth was practically in Twilight’s face. She jerked back, and fell on her rump again.

“What are you doing?”

“Uhh yah—“ Discord closed his mouth. “Sorry, it entirely slipped my mind — without magic I can’t talk with my mouth open. Did you notice that I have a variety of sharp teeth, in addition to flat pony teeth?”

“I’m not a dentist. I was too busy noticing that you looked like you were trying to eat my head.”

“Well, surely you’ve observed that while Spike does have some chewing molars, most of his teeth are sharp?”

Twilight got back onto her hooves. “I don’t appreciate being patronized, Discord. If you’re trying to explain to me that dragons are omnivores, yes, I know. But that means Spike can eat anything, not that he has to.”

“Au contraire, ma princesse. In a realm suffused with magic, Spike can get all the nutrition he needs by consuming magic-infused gems. That frees him up to eat hayburgers and carrot dogs and ice cream all he likes. But this realm is close to magicless, and in a magicless realm, Spike literally cannot survive on a purely vegetarian diet. He could get by if we had beans, or real nuts — coconuts do not count — or milk, cheese, eggs, anything like that… do you see any such things on this island?”

“It’s not like we’ve really explored it.”

“Well, perhaps we might find wild beans, that aren’t poisonous, and that we can digest… but it seems somewhat unlikely.” Discord sighed. “Twilight. This was not a decision I made lightly. I do not eat flesh that was once living. I just don’t. Among ponies, doing such a thing turns me from a creature to be feared for my sense of style and my great creativity to a creature to be feared as a predator. I have worked very hard in my lifetime to be feared for the correct reasons.”

Maybe he could have considered the possibility of restraining his chaos, and not being feared at all… but saying that would probably just offend him, and it was a good thing that he wanted to be seen as a terrifying avatar of nonsense and unpredictability, not a terrifying predator. For the first time since meeting him in the Canterlot gardens in person, Twilight thought about what Discord really looked like… not the goofy persona he cultivated. He was ten heads tall, where the average pony was three, and even Princess Celestia was only six. Three of his limbs ended in claws of one type or another. His mouth was very, very large and had a lot of teeth in it, most of which were sharp, and one of which was a fang. Unlike Spike, whose babyish proportions made him adorable rather than frightening despite his sharp claws and teeth, the only childish thing about Discord was his personality.

Yeah. OK. She could definitely see how easy it might have been to fear him for being a monster that might devour a pony, rather than a monster that would warp a pony’s personality and utterly disrupt their life, but leave them alive and probably mostly healthy.

“I’m not going to judge you for eating meat, Discord, but my parents and I put a lot of emphasis, in Spike’s childhood, on him not eating meat. He caught a mouse once when he was two and tried to eat it. We had to nip that in the bud.”

“Would it shock you to learn that my own upbringing included the same emphasis? But a draconequus actually can’t survive a diet of nothing but vegetation, indefinitely, not without supplementing with dairy and mushrooms and the like. My kind don’t eat gems.”

“I’ve seen you eat paper, though.”

“I’m the Spirit of Chaos, Twilight, I can eat literally anything I want to, including time and the concept of having to wash your laundry… when I’m at full power. Now, I’m a mere biological creature.”

“Who can come back from the dead. And also, how can you eat the concept of having to wash your laundry?”

“Why do you think ponies barely ever wear clothes anymore? It’s because I ate the idea of washing laundry, and rather than constantly wear dirty things or having to replace clothing all the time, ponies became nudists.”

Twilight did not believe him, but did believe that if she continued following this tangent, she’d play into Discord’s paws; he loved telling her ridiculous lies about the past that she couldn’t possibly prove or disprove, because it made her extremely irritated and he was the Spirit of Disharmony and loved irritating her. “My point is, you came back from the dead, so you’re a little more than a mere biological creature.”

“Agreed, and you summoned enough magic by yourself to open the portal to this beach, so neither are you. But we both need to eat. And the food here isn’t as nutritious as at home, to begin with, because there are no earth ponies here, and Spike and I are meat eaters and we cannot get around that with magic right now. Not while I’m healing from my entire skin freezing solid and he’s recovering from our nightmare trek through that frozen wasteland. So I killed these fish, humanely, exactly the way Fluttershy does when she’s catching fish for her raccoon friends or Harry, and I cut them up — without tools, by the way, and neither my claws nor my teeth are designed for scaling fish, but I did it — and now they are dead, and if Spike and I don’t eat them, their deaths will have been in vain. But I am not such a fan of sashimi that I want to eat them raw.”

Twilight had never heard the term sashimi before, but she let it pass. “I’ll let Spike decide for himself.”

