Devil May Care

Chapters

1. Fool
2. Tower
3. Devils
4. Moon
5. Sun
6. Star

1. Fool

The instant he opens his mouth, Discord realizes he didn't start the conversation with ulterior motives.

"I've never been unlucky," he tells Fluttershy as they stroll through the garden of the Castle of Friendship. It's Friday the 13th, and an overheard conversation has snagged on his brain like a fishhook on a wool sweater. "I want to know what it feels like."

They walk past a row of carefully trimmed hierocanthus bushes as the conversation pauses. Discord ponders the surge of new knowledge that sprang into his brain as he spoke. Fluttershy ponders, as she so often does, how to disagree with him gently.

"You probably shouldn't," she finally ventures.

He frowns — but it's forced, now that he knows the opportunity this discussion will open up. "Why? Am I supposed to be boring enough now to only want good things?"

"You can want whatever you like," Fluttershy says gently. "But I don't think you'll enjoy it. Being unlucky will just make you feel worse, because more bad things happen to you."

"Well, maybe bad things are actually good for you!" He flings his arms wide, startling a black cat that wasn't there a moment ago. It darts with a yowl toward his path. "Aren't poets fond of yammering on and on about how adversity makes you stronger?"

Fluttershy grabs the poor kitty, shushing it and petting it and releasing it back into the bushes. "I think we get enough of that without going looking for it."

"You might. I don't." He pouts at the cat's U-turn, then summons a floating salt shaker and lines a claw up with it. "I can snap my claws and change reality, remember? Bad things don't happen to me unless I think they're funny."

Fluttershy holds her hoof up to the shaker as he taps it from the other side. It bounces off her frog and stays upright. "Please, not in the gardens," she murmurs, gesturing at a slug crawling past Discord's paw.

Discord frowns, and abruptly hares off toward a ladder leaning against the side of the castle. Fluttershy lunges in and grabs his tail in her teeth, ignoring the clown-horn honk as it pulls taut. Discord looks back, grabbing an eyebrow and lifting it.

Fluttershy sighs and tilts her head toward the earth pony at the top of the ladder. "He's washing the crystal," she says, voice muffled in tail-floof. "Don't be rude."

Discord huffs and crosses his arms. "If I didn't know better," he says in his Ulterior Motive Voice, "I would think you're trying to stop your friend from jinxing himself. Despite how much he's looking forward to non-enjoying it."

Fluttershy sighs and gives in. "I'm sorry, Discord. If you want to make yourself unlucky in a way that won't hurt anyone else" — she adds emphasis that would be unnecessary with anypony else — "I promise I'll support you."

His expression immediately brightens. "Wonderful!" he says, and snaps his claws.

In the basement of the Castle of Friendship, there's a small platform on which stands a horseshoe-shaped frame studded with pink gems. (Most ponies would tell you that the frame contains a silvered, reflective surface which feels subtly alive, its surface texture rippling like a windblown pond. Twilight Sparkle would add that it's the portal to the alternate universe in which she briefly attended high school.) Behind it is an unobtrusive metal case (which, Twilight would say, holds the magical journal which recently was installed to keep its connection active full-time). And the platform is surrounded by an enormous mechanical cooling apparatus, crackling with thaumic discharge as it disperses the entropy of poorly stabilized magic.

Discord knows only three things about it. One: In the week since it arrived in town, while Twilight has been overseas on vacation, everypony seems to be finding excuses to steer him away from the castle. Two: Everypony whispering about it behind his back refers to it as a mirror. And three: Even from across town, that mirror disturbs his magical senses as if he were staring at Vantablack — such a perfect absence of sensation that his brain refuses to parse it.

(Four things, now. The fourth being that someday he will stand in front of it with Twilight Sparkle at his side, in a place that looks nothing like the Castle of Friendship, and she will remark how funny it is that such a simple-looking thing could be the source of both of their most unusual adventures.)

The teleport deposits Discord directly in front of it with the wheeze of an unfunny joke. Fluttershy appears halfway across the room, close enough for a front-row seat and too far away to stop him. "Breaking a mirror won't hurt anypony!" he says, holding up a giant mallet. "And when I'm done, I'll snap things back to the way they were, so Princess Checklist won't even be able to complain about property damage!"

Fluttershy's eyes widen, just a moment too late to do anything about it. "Discord, wait —"

But he's already swinging. The mallet gleefully passes through the mirror's surface, meeting no resistance whatsoever.

Space distorts. Time crawls. The mirror surges from its frame and envelops him.

Then, with the ugly schlorp of division by zero, the whole assembly explodes.

2. Tower

In the future, long after Equestria's bittersweet end — when Discord will retreat to being an off-key note in the song of the stars — he will decide to headbutt a rude black hole which is wandering a little too closely to one of his nebula-collision art projects.

The resulting infinite gravity will be the most fascinating sensation he will ever possibly be able to experience. It will take him [undefined] time to figure out that his authoritative opinion on that matter is a consequence of falling afoul of relativity. He will realize that as his head approached the singularity, spaghettification caused his mind to become infinitely elongated, irreparably breaking his traditional spatiotemporal perception. Oops.

Fortunately, some time between the unpoint of contact and the end of the universe, he will have a moment of epiphany on how to repair that — and will resolve the infinite discontinuity in his consciousness by splitting himself into two distinct entities, one which ends before the unpoint and one which starts afterward.

Pre-black-hole Discord will escape the experience with only one significant consequence: a life full of occasional fragments of yromem that leap into his head after a particularly meaningful moment shakes something loose.

(The very first of these — long, long ago — was a withering lecture-by-proxy from the future self he will never be able to meet. Perhaps as a consequence, young Discord considered yromem weird and uncomfortable. He didn't enjoy that feeling. So he simply redefined weird until he no longer felt uncomfortable.)

A yromem, Twilight will one day remind him, is reverse-causal future knowledge. It's just a memory, she will say, except it's a thing you would know if you had lived backward in time from the Black Hole Incident until then. Then she will look him dead in the eye and open her mouth to warn him about something important.

Discord doesn't rebmemer the rest.

Neither does he know how to feel about the fact that Twilight Sparkle — the royal personification of obsessive-compulsive disorder; the toothpaste to the orange juice of his chaos; and such a stick-in-the-mud that her family tree has to be approached while wearing hip waders — will say those things while snuggling against his chest.

As Discord hurtles through the unspace of the portal — feeling the void lick lovingly around the Tootsie Roll center of his elongated, spiraling Tootsie-Pop-stick self — a wave of fresh yromem surges in. (Too much to parse all at once; he thrashes through the highlights.) Among the facts he will one day learn, three threaten to bite.

One: The mirror he hammered was actually a portal between Equestria and an odd world that lurks behind it like a shadow. But he's never seen a portal like it before. Existence within the mirror's frame doesn't actually exist, not the way it should. There's a gap in reality that somepony ripped open once upon a time, and the gap was caulked over with a world-bridge of pure elemental Order.

Which is why it was so impervious to his senses. And why, when he contacted the portal assembly, the reaction of opposites blew it up in poor Fluttershy's face — oh stars is she alright, wait, he rebmemers her, she survives, thank Fate.

Two: Star Swirl was a very naughty boy, once upon a time, when he tried to find a dumping ground more secure than Tartarus. The worlds linked by the portal simply shouldn't connect. Stinkybeard had to force his caulky-bridgy-thing to do some interesting rewriting of local reality to get the link between the worlds even occasionally stable. Unless something parses inbound travelers and rewrites the destination to accommodate them, travel fails — and those who force the issue arrive explosively misaligned with local physics.

Three: Oh, wait, right. The bridge of pure elemental Order — which Discord is utterly incapable of directly interacting with, and is currently shooting through like an Alka-Seltzer sabot through the barrel of an acid gun. But if it's incapable of properly aligning him with the exit world, then he should probably —

— take credit for the five-foot-deep blast crater he finds himself standing in, he thinks as he staggers upright and dusts himself off. How often do you get an opportunity for an introduction THAT dramatic?

"Ta-daaa!" he sings, spreading claw and paw and fluttering his one wing. Chunks of stone begin to slam down around him like hail. Okay, maybe a little too much, dial it ba—

— Ow. That one actually hurt.

Discord stares crossly at the traitorous rock as he rubs the new lump between his horns. Borderline boulder, really. A two-foot-wide marble of marble, smooth on one side and jagged on the rest. (Huh. Did he accidentally explode a statue?)

"Holy thunderbolts," an exceptionally Rainbow Dashy voice says from somewhere in the direction of a giant white building. "What is that thing?"

Discord turns, and nearly asks the same question. Humans, yromem helpfully supplies. They're so adorable, though! Giant bipedal furless-monkey versions of the six Elements of Harmony he knows and one-sixth loves. They wear clothes. Fluttershy has a thing for green. And Twilight … huh. She's gone all bacon-themed.

The rest look various flavors of bewildered. Bacon Twilight's eyes are wide with recognition.

A trembling finger levels at him. "D-d-discord," she whimpers.

A huge grin spreads across Discord's muzzle. He spreads eagle-claw to chest and gives her an exaggerated bow. "I see my reputation precedes me even here."

Bacon Twilight whirls to the others, eyes terrified. "Rainbow power, girls! NOW!"

Discord opens his mouth. Pauses. Slowly raises a lion-paw finger. "Point of disorder, my friend," he says. "Perhaps the bacon has scrambled the egg of your brain, but you and I, we're actually past the whole 'Blast Discord with the Elements of Harmony' thing."

Despite his ironclad logic, the girls begin to float in an ominously Harmonic way. They've grown suspiciously equine ears and tails. Some sort of background rock riff is stirring up on the wind. He begins to suspect that perhaps this dimension's Twilight wasn't CC:ed on the friendship memo.

