It was early afternoon when Celestia went into Luna’s bedroom with a trumpet and a bucket of ice water held in her magic.
Luna, as expected, was sprawled out on her bed, snoring. She looked so peaceful, Celestia almost regretted having to do this... but Luna was the one who’d decided to take Ancient History at 2 pm, when she normally wasn’t awake until 4 or 5.
Celestia put the trumpet to her mouth and began to blow. Luna rolled over in bed and smacked her with a wing, sending the trumpet flying, and immediately went back to sleep.
This called for stronger tactics. Celestia dumped the bucket of water on her head.
Luna jerked up in bed, spluttering and flapping her wings like a distressed chicken. “What the – Dis – wait, Tia?!”
Celestia grinned. “You wouldn’t wake up when I blew the trumpet. It’s one pm; you’ve an hour to get dressed and ready to go to class.”
“Ugh,” Luna moaned. “Why did I decide this was a good idea?”
“Because it was taking Ancient History that let me recognize that the Crystal Empire was coming back, last year, and that is how our friends and we were able to defeat the Diamond Queen before she turned all of Equestria to crystal and purge the corruption to turn her back into Queen Rarity, and we became the bearers of the Elements of Magic? Not to mention earning Queen Twilight’s gratitude, because Queen Rarity was one of her best friends and her dragon consort is Queen Twilight’s brother?” Celestia had met with Queen Twilight for private tutoring sessions in magic multiple times since then, but had never asked her how, exactly, an alicorn pony had a dragon for a brother. Given that she was good friends with a draconequus who had a unicorn for a brother, it wasn’t as ridiculous to her as it had seemed to some of her… well, companions. She really couldn’t call Sombra or Tirek friends, exactly; Sombra was Luna’s friend, though, and what did you call the guy who was one of the exes of your ex?
“None of this explains why I thought it was a good idea to take it at noon.”
“It’s 2 pm, not noon, and the only other timeslot was 9 am.”
“I should have taken that one. I could have stayed up for it and then gone to bed.” Luna pushed herself out of bed and shook herself, flapping her wings, which splattered water all over Celestia.
“I suppose I had that coming,” Celestia sighed.
“Let me get to the window,” Luna groused. “I want a morning flight before I have to go sit in a lecture hall.”
“Of course, but the sun is up. Are you sure you won’t burst into flames like a vampony?”
Luna just glared as Celestia giggled. She half-staggered over to the window and tried to push it open with her hooves. It wouldn’t push.
“How odd. Sister, I can’t get the window open. Could you--?”
“Sure.” Celestia lit her horn. Luna was a Pegasus, optimized for flight rather than strength or magic, and Celestia was a very powerful unicorn.
The window resisted fiercely. Celestia had to probe around with her telekinesis to figure out what was holding it closed. “Now this is very odd. There are vines all over the walls, and they weren’t there last night!” With the last word, she made a final energetic push, and one of the two sides of the window banged open. She stuck her head outside. “Oh. Oh, my. Luna, take a look at this.”
Luna squinted in the sunlight, but stuck her head out the window. “Do you think one of Discord’s spells went wrong?”
The walls of their dormitory were completely covered in thick vines, ivy and grape and various types of vines that Greenie might recognize but Celestia absolutely did not. What was more, they could see that the other buildings on Queen Twilight’s Friendship University campus were also completely covered in vines, and there were trees all over the campus that hadn’t been there before. One had grown straight through the giant sculpture of twelve different races holding hooves or paws in a circle of friendship, knocking over the pegasus, the griffon, and the changeling, and completely shattering the gargoyle. This would probably upset Tirek, whose older brother was a gargoyle (which begged the question of why he’d thought it was so weird that Queen Twilight had a dragon for a brother, especially since he knew that young Starswirl, Celestia’s assistant, was actually Discord’s brother.) It might upset Chryssy, too, since she was very sensitive about changeling acceptance into Equestrian society – but possibly not, because she was also pretty self-centered and the changeling sculpture had been of a love-sharing changeling, not a throwback love-taking changeling like she was.
