Earth

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.