Discord freezes. His voice ratchets up an octave. "Fluttershy! Back me up on this!"

She cracks glowing eyes open amid the friendship aurora. "Um," she says hesitantly, but it's drowned out in a surge of Harmony.

"Could we maybe n—" he shouts.

They fire.

"—nnnnnot again," he squeaks as the rainbow slams in.

Like most of reality, yromem has a love-hate relationship with Discord. Sometimes it gives him advance warning of upcoming chaos, so he knows exactly where to go to savor it. And sometimes it seems to relish waiting until it's too late. Those times, he has noted, are almost always the occasions when yromem would have been useful.

"I'm so sorry," Bacon Twilight — no, Sunset Shimmer — will say in the wake of the whole mess, not looking him in the eye. (It obviously will be quite some time after their initial encounter — they're in a house, not at a school.) "But how was I supposed to know? Twilight never mentioned you!"

"Never?" Discord's voice will get flat. "Seriously?"

"She didn't even mention Princess Luna's existence until I asked!" Sunset will protest. "We kind of avoided talking about Equestria. Uncomfortable memories and all that. She wanted to give me space to approach it at my own pace, and I … kind of never did."

"You did know about me, though."

"As a statue in the Royal Canterlot Garden! The legendary villain Princess Celestia once defeated who turned Equestria into a chaotic nightmare world!" Sunset will wince. "I figured, if you had come through the portal before Twilight could warn me through the journal, you must have freed yourself and taken over both Canterlot and Ponyville too fast for anypony to react. If a whole world full of ponies couldn't stop you, an immediate attack before you crippled us was our only chance."

He will frown. "Et tu, Fluttershy?"

"Um," Humanshy will say, fidgeting. "I try not to judge people by how they look, no matter how scary they might be. But you did kind of blow up the school statue to announce yourself."

Discord will grumble. "Quite a bloodthirsty world you've got here. My version of you stopped a Harmony launch in its tracks by wanting to give me a fair chance, but you hesitated when I called your name and then blasted me anyway."

"We rainbowed Sunset and then she became good," Humanshy will mumble. "Then we rainbowed our Twilight and she returned to being good. I figured that if you were actually good —"

" 'If'," Discord will caustically air-quote.

"— then it wouldn't do anything."

"Harmony's a kind force," Sunset will add. "It's just about setting things right."

Right now, he's right there — downright, outright down and out. Sprawled flat on the ground in the crater, eyes not quite open yet. And, he thinks, his unconscious body looks far less handsome than usual.

At least he's not a statue, thank Fate. But there is one catty-corner to the crater: a giant white marble horse (which Harmony has generously unexploded), with a crackling pink portal on one side of the base. The statue's rearing up as if to stomp on Discord's balding monkey head, right in between his giant white hornlike tufts of over-ear hair. Perhaps in an effort to splash some drops of actual color on his drab grey vest and black tie and brown slacks.

Apparently furless monkey is in fashion this season. Someone tell Rarity.

Discord's eyes flutter open. (Sweet Fate, they aren't even yellow!) He groans, sits up, and rubs spindly monkey fingers to scalp. The Rainbow Power Squad cautiously approaches.

"Did it work?" Applejack twangs.

Discord focuses on the voices, eyes half-tracking them, then coughs. "What's going on?" he mumbles. "Who are you kids?"

Before anyone has a chance to process that, the portal bulges and discolors. A second Fluttershy stumbles out (in a human body matching the first's), teetering and windmilling on unsteady legs. Her eyes widen. "Discord!" she wails, scrambling into the crater and lunging at him to cling in a tight hug. "Don't scare me like that!"

Monkey-world's Fluttershy freezes, mouth dropping open, looking vaguely ill.

"Fluttershy?!" the other girls chorus.

"Pff — buh — wha?" Sunset contributes.

Equestria Fluttershy glances up. Locks eyes with herself, and nearly gives in to curiosity. But the situation is a little too pressing. "What did you do?" she says to the group, tone bordering on accusation.

"We, uh," Sunset says, "saved our world from an invading villain with the magic of friendship?"

Even in human form, The Stare is enough to stop everyone in their tracks. "He's reformed," Fluttershy hisses.

"I'm sorry," Discord says, "what's going on?"

Fluttershy's rage instantly vanishes. "The mirror exploded when you touched it," she says tenderly. "I thought you'd be trapped here forever! But just as I was starting to really panic, something opened a portal up from this side."

The girls exchange unsteady glances. "That … was probably us," Sunset says. "The magic of Harmony must have stabilized the connection despite your mirror's destruction." Then Sunset looks over at the base of the statue, and her eyes widen. "Or not. That's not looking so great."

Everyone turns. The swirling pink circle is turning an ugly shade of mauve, throwing off black sparks. Space is starting to deform around it. A feeling like an impending lightning strike is tickling the back of everyone's neck.

Sunset makes another snap decision. "Go, go!" she shouts. "Get home before it collapses!"

"But —" Equestria Fluttershy starts.

"I'll sort this out with Twilight later!" Sunset shouts, leaping into the crater and hauling the pair toward the wavering portal. "I'd rather not do that with you both stranded here!"

Fluttershy eeps. She tightens her grip around Discord and lunges for the rip in space.

"What is happening!" Discord wails as they're both sucked in.

There's a loud snap as the portal finally gives out. A wave of energy blasts the girls back. The wibbly feel of thaumic buildup instantly blossoms out into the scent of ozone. An echo of the snap bounces back from the nearby building. Then there's a deafening silence.

Everyone slowly picks themselves up.

"Sweet stars," Rarity says.

Discord is curious why he's still seeing this. After all, he just watched himself go through the portal.

It finally occurs to him to wonder why he's been viewing the scene in third person.

Yromem: Useless. Drawing a blank.

Memory: Useless. He knows what he saw. He wants answers, not to play detective.

Magic: Probably useless. Far too fond of inane, cryptic tautologies. But as he reaches out with his senses for it, he realizes something: if he focuses his attention in a slightly different way, he can see and hear and smell Equestria through other-him's senses.

Other-him's staring at his fetchingly mismatched arms — against the backdrop of a frantic Fluttershy and a scorched castle basement — and screaming incoherently.

And that lets loose a flood of yromem:

"But didn't the Harmonic blast split you into two separate individuals?" Twilight will ask as he finishes catching her up in the wake of her vacation. "Like the black hole you mentioned?"

Discord will scoff. "You say that as though Harmony could stand the idea of a discontinuity. No, Harmony didn't cut me in half. I and —" he shudders, not quite able to suppress the thought of his duplicate — "He Who Must Not Be Named were still two linked parts of the same being."

Twilight will raise an eyebrow. "I don't understand why you hate him so much, either."

Discord will not think of all the things his other half doesn't deserve. He will think of Fluttershy, and how perfect she is. She's irreplaceable. Any version of Discord who could even think otherwise is beyond loathsome. End of discussion.

"Do you know what it feels like to have Harmony think of you as a problem to fix?" he will say instead, hoping it's a close enough answer to change the subject. "I arrived. Harmony got unleashed. It saw a problem to fix, and it fixed it."

Twilight will bite. "What problem? The Elements counteract power accumulated for selfish reasons. But that's not why you fought the others. Things would have turned out very differently if you had turned evil."

"Correct-o-mundo!" Discord will say (feeling an odd, momentary tingle of pride at her faith in him). "But Harmony did have a problem. Namely, that I glorped through Stinkybeard's portal without that wretched hack of elemental Order being able to properly insert me into the human world."

Twilight will think about that for a minute. "I understand why Harmony turned you into a human to fix that problem, then. But not why you ended up with two consciousnesses, or why it left the other half a disembodied spirit."

Discord will chortle and ruffle her mane in that special way he knows she almost tolerates. "Twilight. Sometimes you are the dumbest smart pony I know."

"Mmm," she will grunt, too curious to begrudge him the moment.

"Think, Miss Stick-In-The-Mud. What's the one thing that every visitor to the Land of Eternal Studentry has in common? More to the point, the thing every Equestrian has in common when you look at monkey-land?"

Twilight's face will twist in thought. "If you're referring to the fact that going through the portal transforms you into a form that fits the mirror world, that doesn't answer my question. If you're referring to the idea that everypony has a mirror duplicate, that's … not actually true."

"Aha!" Discord will crow. "But it's supposed to be."

"Not necessarily," Twilight will say. "Our leading theory is that our duplicates there are a reflection of us, but stripped of the drive that comes from ponykind's Cutie Marks. So our fundamental personalities are the same, except with no inherent focus. If that theory's true, beings without Cutie Marks would simply have no local equivalent."

Discord will raise an eyebrow. "First, you told me there's a second Spike. More importantly, if that were true, Harmony would have had no reason to create The Wimp Who Walks."

Twilight will fidget. "The theory's … a work in progress."

"Right." Discord will roll his eyes.

"So what did happen with Harmony, then?"

He will grumble and lay it out for her. "When I showed up, Order couldn't rearrange the world to duplicate me. That was the problem for which Harmony hacked together a sloppy patch job. It borrowed a clump of my mojo, set it slightly off to one side, and turned it into He Who Must Not Be Named. Then, to handle the fact that Order should have made Non-Worthless Me blend in, it slapped down a ban on showing off my natural, non-monkey beauty."

"That just raises more questions! How —" Twilight will stop. "Hang on, what do you mean 'rearrange the world' —"

It's a trivial fix once he realizes he's disembodied due to Harmony playing rent-a-cop for Order's stupid human-appearance requirement. Gather his willpower; decide he wants to look like the sad, drab monkey-thing Fluttershy dragged away; and visualize a claw-snap to make it so. One moment, there's no sign he exists; the next, he's simply there.