“I strongly recommend that he should eat the fish. And I mildly recommend that you do as well. All ponies can digest small quantities of meat, and unicorns are actually capable of being full omnivores, let alone alicorns. You should be able to eat the fish too.”

“I appreciate the offer, but I don’t want to. I can get by on seaweed and coconuts.”

He sighed. “When you find yourself feeling hungry and empty all the time and you feel like you have to eat constantly just to feel full, come back to me and we’ll make you some fish. Now is there anything you can do to help me light a fire, or do I need to wake Spike up?”

“Spike hasn’t got any fire,” Twilight said. She took a deep breath. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Lighting a fire was not the simplest spell in existence. It was related to pure telekinesis, but invoking a spell that lit fires was like using telekinesis very very quickly in a very small area, and Twilight’s telekinesis had always felt… large, for want of a better word. Fitting it into a spell that wanted her to go fast but in a small area had always been awkward.

But she’d proven there was magic in this world… it just took a lot of effort to get at it. She did as she’d done in the frozen wasteland, as she’d done in the ocean when the waves had driven her to the ocean bed, and pulled up magic from deep within this planet. Then took a few steps and did it again. It was more accessible here, “closer” in some sense than it had been below the ice crust, and not drowning or dying of hypothermia did wonders for her ability to concentrate on it.

“What are you doing?” Discord asked.

“This world isn’t really without magic completely. It’s just, the magic is so deep underground, I can only access it with my earth pony abilities, and it takes a minute or two to even get to it. Then the spot I’ve been pulling at runs dry, so I move to another spot. I’m hoping to build up enough of a charge that I can light a fire for you.”

Discord steepled his digits, flexing them together, looking every bit the conniving villain that he used to be. “That’s very interesting, Twilight. Very interesting.”

“You think it can help us?” Twilight asked. Her head was starting to hurt, and her hooves to tingle. Normally she drew in magic with her horn. Hooves were poor tools for gathering magic; earth ponies didn’t concentrate to gather magic like she was doing, they just walked around and passively absorbed magic from the earth. But there was a lot more magic in the dirt in Equestria than there was here.

“I think it’s entirely possible that I’ve just figured out why this world lost its magic, why chaos was able to bring me back from the dead even on a low-magic world like this, and how we’re going to find sufficient magic to teleport home if we can’t find the final portal quickly enough.” He sounded smugly proud of himself.

Well, if he really had figured out a way home, he deserved to be smugly proud. “How?”

“This is a world that, to all evidence, once had magic. The people who live here have legends of dragons, unicorns, pegasi, griffins… but those species don’t exist. There are ponies, but they’re non-sapient, rather like horses.”

Twilight nodded. In parts of the world, though not in Equestria, ponies’ ancient evolutionary cousins still existed, roaming free, or being used as beasts of burden by species that were not themselves equine. Horses were much larger than ponies, and weren’t intelligent like ponies were — much like the difference between Rarity’s pet cat and the Anugyptian or Abyssinian intelligent cats. “You said the actual intelligent species here is a kind of monkey?”

“Yes. And sadly there’s only one, so we have to take care if we encounter them; they aren’t used to any creature but themselves being able to talk.” He started pacing, too, following Twilight as she moved, but circling her because he wasn’t stopping to draw up magic for a minute or two at a time. Their hoofprints made a very interesting pattern in the sand. “They have legends of magic, too, but currently, magic does not work, they have no idea how it might work, and they think it’s fictional. They sometimes use the term ‘magic’ to mean ‘this happened in a way that involved no work and no activity on anyone’s part, it just happened, which is impossible.’”

“Magic actually takes a lot of work, though. Except for you, I guess.”

Discord grinned. “Magic takes effort for me, too. It’s just a very different sort of effort than what you have to engage in. But back to my point! They believe magic never existed and the legends they have are fiction, coming to them from less technologically advanced ancestors. Of course, it’s always been obvious to me that they must have had magic, once, but they lost it, through some unspecified means. And now it’s been so long, not only is there no one alive to remember it, but even the records they have are sparse and poorly documented.”

“That’s… really sad. I can’t imagine living in a world where magic is fading. I suppose by now, none of them remember any better, but there must have been a time when it was going away.”

“Well, I have a theory now.” His pacing brought him even with her for a moment, so he leaned down and said, semi-conspiratorily into her ear, “I believe the ley lines sank.”