“We’d better find him and ask,” Celestia said. “Can we even get to the stallions’ dorm?”
Luna managed to squeeze herself through the half-opened window. “Let me check.” She flew off, and returned within a few minutes. “It looks like Discord, Sombra and Tirek are trying to pull the vines near their window off, so I think we can get over there if I fly you.”
Celestia made a face. “I hate it when you fly me. What if we use the underground passages?”
“I didn’t check those, but with all those new trees, I don’t know; roots may have breached the foundations.”
“We should at least try,” Celestia decided. “We need to find Greenie, see if she knows anything about this.”
Tirek had his entire torso out the window, trying to pull magic out of the vines that completely covered the walls of their dorm. Discord was extremely tempted to put a sign on his rump while he wasn’t paying attention – “kick me”, perhaps, or maybe “dat ass” or “shake it!” But Sombra would probably tell Tirek he’d done it, which would miss the point.
“There’s a great deal of nature magic in those plants,” Tirek reported, pulling himself back in. “I can barely scratch the surface. I’d need to be a lot bigger to actually drain them.”
“Let me try again,” Sombra suggested. “Nature magic is a chaotic type, and we’ve already seen that Discord can’t do anything to them, so let’s try Order.”
“I wouldn’t say I can’t do anything to them,” Discord groused. “I made them grow muffins.”
“Wonderful, but it doesn’t solve the problem,” Sombra snarked, and then stuck his head out the window. His red, curved horn lit, and dark-colored magic washed over the plants, tiny black crystals appearing inside many of the vines and expanding to cut them. The severed side of the vines withered, but the side connected to the root just grew more shoots and continued to climb up the walls.
“Maybe I should go get Celestia?” Starswirl suggested. “Harmonic magic’s easier to combine with others…”
Tirek scowled at him. “How exactly would you propose to do that? The mares’ dorm is just as bad, and you can see that the path between the dorms is overgrown with shrubs and tall grasses. We can’t walk there, and of all of us only Discord can fly.”
“Why, thank you, T, I’m pleased to see you remember that,” Discord said, in a tone that could almost be mistaken for sincere.
“The two of you need to be professionals,” Sombra said, pulling his head back through the window. “This is a serious enough issue that it might require us to find the mares. This could be a matter for the Elements of Magic.”
“With our Elements being held by Queen Twilight in Canterlot, I’m not sure how you’d propose to use them,” Tirek said.
“Maybe I can get a message to Queen Twilight?” Starswirl pulled his ever-present notebook out of the equally ever-present floppy hat he always wore, yanked a sheet out, and began writing on it with a quill. “Dear Queen Twilight, help! We are trapped in the dorms by plants.”
“Don’t say that. It’s humiliating,” Tirek snapped. “We should solve the problem ourselves, not expect Queen Twilight to come in and save us.”
Starswirl gasped. His horn lit up, and a message scroll materialized out of nothing. “She’s just sent us a message!”
Discord plucked it out of the air before anyone else could. “Dear Discord, and also his friends: Help! There’s a terrible danger caused by forest plants taking over Equestria, and killer tomatoes are trying to eat ponies! I need a handsome young draconequus with powerful magic, oh, and his friends too, to solve—”
“Give me that,” Sombra said, his magic ripping the message from Discord’s paw.
Discord pouted. “You’re no fun.”
“Dear Starswirl, please gather the Bearers of the Elements of Magic and have them meet me in Canterlot. As you’ve probably seen, there is an emergency; forest plants appear to be taking over Equestria, and Canterlot is trapped in a powerful storm system that has grounded our pegasi. Discord and Celestia will need to teleport you; the trains are not running due to trees growing through the tracks.”
“What delight,” Tirek mumbled. Discord smirked. Tirek was not fond of being teleported.
“Let’s see if we can get through the basement to find the girls,” Sombra said.
“Or, I could teleport us to the girls’ dorm,” Discord suggested.