He appears directly behind the back of the six girls staring at the ex-portal. Even from this angle, he can tell Sunset is grimacing.

"Well," she says, "that sure could have gone better."

Discord can't resist. "Wonderful!" he crows, clapping his hands. "Maybe this means I am unlucky today!"

She yelps and spins, arms flailing. It's a thing of beauty.

Discord giggles, pulling a huge camera from a tiny vest pocket. "Would you mind doing that again? This is the sort of moment I should start a stained-glass collection to immortalize."

"Discord!" Sunset hisses, and for a moment, it feels like the good old bad old days when Celestia or Twilight or Commander Heroclix or whoever would stare at him with the self-righteous glare of somepony who couldn't take a joke. Her hand even leaps to the amulet on her chest, and it takes him a moment to remember that Fluttershy did tell her he had reformed, and the motion's clearly just reflex.

… Isn't it?

At the moment, that's not a chance he feels like taking. "Sorry, Sunnybuns," he says, briskly snapping his fingers. "But getting rainbowed twice in a row isn't on today's schedule."

There's a pregnant pause. Sunset blinks at him. He grins back. She tilts her head down to glance at her chest, where her fingers are still curled around the amulet. Then the corners of her lips begin to curl up in that beautiful, terrifying, ambiguously-ex-villainously way.

Discord's smile vanishes. He snaps at the amulet again. Nothing.

"Exit stage left, pursued by a baconhair!" he quips, and poses dramatically for a teleport snap. Of course, that won't work either, but at least it'll offer a moment of levity before he starts runni—

"Okay," Discord shouts at a birch tree in the middle of the nondescript woods he teleported to. "I'm getting slightly cross now."

The tree doesn't respond. Which is fine. He's not yelling at the tree so much as at Harmony. The symbolism fits and everything.

… Okay, it's not fine. Yelling is more satisfying if the target of his anger can whimper and apologize back. He snaps his fingers in an effort to give the tree lips. Nothing happens.

"Now I'm REALLY mildly peeved," he shouts. "It's bad enough I could be —" he stops and checks his Equestria-senses for a moment — "having a lovely nervous breakdown with Fluttershy and Applejack and Spike right now, but on TOP of that, you have to kidnap my magic? Party foul, tree." He leans in, putting on a police hat and shaking a ticket book. "Party foul."

He pauses. That shouldn't have worked.

Thinking cap time. Yromem? Anything? … No. Of course not.

But the thinking cap appeared. And so did the police gear. And the camera, earlier. And he did teleport, and shook off a large rock that would have pancaked most of the native monkeys. (Not to mention his explosive arrival.) So he can still both do, and create, tons of useful things with magic … just not by targeting anything besides himself.

Discord pulls a giant pair of lips from his pocket and affixes them to the birch. "Alright," he says. "Testing, testing, one two tree."

The lips leap into motion. "And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees," they intone.

Bah. Magic. Full of inane, cryptic, useless tautologies. Still, it's something.

"Prithee thou thy blabest yon truth, o Bard of the Birch," Discord says with a mocking bow, then shakes his snapping fingers out. "Figures that it would get stuck on Shakes Pear. I'm going to have to get the settings on these things adjusted. Is that you, Harmony?"

"Though this be madness," the tree says, "yet there is method in't."

"Excellent. Stop messing with me. Okay? Okay. Great! Good chat." Discord pauses. Taps his chin. Then says: "So, while we're talking, what is the deal with this place?"

"A walking shadow," the tree says. "A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

In the yromem that provokes, he will be strolling through a forest with alicorn Starlight Glimmer. It will be reminiscent in spirit of his current surroundings, but the trees will be spindly, angle-branched plants with disclike cyan leaves angling themselves toward the angry red sun on the horizon, ignoring the brighter, smaller blue sun casting shadows from above.

"And that," Discord will say, "was when I decided to destroy the world."

3. Devils

"Wow," Starlight will say. "I mean, I knew, but in all this time I never actually heard the story behind it. That … seems a little extreme?"

"It wasn't just that. There was yromem involved." Discord will tap his claw and paw together, then gesture vaguely. "And, you know. Other reasons."

"Yromem?"

She will simply be mishearing the word, but Discord will take it as a cue to elucidate. "Exactly. I rebmemered a conversation explaining why I wanted to do it, and how. And — especially given that it meant Star Swirl's wretched hack of order would never do any more structural damage to Equestria — the idea seemed pretty compelling."

(He will wonder whether to note that the conversation in question is this one — and then will get distracted by mentally holding up a little "Hi, Mom!" sign to his past self.)

"Compelling enough to destroy your human friends?" Starlight will raise an eyebrow. "Even back then, that doesn't sound like you."

"That's just it. The tree had just told me the world wasn't real. So the human girls weren't my friends. Weren't anyone's friends. They were just magical constructs. Walking shadows." He will have picked up something of a tendency to lecture from Twilight, but it's okay: doing so will remind him of her. "And if the thing Equestria was tethered to wasn't real, then Equestria's magic was being drained to keep the other world in existence."

"Right." Starlight will nod in an endearingly Twilight-ish way. "Basic thaumaturgy. The Axiom of Sustenance."

"Which meant it was a threat to my real friends."

"Yikes. Yeah, in your horseshoes, I could see myself reacting that way too."

"Exactly! Perfectly understandable. Completely selfless. Certainly not a thin rationalization over deeply sublimated feelings," Discord will say, then will hurriedly change the subject at her expression. "So how would you have done it?"

Starlight will hesitate for a moment, but will give in to the age-old temptation of Solving A Problem. "Well, in your horseshoes, I would have taken the simple solution," she will say. "Destroying what anchored the portal to the human world — the way you'd already done by accident on arrival, before Harmony fixed it. Like taking out the plug from an inner tube's air valve. Then the whole thing deflates as existence rushes out through the gap."

Discord will clap a paw to her shoulder. "I've always liked that about you, Glimmy. We both go right for the direct approach."

Starlight will raise an eyebrow. "Okay, but from what I remember, that wasn't your plan."

"You weren't there. I assure you it was."

"If you say so. But then why didn't you try to go destroy the statue right away?"

"I promised Fluttershy that I wouldn't try to hurt anybody real," Discord will say, "and there were other Equestrians still stuck in Star Swirl's little prison."

It takes Discord a few hours to find them. No matter where he starts from, teleport-snapping to the nearest pony just flings him into a stupid sequence of narrow escapes with Buffy Shimmer and the Scoobies. Searching for Equestrian magic doesn't help — the whole place is lousy with stolen thaums. He's finally reduced to wandering around the local mall with a giant pair of They Live truth-glasses, looking for friendlies amid the sea of propaganda and alien skull faces.

Finally, he halts in front of a group of three scowling young aquatic females, skulking in a corner near the restrooms. Their leader is cradling an unlit cigarette in one fin. "Oh, hey," he says, pointing. "You look fishy."

"Oh, hey," she snaps back. "Principal Celestia's ex finally works up the nerve to come back to town. Decided you want a sample of what you were accused of?"

Discord whips off the glasses. Cigarette Fish's human form is a floofy-haired girl with legs up to here and a neckline down to there. "I'm normally a big fan of nonsense," he says, "but Celestia's what?!"

She rolls her eyes, giving no sign she listened, and flicks her hands at him. "Don't care. Aggressively not interested, now that we can't feed. Shoo — go creep on someone else."

Discord's still for a moment. "Well," he says. "if you're going to be rude, then maybe I won't bring you with me when I destroy the world."

Cigarette girl pauses. Looks him up and down.

Then bursts into hysterical laughter.

"Sunlit depths, he's growing a spine!" she gasps, doubling over. "What's the first step in your master plan, Darrell? Ask slightly less politely for your drink at Marebuc— glrk."

That last bit comes when Discord claps his hand to her shoulder. There's a sharp snap and a flash of light, and her stunned body jerks and crumples to the ground. He unstraps the Sweet Dreams™ brand Joy Buzzer™ from his hand and pockets it again, then turns to the twin-ponytailed purple one.

"Your turn," he says. "Explain what she meant about Celestia's ex."

This is the point in the conversation at which Discord typically expects abject cowering — or, alternatively, screaming and fleeing — but these girls seem to be made of far stronger stuff than the average Equestrian. Ponytails raises an eyebrow, then pushes herself from a wall-lean to a straight stance, cracking the knuckles of a balled fist. "The hell, Darrell," she says coolly as Poofy-Hair twitches and Blue-Skin crouches down over her protectively. "Did you develop a case of amnesia along with your death wish?"

"I've got a bad case of 'I'm-not-actually-Darrell-because-I'm-a-visiting-god-of-chaos-from-Equestria'-itis." Discord crosses his arms and scowls at Ponytails. "I'm trying to give yromem a chance here, but if you do anything stupid, that's not bad luck, and you don't have a promise protecting you."

That stops Ponytails cold. "Wait, does that make you Discord?" she says, eyes widening. "Because he's hardcore."

Discord, mollified, straightens his collar and grins. "Flattery will get you everywhere, my dear."

She opens her fist, sticking it out for a handshake. "Aria Blaze. That's Sonata. Adagio's the one you tasered."

"And stalling won't, but I'll pretend to care about the names." He twirls a finger in midair. "Celestia?"

"Yeah." Aria shrugs, retracting her hand. "So, in this world, you two shacked up a few years back. Principal Celestia has always had a soft spot for people that need a gentle touch, and frankly, your native self is the world's biggest wuss."

"I've gotten that idea." Discord takes a moment to check in on him via Equestria-sense —

"— decided to destroy the world," Darrell Ichabod Slater-Cords says, his serpentine chimera-body balling up on Rarity's couch as the three senior princesses listen with shocked expressions.

