Earth

“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.