Titanomachy

Discord

Discord was expecting to be removed from the library immediately after congratulating Celestia on guessing the answer to his riddle correctly. The only real suspense for him was whether he was headed back to the gardens or was to be hidden within the deepest vaults Celestia could find. Upon thinking her name the alicorn in question re-entered the demolished room. "Sigh, here comes the moralizing lecture," he thought to himself and Celestia while preparing himself to endure several minutes of boredom at her hooves.

Somewhat surprisingly, she nosed underneath his statue and levered him back up into a standing position. "Oh, thank you. That was considerate." She ignored his thanks and sat down upon her haunches a few feet away. Her eyes locked onto the stony orbs that were where his eyes should be and stared at him silently for what seemed like several minutes. Growing more curious, Discord attempted to examine her surface thoughts but only picked up a strange, vacant static and the mirror-like view from her eyes.

Being unable to read her was new to Discord, normally she and her sister were open books to him. Speculating, he noted that since he could see himself through her eyes she wasn't keeping him out; as if that was possible. It was as if there were no surface thoughts occurring at all, something Discord's mind couldn't comprehend.

Celestia continued to meet the draconequus petrified gaze, occasionally blinking but never looking away. Discord's curiosity bloomed into full-blown suspicion and he began trying to look beyond the shell where surface thoughts lay. He felt like he was trying to scratch his way into an egg, there were no surface features to "grab" onto and use for entrance. The alicorn's mind was completely smooth, peaceful, and impregnable. He, metaphorically, kicked, pried, prodded and even tickled in an attempt to get any sort of response from his captor and therefore ingress. Nothing he did produced the slightest effect or response.

Discord felt stymied and his suspicions started developing a patina of anger. In a more cautious or introspective being the response might have been caution or worry, however the only kind of fear that Discord was familiar with was the sort related to direct and obvious threats. This quiet antithesis of struggle was something that his essence was just not compatible with and he had no mental or emotional tools for being dealing with this...calm. He filled the silent, white void with babble and insults, saying anything to get a response. "Bo-ring. Come on Celly, do something," He began. "Shouldn't you be telling me what bad, mean draconequus I am? 'Shame, shame, Discord; you shouldn't have told Twilight all those things?'" he said in a falsetto imitation of the alicorn's speech.

He waited for a response, she continued to look upon him placidly.

"Oh, come on! he railed. "Who in their right mind gets into a staring contest with a statue?!?" No response. "You can't win, I can't blink or look away even if I wanted to." Nothing. "Why are you doing this to me, too cowardly for torture ?" Silence. "I've been a statue for two millennia, don't you think I know how to be patient?" Since his voice was not real, there wasn't even an echo to provide sound. He challenged himself to meet her stony silence with his own; he lasted all of five minutes.

"I bet you think you are soooo clever, hiding what you are thinking from me," he commented snidely. "Well I know what you are thinking! You're judging me. You and your judging...judginess," he railed. "Well, you haven't the right to judge me! I am a god! I came along way before your namby-pamby notions of right and wrong! Little miss Jannie come lately," he called her in an in sing-song voice intended to be insulting, "spreading your light and warmth all over the world." His tone turned vicious, "Well you wouldn't even be here if it wasn't for me! Without me nothing would have ever changed and your usurping little hooves couldn't have come into the picture at all."

In the face of Celestia's silence, Discord continued in his monologue like a tenth-bit novel antagonist, "Your sister dared call me 'afterbirth.' If that's what I am, what does that make you? He ranted, "The universe was pristine before you ruined it with your birth. Your dear daddy Cosmos threw everything away for a damned one night stand with my sister. I call you, your sister, and all your cousins a venereal disease."

Still nothing from Celestia. Just that terrible, still silence which promised to continue until the sun burned itself out. The silence ate at him like acid, it gnawed at his nerves . He had endured centuries of petrification but this silence was a torment unlike anything he had ever experienced. It was clean, it was peaceful, it was orderly. Nothing else could drive a god of madness to the breaking point.

"YOU TRAITOROUS CHILD! YOU SIT THERE JUDGING ME WITH HOW MUCH BLOOD ON YOUR HOOVES! HOW MANY CRIMES HAVE YOU BURIED IN THE DARK?!?" Discord was screaming into her mind at this point, lost in his self-indulgent rage.

"What did you do to Twilight?" Celestia's quiet, calm voice hit him like a sledgehammer. He was in full wroth and nothing was going to calm him down or disorient him.