Celestia steps forward, radiating maternal calm. "Darrell," she says with a voice of liquid light, cracking her wings open to subtly brighten the room. "I know he must be upset from Sunset's unprovoked attack —" she glances at Fluttershy, weeping off to one side — "but that's still a terribly grave accusation, and I don't want to leap to conclusions. Is it possible this is … some figment of chaos magic we're misinterpreting?"

He shakes his head numbly. "No. We're … linked, somehow. He even said so. What I saw were some reverse memory things he calls 'yee-roh-mem'. It was really clear from context that he was remembering conversations from the future."

"What will happen, then?" Luna says. "Spare no detail."

Darrell stares down at Discord's gorgeous true form — a body he somehow, inexplicably, seems to loathe — and swallows. "I'll tell you what I can," he says, voice shaky. "I can't control it, and I've only gotten the two fragments so far. But what I did hear is as vivid as if I was there —"

Discord scowls. "A dangerous wuss," he mutters to himself. "A dangerous wuss with just enough knowledge to create exaggerated comical misunderstandings. The worst kind."

"— which is when we showed up at your wedding," Aria finishes. "When both of you stormed out at once and the guests started throwing punches, we were stuffed for weeks." She pauses, tilts her head, and waves a hand near his eyes. "Reality to Discord? Were you even listening?"

"New plan," Discord tells them. "I need to keep the timetable moving, or soon I'm going to have two sets of trigger-happy jewelry models trying to stop me."

Adagio finally, shakily, gets to her feet. "Huh. So you are serious about destroying the world." A wild grin starts to spread across her face. "And then we team up to take over Equestria?"

Discord fidgets. Fluttershy was extremely disappointed in the Tirek thing. "Not … as such."

Adagio's eyebrow raises. "What's next after blowing this joint, then?"

(A ticker-tape parade? Apologies? Dodging rainbows? Nerding out with Princess Checklist over the way he just saved them all? Boy, Discord thinks, this would be a brilliant time for yromem. … Nothing. Of course.)

"I … haven't quite thought that far ahead," Discord says instead, then tries to pivot with a dismissive gesture. "That's not my style."

Aria raises an eyebrow, too. "You've at least thought through how we're getting back to Equestria, right? Because we sure can't, and that's not a problem we can solve after you destroy the world."

Well, Discord thinks, that's an interesting dilemma. The single known portal between the two worlds is currently in tiny pieces on the far end. Discord's magic can't interact in the slightest with Order — except to blow apart the thing anchoring it here. And the only source of Harmony able to kludge it open from here is in the hands of Sunset Shimmer.

"Still working on that bit," he says lightly.

Aria and Adagio exchange a lengthy glance.

"Uh," Sonata says, "maybe we should talk for a little bit about why we're destroying the world?"

"Oh, it's very simple," Discord says, gesturing around them. "None of this is real."

He had been hoping for a better reaction than awkward silence.

"An unreal which is hurting Equestria," he adds. "And I happen to like Equestria."

"Okay, girls," Adagio says slowly. "New plan. We all take off running in different directions. I don't think he can stop us all from reaching Sunset."

Discord angrily flings his arms wide. "As real beings yourself, I'd think you would understand!" he shouts. "Okay, fine — you know what? Convince me this world is real. I can change my mind. Change is my whole thing."

"Sure, whatever." Adagio rolls her eyes and thumps a nearby wall. "That good enough for you?"

Discord shakes his head and pulls a little cube of concrete from his pocket. "Magic can create objects. This place steals magic from Equestria. The Q. is E.D."

"But there's always been enough magic here to power our necklaces," Aria interjects. "If the only magic here was stolen from Equestria, they would fail when they were farther away from the portal."

"That just means this place has stolen way more from Equestria than we thought," Discord counters. "If anything, that makes the blowing of the upping more urgent."

Aria looks frustrated. "You asked for proof the world is real. It doesn't exist less if you get farther away. That's your proof."

"Ah, but there's plenty of impossible that goes on forever," Discord says. "You should visit my infinite library sometime."

"That's bull," Adagio says. "Stop turning this into a philosophy problem. Philosophers are things you eat."

At this point, Discord's just enjoying tweaking her. "Philosophers are emotions?" he says with a cheeky grin.

Sonata gasps. "Emotions!"

The others look at her. "Hmm?" Discord says.

She reflexively grasps at a necklace which isn't there. "Magic, like, can't make emotions. It can make people feel angry, or move anger around, but you can't just magic anger into being. We've tried."

Aria catches on. "Right! If humans here were magical constructs instead of real beings, they couldn't feel the emotions that we eat."

Discord has to think about that one. It does seem pretty convincing.

"So what's the deal with this place, then?" he stalls. "Why is everyone a duplicate of somepony in Equestria?"

"It's a prison, remember?" Adagio cuts in. "Old Beardy wanted it to 'teach us a lesson'" — Discord can hear the spite in the air-quotes — "about ourselves. So he found a mirror universe parallel to our own where everyone here is what we're most afraid of becoming."

Aria nods and crosses her arms. "Like you, for example. Darrell's a complete pushover, led around by the nose." (Discord inwardly winces and tries not to think of Fluttershy.) "Those arrogant alicorns? School bureaucrats. More valuable to the world for being a cog in the system than for anything they'll ever accomplish."

"And us? We feared we were weak." Adagio grins, and somehow her flat monkey teeth look predatory. "But we took care of that."

Discord's considering admitting that Sonata's got a point when a tickle at the back of his senses reminds him of a fundamental gap in their argument.

"There's a problem with that," he says. "Magic can't create emotions, but it can create people. Darrell didn't exist a few hours ago."

They stare at Discord like he's grown a third arm. And not in the good party-trick kind of way.

"You weren't listening," Aria says. "We preyed on him years ago. We were at his wedding."

"Seeing as how he is literally part of me," Discord says, "and I can see through his senses, and I know the exact moment I felt him clump off and achieve independent thought, I can assure you that would have been difficult."

The sirens look back and forth at each other uncertainly.

"Hang on," Adagio says, eyes slowly widening. "Are you serious? Are we just … in some sort of simulation of Star Swirl's?"

"well were u?" Flurry Heart, Alicorn Princess of Communication, will think into the uplink port of her skulljack, spawning an instant message several microseconds later in Discord's HUD.

Discord will send back a :rolleyes: emoji. "Obviously, that was not the case," he will type onto his physical keyboard, entirely because he will love needling her by forcing her to slow down and think in needlessly long-winded sentences at meat speed. "If so, the simulation would have been a construct of pure Order created by his original spell. Therefore, I would have irrevocably crashed the system and corrupted its memory the instant I got injected."

"yeah lol i remember u visiting my vr mmo beta launch," she will respond microseconds later.

Discord will grin at the memory and start typing.

A beep will indicate a new incoming message as he's four words in — which, for Flurry, is an exceptionally significant pause:

"plz dont do that again"

"Nah," Discord says dismissively. "Whatever Star Swirl did, he was working with pure Order, which this place isn't. Which raises all sorts of questions about free will, memory, and agency, given that this parasitic existential shadow hellscape overwrites its own reality at a whim — but on the bright side, it's torturing you for its own reasons instead of his."

The three of them are looking more ill by the second.

"And on that note — good try, but no dice. I'll swing by to grab you once I've pulled the plug." Discord holds up a hand, readying a snap. "If Baconhair doesn't blast me with rainbows again." He cups his chin in the other hand. "Offer void in the state of Stone."

Sonata steps forward. "Wait."

Discord pauses, then points a finger-gun at her. "I liked your emotions thing. You have ten seconds."

She takes a breath. "So, this place, like, isn't all bad," Sonata says. "I mean, most of it sucks, so I totally get why you want to destroy it, but even if it's just here to torture us, it gave us Taco Tuesdays." She shrugs. "Maybe there's supposed to be something cool here for you, too? Maybe you should go find out Darrell's deal and see what he likes."

As the other two sirens look at Sonata in disbelief, Discord digests that for a moment. The idea is insane on its face. Darrell is utterly irredeemable. Anything he likes is, by definition, worthless.

But Discord does have a soft spot for humoring other people's insane ideas. And he is curious about one specific thing.

"Thank you for the reminder, my dear," he says, and snaps, and vanishes.

4. Moon

Far past the high school — past the city center and the suburbs and the ranches and the farms — a small highway winds into the verdant foothills and up to the isolated mountain town of Dream Valley. On the slopes overlooking the town, there's a house at 206 Harmony Ridge Drive. From its enormous front picture window, you can see the land roll away, emerald green out to the shimmering sapphires of distant seas.

Discord appears in the middle of the spacious living room with an incongruous honk, and looks around Human Celestia's home.

Its state is best described as the halfway point between tidy and cluttered. The only bare surface in sight is the drab gray wall-to-wall carpet. Endtables and bookshelves and filing cabinets support a sea of artifacts from two lives and half a dozen colliding interests — but they're at a comfortable density, and neatly segregated into their own designated regions. The walls by the stairs are a patchwork tableau of photographs: sisters, light and dark, apart and together, frozen amid various happy memories. On the opposite wall, there's an oil-paint landscape of the Milky Way glimmering over a dark field of flowers (and Luna's signature), next to a medieval tapestry depicting the end of some long-ago war (clearly a refugee from some drafty Bittish castle). In the corner is a desk with a large Macintosh computer sitting next to a number of framed desktop photos.

His attention is immediately drawn there. Front and center is a picture of Principal Celestia's star valedictorian, bacon hair wild in spring wind, her five best friends crowding in in a group hug. He reaches past that, and a royal wedding photo — Celestia and some natty noble, both hilariously overdressed, eyes fixed past the camera in thousand-yard stares — to a small frame with two figures in a meadow. A laughing Celestia, eyes blazing with life, is holding the camera up for a selfie, while behind her, sitting meekly on a picnic blanket and staring forward uncertainly, is —

"Darrell?" a voice mumbles from above and behind him.