“Or you could not, and we could follow Sombra’s suggestion,” Tirek said.
Greensmith Apple, known as “Greenie” to her friends, was a native of Ponyville, where Queen Twilight Sparkle’s Friendship University was located. She belonged to a large and close-knit family, so it was her habit to leave campus at lunchtime to go get lunch at her family’s farm, Sweet Apple Acres. Granny Bloom made much better food than the lunch mares on campus did, in her opinion. (Celestia had pointed out to her that the lunch mares had to feed multiple species with different dietary requirements, and Granny Bloom did not, but Greenie had her opinion and it was very difficult to get her to change her opinions.)
As she finished up her apple fritter with dandelion salad and soybean-paste-with-carrot dumplings, though, she felt something… something odd shivering through her, and it seemed to affect the rest of the family as well. Her great-uncle, Big Macintosh, got up from where he was sitting on the couch and trotted over to the window.
“What’re you seeing, Big Mac?” Granny Bloom asked. “Feels like something wild’s coming through the earth.”
“Eeyup,” Uncle Mac agreed. He stepped aside to let Greenie’s dad, Bright Mac, take a look.
“Whoa there. The plants have gone crazy! Looks like the Everfree’s trying to grow over the fields!”
“Well, we need to put a stop to that,” Buttercup Pear, Greenie’s mother, said firmly. “Everypony get on out to the field! We’ve got some weedin’ to do!”
Greenie shook her head sadly. “Ma, Pa… I want to help out, but if this isn’t just happening on the Acres… I might be needed with the rest of my friends to put a stop to whatever it is.”
“Daughter, you know how proud we are of how you and your friends handled that thing with the Diamond Queen coming back,” Bright Mac said firmly. “We’ll fight the weeds, and you go see if you and your friends need to fight off whatever’s causing this craziness.”
“I’ll get my weedkiller!” Granny Bloom yelled, trotting off to her “lab”, the place where she mixed her potions. “Greenie, you get going before the weeds block you off!”
“Right!” Greenie put her plate in the sink, rinsed it quick, and then trotted out the door.
Outside the grass had grown to be as tall as a pony. The road was disrupted, the packed earth broken and crumbling around weeds sprouting from it. There were thick vines everywhere.
There was a reason she was called Greensmith – aside from the fact that she was green, and “Granny Smith” was a type of apple. Greenie braced her hooves against the ground and drew on the magic of the Earth, hard.
She was one of the most powerful earth ponies in Equestria, and she could shape plants, forcing them to grow in the places and the directions she wanted them to. But there was very little she could do about the torrent of wild magic racing through the ground. She could tell it was coming from the Everfree, and that it was equal parts nature magic – one of the earth pony specialties, that most farmers had to some degree – and chaos magic, though she only knew how to detect the latter because she was friends with Discord. Chaos mages weren’t exactly common; Discord was the only one she knew.
She didn’t need to be able to control it or stop it, though. All she needed to do was direct it. A path opened up in front of her, plants withering in the exact center and growing away from her path on the left and right sides. Greenie took a deep breath, and then began to gallop back to the University.
When Celestia and Luna checked, Greenie was not in her room – hardly unusual, she might not have come back from lunch yet – but her roommate Chrysalis was.
Chrysalis was strange. Most changelings formed close bonds with other changelings or with members of other species, feeding on the love of friendship that they shared between them, and experiencing that love as much as they were strengthened and fed by it. Most changelings were also brightly colored, and came in shapes reminiscent of iridescent beetles, or sometimes ladybugs. Hundreds of years ago, King Thorax had brought the secret of sharing love to the rest of the changelings, and had ascended to become their King.