"A SINGLE WHISPER. THE SLIGHTEST NUDGE AND SHE FOUND THE TRUTH ON HER OWN. EVEN STUCK LIKE THIS, I BEAT YOU! YOUR FAITHFUL STUDENT EXPOSED YOU FOR THE FRAUD YOU ARE AND I DIDN'T EVEN HAVE TO DO ANYTHING!"

"And Tartarus?"

His rage took on a gleeful tint as he recounted his victory. "Just the slightest hint, that's all I did. I didn't even really need to do that, she would have reached the same conclusion a day later at most. If anyone 'did' anything to her, it was you. Your lies and self-pity drove her into the darkness. Your sister passing beyond the Black Gate is even more delicious. You are alone, forever, with me."

"Finally," he extolled to himself. "There! A crack in that blasted composure." He perceived a ripple of bitter grief pass over the smooth serenity of her mind. Discord grasped it in his mental talons and began ripping.

As he tore at her mind, Celestia asked "So, do you know the answer to Twilight's research? Do you know who the Changeling Queen is?

"Of course I do, I'm her father."

Celestia's eyes closed and the grief poured forth in a flooding torrent, "Of course you are."

"Her name is Chrysalis, she is the need to be loved."

"I've been such a blind, arrogant fool. I am so much like you, uncle."

The admission managed to derail his rant. "What?"

"Thank you for telling me what I needed to know."

"Wait, what?"

"For someone who's supposed to be the personification of chaos, you can be rather predictable in your way."

The shield around her mind dropped and behind the bile green bitterness and grey grief he saw the sun-like golden glow of hope.

"Bugger," Discord swore to himself.

Twilight

As she stepped through the gate, Twilight felt that not only was she falling but that she had always been and always shall be falling. It came as a shock when her hoof reached the end of that abyss and gently trod upon what felt like stone. She was shaking in terror and had to fight every instinct she had to not turn her head and look. Was the gate still there just a step behind her and still reachable? Or was there an endless, mind shearing drop down which she had plunged for all eternity? Forcing her head not to turn, she opened her eyes and saw nothing.

Being an astronomer, Twilight had thought she knew what darkness was. The dark was gentle, the dark was quiet, it was mysterious, and beautiful. She now knew just how ignorant she'd been. What she had been calling Darkness was actually Night. One was a gift from Luna the other was this smothering blackness that ripped all memory of light from her soul. She stumbled as the blackness crashed against her senses, one of her knees impacting what must be a sharp jut of stone. Crying out in pain, she was startled by how completely her voice was muffled and the utter lack of echo.

This place was horrible but she wouldn't have described it as evil. It was more like the ocean than some hateful monster. She was too small for something so vast to even notice her, let alone form an opinion about her. If this darkness was a sea, she felt as if she was at the bottom of it. There was a crushing pressure exerted by the dark, feeling both her soul and her bones creak under the weight of it. Her heart started to pound as her lungs fought to fill themselves. It was as if the air was heavy and somehow saturated with darkness and therefore without the ability to sustain life.

With a detached, logical assessment she noted that white sparks were appearing in her vision, they were the hallmarks of hypoxia and her imminent death by suffocation. "I never even wondered if there was going to be air to breathe," she thought with some irritation. She damned her fatal assumption as her vision filled with whiteness, with light. "With light," she thought, her eyes flying open with desperate hope. Her consciousness was already fading and if she passed out before the spell could take hold she was a dead mare. Focusing all of what was left of her rapidly fading will into one of the simplest spells she knew, she ignited the tip of her horn. Magenta light trickled out of her horn, pushing against the darkness like smoke thick as syrup. All she could see now was a single pinprick of light shining at the end of an ever deepening tunnel. As the light slowly pushed the darkness away from her lips she gasped, bringing the now clear air into her lungs where it burned like molten metal.

"LIFE!" she thought as she panted while painfully coughing and retching up tendrils of darkness from her mouth. She did not notice them slithering off into the shadows. Panting, she lifted her head and looked at her now illuminated surroundings. Her light spell formed a magenta sphere around her, about three lengths in radius. With horror, she watched as the darkness pushed against the bubble of light surrounding her. It prodded, pushed, and recoiled upon exposure to the light like something alive. "Maybe it's just something similar to convection?" she said to reassure herself. She could see now that she was in a tunnel and estimated from the angle of curvature that its diameter was between eight and ten lengths. The stone was glassy smooth and black, like volcanic glass. The surface was contorted into an almost fractal pattern, as if the stone had been rapidly boiling magma one instant and solid the next. Every edge of the pocked and twisted surface appeared to be razor sharp.