Discord clenches his fingers so hard the glass covering the photo cracks.

"Discord," he says flatly as he turns around.

Luna is standing in the upstairs hall — or, at least, a sad human parody of her. Her hair is a drab shade of light blue that the real Luna only ever had when the Elements of Harmony blasted all her power away. She's dressed in a dark blue bathrobe, hanging loosely around her thin frame, and underneath matted hair her eyes are dark with exhaustion.

Their eyes meet — and something in his look makes her jerk back from the railing. One hand flies to her chest, clutching the robe's collar. The other flattens against the wall as she staggers backward a step. All the color drains from her face.

"Please don't kill me," she says in a very small voice.

Discord blinks, thrown out of his anger. "Kill?" he snorts. "You know who I am, yet you think I'm here to kill? I don't know whether to be offended or amused." He stares at this sniveling figure, a sheep to Princess Luna's wolf — yet more proof that absolutely nothing of value will be lost when this world is erased. "Pity. Let's go with pity."

Pathetic Human Luna stands frozen for a moment. "All I know about you is what the other me said," she finally ventures. "Which is that Discord wants to destroy this world."

Now that piques his interest. "Moon Moon's here?"

"No, she and I just talked in a dream." Luna swallows and laughs shakily. "Now there's something I never thought I'd say. Oh — um. She had a message for you."

Discord's instantly suspicious. Princess Luna is legendarily subtle and cunning; he knows from experience just how dangerous listening to her is. But she's probably also betting that going to these lengths to talk at him will make him too curious to refuse — and that's a bet no bookie would go against. "Alright," he says. "Let's hear it."

Human Luna nods and steadies herself. "She wants you to know that they expect to have a way by moonrise to reopen the portal and bring you back. You're not stuck here. There's no need for anything drastic."

Discord laughs. "How adorable! She thinks I'm panicking." There's a little twitchy feeling near the bottom of his stomach, though — despite the topic coming up several times, he never considered the long-term implications of the portal being broken, and he doesn't want to think about how he would have taken that realization. "And if that was why I was going to destroy the world, that might have made a difference. Was there anything else?"

"I think so." Human Luna squeezes her eyes shut for a moment, searching her memory. "Oh, right. She and Princess Celestia also realize that destroying the portal was an accident. They're not upset at you."

"Strike two," Discord says. "Also not doing this to hide the evidence." Though, admittedly, that does sound exactly like something he'd do. "What's her third pitch?"

"That was all I got," Luna says. "We didn't have time for anything else. She had to spend a few minutes introducing herself and explaining the situation. Then your arrival woke me up from my nap."

Discord can't help but laugh. "Sleeping through the invasion! Some things never change."

Luna looks at him in confusion, then stands a little straighter and cinches her bathrobe more tightly closed. "What are you doing here, anyway? She thought you'd be in town."

Discord freezes. Whips his hands behind his back. Kicks the trash can out from underneath Celestia's desk, and drops the photo in it with the world's subtlest crash. "Nothing that's as important to you as my destroying the world," he parries. "Shouldn't you be trying to talk me out of that?"

She studies him in a way that reminds him a great deal of her better half. "If the immortal pony goddess version of me couldn't," she says slowly, "I don't think I've got much chance."

Discord frowns. "Not with an attitude like that, you don't." He throws his arms wide. "Will you have some pride in yourself? At least give it a shot. I'd like to think that there's something in this universe that isn't an insult to Equestria."

She lets out a long breath. "I guess I can try. First of all, is that why you're out to destroy us? We don't measure up to your standards?"

"For your information," he says, putting his hand to his chest, "as much as I'd love to take the moral high ground on that, there's a more different moral high ground that's even more important. Namely, this world is a fake shadow copy of Equestria which only exists by eating its magic, and I can't let it threaten the world I love."

Luna's silent for a while.

"Well," she finally says. "That certainly explains a lot."

Discord raises an eyebrow. "For the record, that isn't how talking me out of the apocalypse is supposed to go."

Luna walks slowly over to the stairs and sits down on the top step. "I think you're right, though. I mean … magic suddenly becomes real just in time for our students to become friends with a transformed pony from another dimension, and then my sister shares a dream with an alternate me who got banished to the moon for a thousand years … and then magical princess-goddess me writes to tell me I'm an inspiration to her? I can't deny the evidence of my senses, but a world that's real doesn't work that way."

"See, that's what I've been saying!" Discord says. "Except, you know, with less detail. And I haven't been saying it. But there's something about this place that doesn't add up." On impulse, he adds: "So what do you think? Why is this world filled with My Little Clonies?"

"Well, if we're fake —" she says without a hint of hesitation, as if it's something she's given far too much thought to — "I think maybe this is a dream-world filled with what Equestria's goddesses wish they could be, in their heart of hearts. Celestia wants a fresh start. To leave behind her responsibilities instead of needing to raise the sun every day, and be able to focus again on helping her subjects grow and learn. Twilight Sparkle wants to be innocent again — get out from under all the pressure she must have been thrust into when she became a princess. Her local copy was just an average, unassuming student over at Crystal Prep until that whole mess with the Friendship Games. And the other me …" Her voice softens. "She's holding onto an unhealthy amount of guilt."

"There is nothing about Human Me which I wish for," Discord says, keeping his voice extremely flat.

Luna hesitates for a fraction of a second at his tone, but she's on a roll. "Speaking of which — that's the other half, the straight-up inconsistencies. As soon as Pony Me mentioned that Darrell was a copy of you, I began to wonder why I hadn't noticed that his wedding to Celestia was the same week I remember Celestia and I being on vacation at Mount Rushmare. And he and Celestia were supposedly good childhood friends, but I don't remember him ever visiting our house, or ever seeing him in grade school. The more I think about him, the more unreal everything feels."

Discord snorts — actually impressed. "Do you know you're the first person I've talked to so far who's even noticed that?"

"In my job, you have to have both a high tolerance for weirdness and a keen nose for it." Luna smiles wryly and makes a vague hand gesture. "So is that the big evidence that we're fakes?"

"Actually, no. He Who Must Not Be Named is an entirely different sort of unreal than your world is. Harmony jerry-rigged a local duplicate of me together after Order botched the job, but Harmony couldn't cleanly rewrite everyone's memories on the fly."

She has to process that one for a moment.

"I see," Luna says, tone dry as chalk. "That is definitely a normal thing to say, which happens all the time in conversations in the real world."

"You'd be surprised. Ponies used to have entire schools of magic devoted to memory manipulation before Celestia got on her high horseshoes and banned the lot."

Her eyebrows shoot up. "… Oh."

"I should also note," Discord adds, "you're taking that revelation a lot better than most ponies do."

"I haven't had a lot of time to think about it yet," Luna says. "Magic isn't upending my life the way it is with the kids. Up until I met Pony Me in a dream half an hour ago, it was something that happened to other people." She sighs and says quietly, "I guess I won't get a lot of time to think about it, either."

Despite his first impressions, Discord's been unexpectedly warming up to this poor little broken human — and he can feel hope stirring. Maybe she's a good enough copy of Real Luna to give him a run for his money.

"Talk me out of this, then," he prods.

"Sure." Luna shrugs. "I don't want to die."

A flicker of irritation creeps back in. "Yes," he says flatly. "We established that back at the beginning. What I want is your best argument against my plan."

"That's the argument, though." She looks him directly in the eye. "You're not a bad person, Discord. It sounds like you're looking for a reason not to do this. And that is: whether we're real or not, you shouldn't let yourself become someone who can listen to a person say, 'I don't want to die,' and then end them anyway."

That stops him cold.

It's breathtaking. It's like a verbal Stare. It's the first time that anybody but Fluttershy has made a moral argument that he's wanted to consider. Discord flails ineffectually for a counterargument … until he remembers that she admitted having just talked to Princess Luna.

Moon Moon is the undisputed master of getting inside opponents' heads — so there has to be some trick here. He doesn't know what it is, but given the power of the argument, Human Luna had to have been coached. Moon Moon must have walked her through every single word of the argument. No — every gesture, every tactic, starting with making him sympathize with her at the start.

Which means everything she's said is a lie. "Woke me up from my nap"? "No time for anything else"? Ha! How could they expect him to forget that Luna and Celestia manage opposite halves of the sky? This human must have gone to sleep at moonset when her job ended, and been planning how to trick him ever since!

With that established, it's a lot more comfortable to ignore her point and fall back on his own facts. "That's true if you're a person," he says. "But that's exactly the question here. Should you feel guilty when you're watching a movie, and then you turn it off at the end? Have you killed anyone then? And what if staying obsessed with that movie is distracting your real friends from real problems?"

"Turning off a movie doesn't end its world."

"It's an analogy!" he snaps. "You know what I mean! You're not real, and they are!" Discord crosses his arms. "I'm doing this for them. And I have to do this for them, because none of them is going to."

Luna frowns — then her face falls back into a gentle sort of neutrality (as hard to read as the real one's more aggressively blank mask), and she gives him a shrug. "It's not just ignorance on their part. The ponies are going to great lengths to save us, and they wouldn't do that if your argument was as airtight as you think it is. You should talk to them directly before you do anything you might regret."

"It's a little late for that," Discord growls. "They've already been bamboozled by He Who Must Not Be Named." He folds his arms. "They'll understand, anyway. They'll have to, when they hear I'm going by the word of Harmony."

Now she just looks confused. "That's the second time you've used that name. Should it mean anything to me?"