“Sank.” Ley lines were only of theoretical interest to Twilight, since Equestria was suffused with enough magic that it didn’t matter if she was close to a line or not, but she knew the basic principle; the thaumosphere of Terra Fabula, as Discord called it, was covered with lines of force that carried magic. They dipped down toward the poles and went underground, which weakened magic near the poles enough that Celestia and Luna together hadn’t been enough to fully hold off the winter storms that buffeted the Crystal Empire when Flurry Heart had accidentally shattered the Crystal Heart. From the poles, the magic suffused the underground magma, spurting upward via volcanos and underwater rifts, or more gently suffusing upward, to be caught in the ley lines and pulled toward the poles again. Near the Equator the lines bent out so far, Terra Fabula’s thaumosphere touched the thaumosphere of the Moon, and it was theoretically possible to fly to the moon, though as far as she knew no one had ever done it. Occasionally Rainbow Dash bragged about plans to pull that one off someday.

She hadn’t known ley lines could sink.

“Yes. At one point they may have been up in the air or running through the surface, easily accessible to people, and supporting life forms that rely on magic — such as dragons, or unicorns. But at some point, they sank into the ground. Perhaps as far as the magma layer; perhaps only to the bedrock. Without an alicorn, who has earth pony abilities to draw on the earth and unicorn abilities to understand and manipulate magic, there is perhaps no reasonable way to access this magic.” He grinned broadly. “Except! If we could find an active volcano, there may be magic spewing out of it, possibly in too chaotic a form for the local sapients to make use of it. And if that’s the case, I could use it, and we could be home with a snap!” He demonstrated with a snap, which did nothing.

Slowly, Twilight said, “And that would explain… why it was so hard to get at it in the southern pole region. It wasn’t just the ice cap. It’d be literally deeper underground there. Up here, it takes me only a minute or so to pull as much magic as I can from a spot, and store it; down there, I think I might have had to stand around in the cold for five or ten minutes to pull in enough energy to open the portal.”

“Exactly!”

“So we have two options for getting home. Find the next split of the portal, hope it goes to Equestria, if it doesn’t then we look for the split after that, and so on. Or, find an active volcano — which you realize is very dangerous to all of us but Spike — and you get enough magic from that to teleport us home. Maybe. We don’t yet know if there is magic coming up out of the ground in a volcano, and if the caldera is genuinely active, I probably can’t safely go near it and I doubt you can either.”

“If the magic is coming up, I don’t need to go soak myself in the lava to get at it. Magic will simply come to me, if it’s out there and available.”

“Even here? You’re not the Spirit of Chaos for this world.”

“Yes. Even here.” At this point Discord’s stomach grumbled so loudly Twilight could hear it. “Oh, dear, pardon me. Apparently I am starving to death. Any hope of that fire?”

“Let me try.”

Twilight walked back to the fire pit Discord had set up. He hadn’t yet hung the staked fish over the area with the firewood, which was good, because it was possible Twilight could cause a burst of flame so high it would have charred the fish. Concentrating on the firewood, she cast the spell.

It didn’t result in the near-explosion that some of her efforts to start fires had, in the past. Collecting magic from deep underground on a low magic world apparently took enough effort that she simply didn’t have enough to screw up like that. It did set a merry blaze, though.

“Thank you, Twilight,” Discord said, placing his fish on the Y-shaped sticks he’d set up to hold the stakes he’d run through them. “I’ll do my best not to burn these. Any chance you could get me some salt water in one of those coconut shells? If they do start to burn, I’d like to quench them in water, not sand.”

“Sure.” She even had enough energy left for a little telekinesis; she carried the coconut shell with her teeth to the ocean, but after it was filled, she was able to move it back to Discord’s side before running out of magic.

Twilight glanced over at Spike. Dragons slept a lot, but even so, under normal circumstances she’d expected him to be awake by now. She could see his small chest rise and fall with his breathing, and it was regular and smooth, not labored as if he were sick… but recent events had to have taken a lot out of him. It was no surprise that he was sleeping late. She’d be asleep herself if Discord hadn’t woken her up.

This side of the island faced east. So very strange to see a sunrise that Princess Celestia hadn’t created, that nobody had created. Discord had mentioned that the moon here was controlled by gravity, a concept Twilight had encountered in science fiction and in books about theoretical physics, though nopony had ever proven it possible. Was the sun controlled by gravity, too? It must be, without magic. But without magic, how did it burn? The equations for fusion suggested that to get stable fusion without magic, a body of fusing plasma had to be absolutely gigantic, several times the mass of Terra Fabula, so how could it possibly orbit the Earth? Wouldn’t the Earth just be pulled into its gravity well?

Discord would probably know, but would probably come up with an amusing lie rather than tell her the truth. That was usually how it went when she asked Discord things. Maybe she needed to be ready with her questions for his next near-death experience, she thought sardonically. He’d been a lot more forthcoming when he’d just almost — well, no, when he actually had died and then come back.

Wow. She was never going to get her head around that.