Once she recovered her breath, Twilight began gingerly picking her way across the uneven surface. While dry, the stone was smooth and nowhere was there a place to fit her entire hoof comfortably. All it would take was a single, unlucky stumble to kill her in this place so she took her time. Not that she didn't feel any urgency. She knew that she wouldn't be able to eat, sleep, or drink and if she became so exhausted or hurt that she couldn't maintain her light spell she would immediately suffocate. She forced her legs to stop shaking and pushed onward down the tunnel.

Twilight had no way to keep track of how long she had been walking, nor how far she had gone. There was obviously no sun to gauge time with and she could only see a few lengths in front of her and dare not look back, even to check her progress. Picking her way across the sharp rocks was exhausting and growing ever more difficult as blood from dozens of nicks and scratches ran down her legs to the bottom of her hooves. She worried about navigation and scale, two aspects of this journey into which she now believed she had not put enough research.

As of yet, there had been no branches off of the tunnel however the sphere of light which she occupied was smaller than the tunnel and if there were any branches on the left side she may well have missed them. One of her less scholarly books that she had read had presented her with the theory of the right-hoof rule for exploration. In many maze systems, consistently following either the left or the right wall will allow you to eventually explore the entire area. "Come to think of it," she said to herself, "it most likely was a Daring-Do novel. Dash'll flip if she ever found out that I was using something I 'learned' from that fluff." Smiling to herself, "Maybe I should tell her anyways, just to see her face."

She had plenty of time to muse of the potential mistakes she may have made. "What if Grogar was in a portion of Tartarus that was more than two days away on hoof?" she worried. Twilight knew a few spells that could keep her awake but they would exhaust her magic even faster, in the end. The darkness had not stopped pressing against the light for a single moment, it behaved as if it were hungered a hungry beast. She knew she was doomed if her horn-light ever failed. Mentally reviewing her "Do" list she partitioned a portion of her mind and assigned it the task of concentrating on her goal, Grogar. The rest of her mind was now free to concentrate on picking her way down the tunnel and worrying about the many, many ways she underprepared.

That was when she noticed something new. The tunnel had taken on an upwards slant, gradually enough that she hadn't noticed until now. What drew her attention to the grade was a sound, a dripping. Heretofore, Tartarus had been dry and silent except for the muffled noise of her own hooves. That sound was definitely a drip, a drop falling into a small pool. The slope increased as she pushed forward and soon she was confronted with a slope she would have to climb as much as walk. It was here that the dripping noise was originating from and as she had approached, more and more drips joined into a chorus that reminded her of the smallest frogs found along the banks of the town pond. Keeping her own admonishment against coming into contact with liquids of any kind close at mind, she cautiously approached the slow-motion rivulets.

In the reddish light of her horn the liquid appeared black. Against the background of the obsidian tunnel the trails of fluid were essentially invisible. Biting her lip, Twilight timed several of the drops against her beating heart, approximated their volume, and did her best to estimate the temperature of the air and rock. Calculating from that data, assuming that fluid dynamics and gravity were behaving the same here as they did back home, the viscosity was about four times that of water. "Blood," she said with a shudder. "Nothing else is in that range." As ominous as this was, flowing blood meant life. Life meant that there was somepony, someone, or something to find up there. "It might be a slavering monster up there but at least it would be something new," Twilight thought as she began climbing.

The way up was slow. Not only was she having to climb what was quickly becoming a cliff, she had to do so while avoiding nearly invisible streams of blood. Even if the fluid possessed none of the mythical properties water usually carried in stories about Tartarus, the slipperiness of the wet stone would send her tumbling to her death. Patiently she waited, watching and listening for telltale drips to show where the blood flowed. Eventually she noticed another noise among the dripping, the tinkling of tiny bells. The jingling reminded her of Hearthswarming Eve, and she chuckled at the juxtaposition of her current position and the warm holiday she loved. "I must be growing delirious," she thought to herself at first. "It wouldn't be the first time stress and strain had caused my mind to snap," she admitted to herself. But then she remembered Grogar's Bells.

It was with a thrill of both terror and victory that she felt the end of the cliff above her. Smiling and shaking she pulled herself carefully onto the flat surface, still getting a couple of scratches despite her caution. She started to look back down the cliff, to see how far up she had climbed but caught herself just in time. Eyes scrunched shut she turned her face back towards the intermittent tinkling sound. She knew sound could be deceptive here. The darkness seemed to muffle or carry at whim, usually to the detriment of the adventurers in the legends. Twilight pulled herself back to her feet. Oddly, she could feel a slight breeze blowing from up ahead, tugging at her mane.