Discord sighs, his hopes crumpling. Even after realizing that this pathetic clone's effectiveness came from being coached in great detail by Moon Moon, he could still have enjoyed matching wits with a princess by proxy. But catching Human Luna up on the basic context necessary for an argument is quite beyond his tolerance for drudgework.

"I guess not," he says. "Anyway, I suppose I should thank you for trying." He pauses for a moment, then yields to pity and adds: "For what it's worth, I'm sorry you got the short end of the existential stick here. You really did deserve a world better than this."

Luna opens her mouth to respond. Her expression scrunches up, and she stares at him, calculating — and for a fraction of a second, it feels again like he might be able to match wits with the goddess she's imitating —

Then she deflates all at once, slumping back against the stairway wall, extinguishing his hopes for good.

"Oh," she manages, in a small voice. "Um. Thanks."

Sheesh. Discord has kicked puppies who made him feel less bad about winning their dispute.

Awkward silence stretches out for a moment. "Right," Discord says, and raises his fingers to snap. "Ta."

"Will it hurt?" Luna suddenly says.

Discord frowns. "I'm not cruel."

She looks back up at him with a subdued expression. "I know. But are you sure of what it'll actually feel like? Have you done this before?"

"No, but —" he hesitates, then narrows his eyes. "We're done arguing. You already had your chance to make me feel guilty."

A frown flickers past her features, almost too quick to see, and then she sighs. "That's not it," she protests. "My world's about to end. I just want to know what to prepare for."

"Ah," Discord says, letting himself give in to pity again. "Well, when I had a front-row seat to Tirek draining the magic from ponies, they just stopped caring. So I imagine by the time the world ends, it simply won't matter."

She nods uncertainly. "Where are you going to do it? Will I be able to see it coming?"

"Down at the school." He points through the big picture window, and is about to cut conversation off when Luna barks out a short, sharp laugh.

"It figures," she says. "Everything always comes back to that. Why there, out of curiosity?"

"Because that's where the portal to Equestria that I'm going to detach from the world is." Discord's pity only goes so far; he has no patience with this kid-level stuff. "Are we done here? Don't you have some —" he makes a vague gesture, and feels his tone turn a little more bitingly sarcastic than he had intended — "loved ones to call, so you can say the tragic, overwrought, weepy goodbyes that will tug at my heartstrings and make me change my mind?"

"Well," Luna says dryly, pulling a cell phone from her bathrobe pocket, "I was going to wait until after you left to start dialing, but if you do feel like waiting around and being convinced —"

Discord snorts. "Have fun with that," he says, and snaps before she can say anything else.

There's an obvious, and smart, place for him to go next. Nothing's going to change his mind at this point; he ought to head directly to the portal, do not pass Go, and get this mess over with.

But there's smart, and then there's satisfying. And right now, that guilt trip from Pathetic Human Luna is hitting a little too close to home. He needs to get that out of his system first. And there's no better way to do that than some good old-fashioned gloating.

"Harmony!" he crows to the birch tree. "How's it going, you old sap."

"The wheel is come full circle," the tree's lips gravely intone. "I am here."

"As if you'd leaf at a time like this." Discord struts up to the tree, grinning. "I've been having the most gloriously unlucky day."

The tree displays no hint of emotion. "As if that luck, in very spite of cunning, bade him win all."

"That's the plan," Discord says with an exaggerated bow. "Thank you so much for clarifying things with your earlier advice, by the way. I've got to say I like this new side of you. Who'd have ever thought you'd be the one helping me set things right by blowing up the world?"

"To do a great right," the tree says, "do a little wrong … and curb this cruel devil of his will."

Discord isn't sure what to make of that last addition for a moment. Then he barks out a laugh. "Hah! Yes, I suppose you have used me the same way you always use everyone. Good of you to admit it. But we'll talk about your manipulation later — right now we've got a world to destroy." He thinks for a moment, strikes a little pose in front of the mouth, and adds, "Mare lips, mare lips on the wood, will our plans go as they should?"

Discord isn't sure it's possible for a tree to hesitate — but this one certainly seems to pause for longer than usual before the lips open again.

"We make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars," it says, "as if we were fools by heavenly compulsion."

Discord stands there, rigid, for a moment, then lunges forward and rips the lips off the bark. "Who asked you?!" he roars, flinging them to the ground.

There's no response.

"You know what?" he shouts. "I don't need you! I'm perfectly capable of destroying the world on my own. I've already come far closer than you ever did! And if Sunflanks and Moon Moon want to make a fool out of me … well … they're just going to have to come here and try it to my face!"

The lips begin to shrivel, turning grey, as the magic animating them dissipates. He sticks his tongue out.

Discord's never been much of a thinker. But as he's standing there seething at Harmony, he can't help but think. The thing is: the portal's broken, and all of the princesses are stuck on the Equestrian side. But unless there's a way for Celestia and Luna to directly oppose him — and thus, be the ones to blame for any hypothetical disasters — what Harmony said made no sense. (Which is bad. Not making sense is his job.)

How could Celestia and Luna possibly ruin his plans?

The question lingers for a moment. Yromem, as usual, completely fails to be helpful.

Then Discord pauses. A smile begins to curl back onto his face.

He's overthinking this. There's a simple way of finding out.

5. Sun

Eavesdropping on The Wimp Who Walks does, in fact, take him directly to the princesses. And the scene at the Friendship Map table looks dreadfully grim.

Celestia is in Twilight's chair, with Luna and Cadance alongside; apparently they're still trying to get word to Princess Checklist overseas. A sheet of paper has been spread over the map geography, marked up with hoof-drawn city streets and littered with little horse figurines and multicolored triangle pyramids. Starlight's scribbling frantically into a book of Twilight's that glows with magical light. Spike is barfing out scrolls like a frat pledge in the bathroom after a party. Twilight's friends have donned their necklaces and are sitting tensely in their chairs — never mind the whole "powers sucked back away by the Tree of Harmony" thing.

They're really overreacting about the removal of a parasite that's sucking away all their magic. Discord hesitates; it's nearly enough to make him call the whole thing off. But then he catches a glimpse of Fluttershy's wet face and thousand-yard stare. He steels himself. Regardless of the personal consequences, he's got to do this for her future.

"Then give the scholars full access to the Restricted Archives. I want a way through, now, without the portal," Celestia says, then turns to Starlight. "What's the latest from Sunset's world?"

"No more sightings," Starlight says, her scribbling not slowing.

Celestia frowns. "It's been too long. I don't like this. Why hasn't he struck yet?"

"He had a change of heart?" Fluttershy whispers.

Rarity gently places a hoof over hers. "I certainly hope so, darling. But that's not an assumption we can make with their world on the line. If I had to guess, he's probably still looking for other Equestrians."

"If there's more than the Sirens, then nopon— nobody has discovered them yet," Starlight says. "One of Sunset's teams found the three of them and followed up on their report, by the way. But there's no sign Discord ever went to Darrell's house."

"What about the list I gave you?" Darrell's ugly voice grates through his stolen body. "The office, the park, my favorite restaurants —"

"Scouts are hitting them as fast as possible," Starlight interrupts. "But even though they're mobilizing everyone that Sunset or the Alternate Elements have ever worked with, they're just so short-hooved. Handed."

Celestia rubs her temple. "This is useless. We need a way to do more than advise and coordinate. Luna, is there anyone else there who you can —"

"Wait!" Starlight interrupts, sitting up straighter and reading in real time as a message comes in via the book. "Contact – at – Dream – Valley. D – en – route – to – school – portal."

It takes him a moment. And then he facepalms so hard it snaps him out of his surveillance.

Son of a timberwolf, Discord thinks. She did it again.

The last time Discord underestimated Princess Luna — back when she was a bruised, dirty filly in his glorious empire of chaos — she pulled an identical kicked-puppy act and got him to gloat about how clever his hiding place for the Elements of Harmony was. Less than a week before she and her sister returned with them in tow.

How did he not see this one coming? She coached her duplicate into pulling the exact same trick! And then taunted him about it — getting him to spill the information she wanted and then telling Pathetic Luna to wave the cell phone in his face!

(How she did this with nothing but an interdimensional dream message to a useless human, Discord has no idea. And that only makes him madder. She can't out-think him like this. It's an outrage. He is a god.)

Before, he was merely doing this to save Equestria. But now, it's personal. Sunflanks and Moon Moon are calling the shots. Harmony even said so: they're out to make a fool out of him.

Well, not this time.

He'll show them.

There's a mad scramble of updates around the table, and crosstalk as details crawl in from the journal. The serpentine archer miniature from Spike's Ogres & Oubliettes game gets dropped on one edge of the map, near the "Dream Valley" arrow, and a red pushpin gets jabbed in at the school. Celestia barks a series of tactical orders — chief among them, scrambling the units they're using for transportation in order to get the Human Elements of Harmony back to Sunset and the statue as quickly as possible. Starlight reads and writes madly.

As the table's figures are being pushed around, Luna — elbows on the table and hooves pressed together at her nose — is staring at them with a frown.

Discord focuses on her with such intensity that Darrell turns his head to stare. Celestia catches his head motion out of the corner of her eye, and glances over herself.

"Sister," Luna takes that opportunity to interject, "I am still reluctant to assemble the Alternate Elements at his target."

"Why, Luna?" Celestia says. "It's thanks to you and your human counterpart that we have the intelligence we do. Don't start doubting yourself now."

Luna's frown deepens. "An instinct nags at me that there is a crucial factor here which we have overlooked. But even were that not the case … he is a being of chaos, sister. Base urges we can predict, but whimsy we cannot. In such cases, the conservative play is the correct one."

(She's not underestimating him, Discord notes proudly, and his desire for a proper rematch burns a little brighter.)

Celestia unfolds a wing around Luna. "Even if we didn't know what we know, the conservative play would be assembling the Elements for a tactical strike in case reason fails. There's no further benefit to scattering them."

"On the contrary. We do not know the extent of the powers Discord possesses in the other world — only that he has retained them despite a direct hit from the Elements, and that he cannot directly affect their avatars. While splitting them limits our counterstrike ability, it offers the best chance —" Luna glances meaningfully at Fluttershy — "at initiating a peaceful dialogue the next time he is spotted, regardless of any alteration in his plans."

Celestia sighs. "I love you, Lulu, but you're overthinking this. We know exactly where he's going to be. Why would we want the Elements anywhere else?"

"For the same reason I ordered them split them up to begin with." Luna gestures at the map. "The various reservoirs of Equestrian magic which he could drain in order to rip similar holes in the world."

(Wait, what? Discord snaps to full attention.)

"As long as multiple avenues remain through which he might fulfill his objectives," Luna adds, "I cannot advise leaving any of them unguarded."

Celestia considers that for a moment. "Be that as it may," she says, "what she learned comes from Discord himself — and he's the antithesis of subtle, so I'm dubious of any plan requiring us to take his intentions as a feint. Besides, there's no reason to believe he even knows about any of those artifacts —"

Twilight will wrap a wing around him as they watch, for the first time, the moon of a new planet rise. For the first time since Fluttershy's death, he will find himself tearing up with something besides grief. She will hug a little harder. The silence will feel a little more intimate.

"What's on your mind?" he will finally ask, looking for a distraction from the thoughts swirling muddily in his head.

She will laugh self-consciously. "It's stupid," she will say. "It's trivial."

"No. Go on."

"But it's been hundreds of years now, and I still wonder sometimes how you knew to head for the locket — you know, the one which the other me turned into 'Midnight Sparkle' with — when you tried to …" She will gesture with a hoof. "You know."

Discord will place a paw over his heart. "A magician," he will repeat, as always, "never reveals his secrets."

"I know." Twilight will laugh and nuzzle him. "You drive me crazy sometimes, you know that? You big goof." Her head will settle in against his chest as she listens to his heartbeat. "It's alright."

He will hold her for a while, stroking the gradient of her mane. He will think about how, in the hundreds of years they've known each other, she's never broken the promise she made not to ask anyone else about that. And then, suddenly: "Honestly, it was pretty simple."

He will feel her pulse quicken. "Oh?" she will ask with an extremely forced casualness.

"That meeting of princesses in the war room?" he will finally, finally admit, savoring the moment, savoring the anticipation of her shocked laughter. "I was listening in —"

Discord's Equestria-sight jolts upward as Darrell leaps up. WHAM! The table rattles as paw and claw impact it, scattering pieces.

"He's listening in!" Darrell shouts.

Luna's reaction is the best. He hasn't heard that curse in 1200 years.

"And he changed his plans! But the reverse memory said where he's heading!"

Right. That's his cue. Discord jerks his focus back and snaps his fingers.

The window of opportunity is rapidly closing on his new target. But all he needs to triumph is a head start.

The "Teleport to Twilight Sparkle" snap doesn't actually work — there's all sorts of magical interference. Baconhair and her team must be pulling out all the stops. Granted, with the resources of two worlds behind them, he shouldn't be expecting any less.

Pulling a map of Twilight Sparkle's location out of his pocket, however, does. And while teleportation in general is rather fraught right now, he finds a brief eddy in the magical surge, and fills himself up with enough magical momentum to smash through the flow and land within half a block. (That's guaranteed to tip the Rainbow Squad off, especially with Luna overseeing the defenses — but everypony knows his destination now, anyway.)

Discord strolls down the quiet suburban sidewalk, whistling, then steps over a six-inch picket fence and tromps through the grass alongside the path toward a large white house. As he approaches the patio, he can see scrambles of motion inside through the broad front window. Fake local Twilight Sparkle, wearing huge coke-bottle glasses, is huddled behind the sofa, clutching a box to her chest and whispering into a cell phone. Shining Armor has flattened himself up against the wall by the window, holding a baseball bat. Some other spiky-blue-haired dude has braced himself against the door, and a number of grim-faced uniformed students are taking whatever cover they can find, holding golf clubs and tennis rackets and archery-club bows.

It's adorable. None of that's going to hurt him if the boulder didn't. But they're certainly making a spirited try.

Discord fumbles through his pocket for an efficient solution. There's a twinge of disappointment that he can't dissolve the problem by simply snapping and turning them all into newts, but under the circumstances, a flashbang grenade through the window should work nearly as well —

The screech of brakes on the road disrupts his thoughts — along with the choke of a stalled engine and the crash of a motorcycle tumbling to a stop. Boots clomp heavily on pavement. Discord turns, raising an eyebrow.

A spindly white human unfolds from her rough landing, standing tall and straight. The wind, for a moment, catches her flowing white blouse and the pastel aurora of her hair. She stalks across the yard toward him like she owns the block. Radiant, calm, defiant.

Sweet stars! His heart nearly leaps out of his chest in glee. He is going to get that rematch.

"Celestia!" Discord shouts, hopping and clenching his fists by his chin. (Despite how crushingly disappointed Fluttershy is going to be with the situation. After all, how long has it been since Sunflanks has legitimately squared off with him, without throwing her students in the way?) "You made great time! Though I guess the commute's a lot shorter with no other traffic."

"Darrell," she says — and not even her legendary gentleness can disguise the iron will behind her tone, the will that brought her here against impossible odds for a climactic battle to save a world not even her own. "I don't know where you got the idea that this world matters any less than Equestria, but we need to talk before you make a terrible mistake."

It's a lovely monologue. Very heroic. Or that's his assumption, anyway — because his brain slams to a screaming halt on the very first word.

"Discord," he says, fists falling, face flattening.

Celestia stops dead for a moment — as if she has, for once in her immortal life, miscalculated.

She swallows and takes a breath, clearly choosing her words with more care.

"I know," she says softly. "You don't like the idea of having anything in common with him. But Discord and Darrell are a false distinction. Two parts of the same being."

"Stop. I'm Discord." What mind game is this? Is she trying to appeal to his better half? "Somepony's getting caught up in the lie." He points an accusing finger. "And that's why I'm doing you the favor of erasing it."

She spreads her hands. "Whether this world is real or not," Celestia says, "where is the lie? Darrell is somebody you could be if you wanted." Her voice softens. "Somebody loved."

Okay, she's definitely working the better-half-of-him angle. And Discord doesn't even know where to start with that.

"I don't even know where to start with that," he says. "A, do you think I'm doing this for attention? Two, according to the false yet juicy local mythology you're trying to invoke, we'd be destined for a rather egregious break-up. Third, the pony to be making that offer is half your height and butter yellow."

Celestia steps forward, arms still spread — and, when Discord holds up a warning hand in snap position, circles wide around him, making no sudden moves. "Are you doing this for attention? I'd like you to tell me," she says gently. "All I know is what the others think. Darrell got created when the blast of Harmony hit you. So they think Harmony is trying to manifest your deepest desires. And they think you're overreacting to the truth about what those desires are."

He lunges forward, teeth bared. "I'm saving Equestria!" he shouts in her face (dimly aware that his sudden outburst might tell her a different story). "This world is a parasite, growing fat off of stolen magic while our home withers away!"

Celestia holds her ground with obvious effort — now between him and Fake Twilight's front door. Arms still spread wide, body squared, legs tensed and trembling.

"I … don't think that's the case," Celestia says as he takes a step back to recover his composure. "But even if that's true, I'm not the one with those answers. Sunset, and Twilight, and the students — they're the ones who would know. And if it's true, they can help you fix it. So the best way to accomplish your goal is to sit down with them and talk things out."

Discord narrows his eyes and glances back down at her trembling legs.

Trembling.

He hasn't seen Celestia tremble since the very first time he met her — a brash young filly squaring off with an untested magical artifact against the god-emperor of the world.

"You know," Discord says slowly, "I'm beginning to think you're not the real Celestia."

"What makes you think I'm not real?" she says with a calm that is ever-more-clearly forced.

"The fact that, after getting my hopes up, you've done nothing but try to talk me down. But also, pretty much everything from the beginning, now that I'm looking."

On instinct, Discord withdraws a slim metal box from his pocket with a large, bright red button on top. It doesn't even do anything besides look ominous. But when Celestia's eyes stray down to it, she instantly freezes.

Discord grins wickedly. Gotcha, he thinks. This thing moves like Celestia, looks like her, sounds like her — but when the chips are down, all the tells are off. And that means he's just playing with a fake.

"What if I were to tell you," he coos, hovering the finger of his other hand over the button, "that this world was never real to begin with — and that, therefore, its inhabitants mattered exactly as much as the characters in a story? What if I, as a reader of that story, had decided that it was time to close the book so my friends could move on to the next one? And what if a character of that story, claiming to be my friend the alicorn princess, showed up in front of me, asking me not to close the book?" He leans in, enjoying this a little too much. "Would she be able to do anything to prove that she's not just a sad, useless shadow of the goddess I know? Or would I press the button, and end the sound and the fury?"

"Discord," she pleads, eyes wide, turning the palms of her outstretched hands upward.

"I'm waiting," he cackles, dramatically lowering his finger.

The principal in front of him closes her eyes, jaw trembling. Pain sears across her features — the pain of failure, of helplessness.

And then an odd twitch curls the corner of her mouth, and that pain shifts.

It's a serene pain Discord sees then. An old one. It's still a look of failure, but it's a failure tempered by time. A yearning rarely felt in full measure, but never distant.

She opens her eyes, and those are Celestia's eyes staring back at him, deep and infinite and sad, the eyes of a love which would make any sacrifice.

An angel.