Cautiously, she walked towards the sound of the bells. While louder ringing was seemingly at random, smaller bells tinkled nearly continuously. As the bells grew louder and more constant she began to accelerate, her caution dissolving in her excitement. "He is real!" she thought as she sped from a walk to a trot. "I made it!" she thought as she continued accelerating. "I'm going to save her!" she thought as the edge of her luminescent bubble broke upon the surface of something huge. The dark grey bulk, twice the mass of Celestia, shifted as it turned towards her. It's face didn't even register with Twilight's mind, all she saw was it's eyes. They were a grotesque mockery of the expressive orbs that should lie within the sockets. Molten lava filled the orbits and smoke rose from these burning pits. Twilight reared, her instincts taking over as she panicked. Her hooves slid out from under her on the slick stone and she fell to the stone floor, screaming.

Luna

"Stand aside fell guardian! I must pass beyond the veil of darkness thou'st protects!" Luna projected a most traditional manner.

In return she was stymied by three sets of puppy-dog eyes. The fact that each eye was the size of a watermelon did subtract some from the power of the sorrowful gazes, but there was enough doggy begging behind those stares to bring even a questing Luna to a halt.

"Oh come on!" she exclaimed, using an expression she learned while foal-sitting. "That's just not fair."

The puppy-dog eyes continued their assault, unabated.

"Twilight past through the gate, correct?" she asked in the hope that a different approach would yield a different result.

One of the massive black heads nodded.

"Well don't you see? We have to go in there after her!"

All three of the heads rotated to the right, questioning.

She sighed, "Not we 'We', I meant I 'We'."

The left-most head pant-laughed at a crude joke.

The princess of the night rolled her eyes at Cerberus. "Stop fooling around! Your jest is foul and ill humored!"

The two heads gave her wounded expressions of innocence, the third guiltily shifted his eyes back and forth.

"Fine! I'm sorry to have scolded all three of you for what only a single head hath done. Better?"

Three sets of drooling doggy smiles and a tail the size of an oak whipping back and forth confirmed that her apology had been accepted.

"Hay! Not you Lefty, you were the one being humorous."

The right-most head shot up in surprise and indignation.

"Gah! My left, my left!"

The left-most head (from Luna's point of view) busied himself with looking at the trees and birds off to his own right. The other two heads stared at him until he could no longer ignore the judgement and then lowered his ears and pouted.

"Good!" Luna said with an air of finality. "Now if you would kindly step aside, w-...I will be headed into Tartarus."

The 10 ton beast whined pitifully but did not budge. To make things worse, the eyes were back.

"What didst thou think we- I, would do after you told me she had passed through the gate? Turn around and go home?

One head panted a hopeful smile while the other two continued their barrage of soulful eyes.

Raising an eyebrow, "Really?"

The high-volume whine returned.

"Stop that. You know I have to go down there and save her!"

A cacophony of whines, growls, and a bark was Cerberus' reply.

"I know it's dangerous, that's why I have to go after her." She changed tack as a thought occurred to her. "You do like Twilight, don't you?

The beast's tail whipped back and forth again, causing a succession of booming thumps.

"Well If you don't let me down there she might die, or worse."

Three sets of expressive doggy eyebrows conveyed the conflict Luna had set up within Cerberus' doggy minds. If he let Luna in, that was against the rules and that made him a Bad Dog. But if he didn't let the goddess in, then that would mean bad things would happen to Twilight. Twilight was a friend and if he let anything bad happen to her that also meant that he was a Bad Dog.

"Your job really isn't to keep people out anyways, its to keep things in," Luna added, throwing him a proverbial bone.

The mind of a dog is not built to deal with "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situations and Cerberus, despite being massive and ancient, was at his core just a really big dog. So like any dog would, he grasped the flimsy moral cover that Luna had offered him and then slinked off to his favorite spot of dirt to deal with the existential dilemma facing any Good Dog placed into a bad situation.

Not being a dog, Luna didn't fully understand the psychological strain she had just inflicted upon the hound, but she did feel a large and nameless guilt. But being in a tearing hurry, she pushed the sensation to the back of her mind with a promise of extra-large doggy treats and a new ball for Hearthwarming's Eve. "Maybe, I'll stop and give him a belly rub on the way out too," she bargained with herself.

With the sigh of someone who knows that they struck a low blow, Luna turned away from Cerberus' hindquarters and regarded the entrance to Tartarus. This was a point of confluence, a place where things that did not and should not touch did anyway (much to the annoyance of the laws of nature). This place was old long before she had ever been born. "Celestia might remember when Gaia was chained and placed between Cosmos and Tartarus," she thought to herself, "but to me this has always been here." It was an odd thing, to feel both ancient and childlike at the same time. "A child among gods, yet a goddess herself," she labeled herself.