The back of her blouse rustles. Rips. And brilliant wings of white feathered light burst forth, shooting out a body-length beyond the tips of her outstretched arms.

Discord's breath catches as he staggers a step backward, buffeted by the raw, intangible power of the Sun. Celestia, radiant and serene, arches her back — the colors of her hair blurring and coursing in some unseen wind, face lifting to the heavens as she rises above the porch. It's a short ascension; she levels off a few inches above the ground, and stares back at him through eyes of pure, glowing white.

Dimly, Discord is aware of the sound of the button clattering to the ground.

He gradually levers his jaw closed.

"That," he finally manages. "Was unexpected."

His voice seems to snap Celestia back from whatever higher state she was in. She blinks, and the pupils return to her eyes, and she sinks to the ground, wings dissolving into the aether.

"Thank you," she says weakly. She sways and drops to one knee — clearly fighting just to stay conscious as the massive energy expenditure catches up with her — but there's a note of cautious hope in her voice. "Does that mean we can talk this out now?"

Discord barks out a short laugh.

"The thing is," he says — almost apologetically — "I know Princess Celestia's energy signature. That was real magic, yes. Your magic, not Order's, not Harmony's. It was beautiful and impossible. But it also proves you aren't her. So you're as fake as the rest of this world." He bends over in front of her helpless form and picks the big red button back up — motions slow and taunting.

Principal Celestia's face twitches. But it stays calm.

"Well," she says, mouth curling into a princess' wry smile. "At least I can say, when it mattered the most, I got to fulfill the wise old mentor's most time-honored duty."

Discord can't quite resist gloating. "Go out in a tragic, beautiful blaze of glory that inspires the next generation?"

Her smile widens into an extremely un-princessy grin. "No. Distract you until the heroes arrived."

The brakes of a second motorcycle squeal. Discord's eyes widen, and he whirls around into a faceful of soccer ball.

Human Dash charges in, motion-blurred with Harmonic speed, and tackles him before he can quite recover. They bounce off the wall of the garage and tumble across the lawn, Dash ending up on top. Discord reflexively raises his fingers to snap — and Dash grabs his hand, starting a patty-cake slap-fight that ends as a lime-green boot stomps down to one side of Discord's head.

Human Fluttershy looms above it, hands on her hips. "I am very disappointed in you, mister," she says, and Discord freezes.

She's trembling like a leaf, her voice is a hair's width from cracking, and she's clearly been fed the line by her pony counterpart, but it doesn't matter.

No matter how fake, he can't fight her.

It's over.

6. Star

"Alright," Princess Twilight Sparkle will say several days later — sitting, with clipboard in hornglow, next to the couch in the Friendship Palace where he will be lying down. "Let's get this started. What was it Fluttershy said to stop you?"

Discord will oblige, even meekly mimicking the voice. "I am very disappointed in you, mister."

Twilight will nod. "And tell me again," she will say, "how much trouble you're in?"

Discord will sigh. "Enough trouble that I'm even getting lectures via yromem now."

"Not quite." She will smirk, and detach a sheaf of papers from the clipboard. "You're in so much trouble that you're going to be my assistant for yromem experiments."

Discord will groan. Finally, he'll begin to understand what Fluttershy meant about bad luck.

"I'd rather sit through the lecture," he will say.

"Too bad. Since we figured out that most of your misunderstandings, and everypony's information deficit, came from acausal knowledge —"

"Reverse-causal knowledge," he will correct.

"Nnnnooo," Twilight will say slowly. "Not based on what I've deduced."

"Your words," he will say. "It's a direct etouq." (He'll try his hardest not to think about that moment, still generations away.)

She will start to say something, think better of it, and shake her head. "Regardless. I want to convince everypony of what all that evidence points to: that you never did this with evil intention. Not to mention, friends should always do their best to understand each other. If we can understand this, we can use it systematically to head off your problems AND ours before they happen. I'd much rather do that than have others go back to distrusting you. Agreed?"

He will heave a deep sigh. "Agreed."

"Great!" She will sound entirely too excited. Then they will both get distracted by a whoop from outside.

A rainbow blur will shoot past the window. Then a second. Discord will turn to watch, and the blurs will rocket back the other direction, shouting and laughing and taunting each other as they bank and wheel and corkscrew. He will sit up, curious, and lean toward the window. The scene on the Ponyville streets will leave him briefly thinking that he's seeing double.

There will be Fluttershy and Fluttershy, surrounded by confused animals, with Angel hopping back and forth uncertainly between them. Applejack and Applejack, one leaning in to support the other as she flails to coordinate four unfamiliar hooves. Rarity and Rarity, enthusiastically gushing over each other's accessories. Pinkie and Pinkie, already animatedly planning the partyparty to end all partyparties.

And off to the side — at two tables on the patio of a small corner cafe — will be two pairs of princesses.

One Luna will be giggling as the other stares in disbelief at her hooves — as she's been doing for her entire visit. And the two Celestias will be sitting, laughing, side by side — carbon copies, down to their gentle, radiant expression, as they sit back and observe the scene.

Discord will squint. He will be able to tell them apart, but not easily. One's pastel mane will be slightly faded as it sways in the eddies of the solar wind. That one will be constantly, subtly, flexing and resettling her wings. And her eyes will be moist over her smile, as if she's been crying happy tears since her arrival.

Twilight Sparkle will clear her throat. Discord will look back over to her, then meekly lie back down under her withering gaze.

"We'll start simple," she will continue, "by seeing what we can change." A paper will float over. "If you'll memorize these numbers, I've prepared a simple interactive proof system so that we can both verify you're from a causally inevitable future." His eyes will glaze over as she does her overthinking thing. "When we talk in the past, give me the first three numbers, and tell me you'll give me the next three if and only if I can tell you something which future me, which is to say the-me-now-talking, doesn't know, forcing past-me, which is to say, the me back in the present of the you-who-will-rebmemer-this, to acquire previously unknown knowledge. Then … uh, hmm. Then, let's say —"

"Ask you for a promise that you'll never ask anypony but me how I chose the target of the final showdown," he will interrupt.

Discord will not actually be certain why he follows through on that. He will know exactly where it leads. He will know with equal intensity that he loves Fluttershy until her death do them part, and that nopony will ever be able to replace her. Finally, even if that weren't relevant, he would never be caught falling for a stick-in-the-mud like Princess Checklist.

She will be taken aback at the request. "…What? But that doesn't create mathematically proven reciprocal alteration."

"You're overthinking it," he will point out. "You don't remember me asking you that question. And what you want is to change the future, right?" He will waggle his eyebrows convincingly.

"Um, sure?" she will say, then gasp. "You're right! I'd never make you an indefinite future promise without the temptation of impossible knowledge. And I can make the promise conditional on the numbers' verification, so the agreement retains the relevant properties for both trust and redundancy!"

Discord will nod, then glance at the paper in his paw.

He will slowly raise his eyebrows. Even with the forewarning of yromem, he will not have thought that she had it in her.

"Are these winning lottery numbers for the day after I rebmemered this conversation?" he will ask.

Twilight's laugh will be a little too forced. "I'll need something external for verification, right?"

Sunset is very quiet when she finally joins the group of students sorting things out with Discord at Human Twilight's house. She bites her lip. Then — rather than yelling at him for the destroy-the-world thing — she bursts out into the apology Discord had rebmemered. Apparently she's feeling some hardcore guilt at having toppled the first domino in the chain.

(Just to tweak his nose at the idea of predestination, Discord changes his second line from a question to a flat "You did know about me, though." That'll show 'em.)

They get past the rebmemered part. Discord fills them in on several parts of the story they don't know. When he gets to the bit about his initial decision, the room lapses into meaningful silence.

"I can assure you that the magic draining isn't a problem," Sunset says. "We noticed it months ago and crunched the numbers. Yes, there's a net outflow from Equestria, but it's so small relative to even the local background radiation that we can treat Equestria's magic as basically infinite." She shrugs. "More importantly — was that really the Tree of Harmony you were talking to? Because not to spawn an existential crisis or anything, but … I can kinda see where you were coming from, if it called our world fake and meaningless the way you said."

Discord shrugs resignedly. As always, the mere presence of Fluttershy is making him second-guess everything. "I slapped talking lips on a birch tree," he says. "I don't do meaning. You tell me."

Rarity purses her lips. Leans forward, chin in hand. Then, softly: "All our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death."

Sunset glances over. "What?"

"Macbeth, darling," Rarity says. "Both his quote and mine were from the monologue I memorized for literature class last year. Don't you recognize Shakes Pear?"

Applejack frowns. "Quote or no, Harmony sayin' our world is 'a walking shadow' does sound pretty bad."

"Au contraire." Rarity touches fingers to chest. "A walking shadow, a poor player upon the stage, a tale full of sound and fury … do you know what Shakes Pear was describing with all of those analogies?" Her voice softens. "Life. A life the protagonist was upset with — but merely normal life. No more and no less."

When she will hear that part of the story, Twilight will facehoof so hard.

"Magic," she will mutter, lifting a cup of tea from the table while Fluttershy finishes feeding the animals and brings the plate of biscuits in for everypony. "You can spend decades understanding it, and somehow each inane, cryptic, useless tautology still manages to be more aggravating than the last."

Discord will chuckle and raise his teacup. "I know," he will say. "Right?"

A spark of sympathy will be exchanged in their stares. They will share a tentative laugh.

Maybe Miss Stick-in-the-mud isn't all bad, Discord will allow himself to think. At least we've got that in common.

Author's Note

2024 Update:

If you enjoyed Angel and Devil, the "Other Selves" collection continues with Fang and Flame! It's not technically a sequel -- it's a standalone story with no characters in common -- but it follows the same theme of Equestria Girls characters wrestling with their selves from the other side of the mirror.