She could remember when Tartarus's maw used to be more discernible, but that was eons ago. Rain, wind, and lichen had weathered his petrified flesh so that none but those who already knew would recognize these hills and caves as the gaping maw of a titanic draconequus. She shuddered at the thought of the scale at which this battle must have been fought. She knew that this happened before Celestia and the other gods fell to squabbling amongst themselves and would have confronted both Tartarus and Gaia as a single force. She could feel a slight buzz of magic still lingering within the ancient iron gates. Once those wards were the most powerful protections that all the new gods together could muster and still they weren't enough. Discord's escape from the prison showed that most clearly. Abandoned in exchange for the guardian hound, Cerberus, the old remnants of the wards merely prevented the iron from rusting.

She pulled the black gate wide, unfurled her wings, and then she lunged forward with a beat of her wings lifting her hooves from the ground. Desperately, Luna tried to not think about the fact that she was literally tossing herself down the gullet of a monster that terrorized the ancient world. In that, she failed.

As she passed under the lip of the cave defining The Mouth, she passed into the space between worlds. In most cases she felt that the limited perceptions of mortals was a cruel blindness. This passage reminded her that perhaps blindness was not entirely a bad thing. In this distance that could not be measured in length or time she was frozen inside a single moment while she passed through a veil that was thinner than a blade of grass. In this terribly stretched out moment there was no light to see, nor time for light to reflect and carry images. There was no air or temperature, nor need or perception of either. There was just this single moment inching along for millennia and boring Luna to the edge of madness.

After the first few perceived decades of her journey through the moment of her crossing, Luna placed her mind into dormancy. It was a trick most immortals mastered at some point and her recent imprisonment within the moon was a very effective refresher course. However, since there was no warning that her transit was ending, she landed in the bleak and pitch black cavern in a clattering tangle of legs and wings while her mind scrambled to regain control of her body.

The first thing she noticed was that the floor was sharp and painful against her hide. While not cutting her divine flesh it was poking her uncomfortably in many sensitive areas. The second thing she noticed was that she still could not see. She knew that normally she could see without the need of any light, one of the benefits of being the goddess of the night she supposed. She wondered if this realm somehow could sap her divine abilities. Fearing the loss of her magic she ignited her horn with a thought and summoned a pale, silver glow. It was with dawning recognition that she noted the swirling, smoke-like dark that pushed back against her illumination.

"Erebus," she growled while allowing yet more power into the light spell and pushing the clinging, black tendrils away from her body.

The formless dark condensed and thickened into a swirling mass about ten pony lengths in front of her. Luna knew that this was just the smallest fraction of this being's body, as Erebus was said to completely fill the endless realm of Tartarus. Even taken as an estimate or an exaggeration, that made for a lot of angry god. Trying to get a glimpse of what the darkness was blocking her from she focused the light from her horn into a cone of blinding, silver light and aimed it at the center of the clot.

A pained hiss emanated from the mass as the portion contacted by the light boiled and fled. To her dismay, she saw that the cavern was pocked with entrances to tunnels, hundreds of them, each vomiting forth a torrent of congealed darkness. "Fie," slipped past her lips as she assessed her situation. She could hold back Erebus if she concentrated on her light spell, for now. The god was gathering his dispersed parts, unifying for the confrontation he's been hungering for since his imprisonment. To feel her time running out so soon after having far too much time on her hooves was disorienting and she chided herself to focus.

"EREBUS!" She called out at high volume. "WE HATH DEFEATED THEE BEFORE AND WE WILL DEFEAT YOU ANON IF YOU CHALLENGE US AGAIN!" She proclaimed, reminding herself that it was not a bluff if it was true...or mostly true. She had been little more than a filly then but she had her sister at her side and together they defeated the Hungry Dark. She was older now and wiser, she hoped. "Perhaps I can overcome this monster on my own now," she thought and yet fear caused her to sweat like a dray horse. The darkness accelerated in its gathering. So fast did it now flow that her mane blew and ears popped from the air being dragged along with Erebus' matter.

The cavern seemed larger now, filling with a towering mass of un-light. The clot was over twice the size of a full-grown dragon and brushed against the ceiling and walls. Luna flared her wings out of instinct and summoned a more solid shield of shimmering magic. Her cone of silver moonlight she sharpened into a blinding white beam that would slice through the hungry dark like a razor. Even with these tools she wondered not if she would overcome the darkness but how long she would last against it. Then, out of the deep caverns came a scream. The call was unmistakable to her, it was Twilight. Luna then returned her attention to Erebus, her mouth now set in a grim line and her brows knit in determination. It was time.