Chrysalis was his own daughter, a princess of the changelings, and because of Thorax’s advanced age, it had been assumed that someday she would take the throne. But Chryssy was a throwback changeling – with a black carapace more reminiscent of an ant or a wasp than a beetle, and lacy legs that looked fragile, with holes in them. Chrysalis had been born unable to share love the way other changelings did, and it had made her arrogant and individualistic, and left her without friends or allies. So Thorax had sent her to Friendship University, and Greenie had stubbornly reached out to her to try to befriend her, and Celestia had joined in. Then they had all become the Elements of Magic, and Tirek, Chryssy’s elemental foil and partner, had become her friend as well.
So Chrysalis still didn’t know how to feed from shared love, and might never learn, but she was capable of experiencing friendship to at least some degree, and concern for her friends. Her father sent her flasks of love jelly so she wouldn’t have to feed on anyone at the University, and she did magical training with unicorns rather than other changelings because she was so much more advanced than they were in changeling-specific magic.
“We need to find Greenie and the boys and get to Canterlot,” Chrysalis said as soon as Celestia and Luna arrived. “My father has a message for Queen Twilight.”
Sometimes Celestia envied the changelings’ ability to send messages to each other telepathically. “That’s just what we were going to suggest. What does he want you to tell her?”
“Nature has gone mad,” Chrysalis said. “A storm system has appeared over our home, and plants are sprouting everywhere.”
“The same thing is happening here,” Luna said.
“Yes, well, the changelings live in a desert. We don’t get massive storm systems; we get torrential rain occasionally, but this is more like a hurricane, except for the problem that hurricanes don’t appear in the desert. And the plants always sprout during rain, but this is different. There’s far, far more of them than there usually is, and they’re taller, and there are vines everywhere.”
Celestia nodded. “Luna and I saw that something similar has happened here. Have you looked out the window yet?”
“No. You can’t fly, and neither can Greensmith, so I didn’t think of opening the window to fly to Canterlot.”
“You might not be able to,” Luna said. “I couldn’t, and Celestia was barely able to pull half of it open with her telekinesis.”
Chrysalis went to her window. It was covered with greenery to the point where she couldn’t see outside. “I see what you mean. Celestia. Fire spell?”
“I didn’t want to try that in case it spread. I don’t want to burn the school down.”
Chrysalis rolled her eyes. “The school is made of stone and crystal. It won’t burn. And if you can get the window open so Luna can get out, she can grab a cloud and put out the fire with rain if it spreads.”
“All right, then.” Celestia concentrated. Fire, heat and light were her specialties, the magical talents specific to her cutie mark, a symbol of the sun. In a moment, a roaring blaze outside the window was consuming the plants that covered it. Celestia kept focused, directing the fire away from the wooden casements that formed the two halves of the window, until enough had burned away that Chrysalis could easily push the windows open.
“I see Greensmith,” she reported. “She’s outside, on her way in.”
Celestia could see the vines and overgrowth parting to let Greenie through. Luna had better distance vision, being a pegasus. “She looks exhausted,” Luna said. “I think we should go to her rather than expecting her to come to us.”
“Is that safe?” Chrysalis asked. “We don’t know what these plants might do to creatures trapped within them as they grow.”
“With you and I there to hold them back with magic, it should be safe enough,” Celestia said. “Luna, why don’t you go tell Greenie to stay where she is, and then put out the fire, and then come get me?”
Unicorns couldn’t typically fly, because pushing against the ground to levitate themselves only worked when they were very close to the ground, and most unicorns could not directly lift themselves. But Celestia had trained her magic, most of her childhood, by playing with a chaos mage, who routinely altered his own gravity. She had learned spells to make herself considerably lighter, so her sister could easily carry her.
Before anyone could agree on whether they were teleporting, flying (Discord swore up and down he could give everyone temporary wings), or attempting to use the basement passages, Discord saw Luna outside, which drew his attention to the fact that part of the wall of the girls’ dorm was on fire.
“Now why didn’t we think of that?” he asked, pointing it out to Sombra and Tirek.
“I did,” Tirek said. “But I didn’t want to fireball hard enough to damage the walls, and when I tried less power, the plants didn’t catch. Also, I have limited magic if you recall.”
“Not feeding you,” Discord said sharply.
“I don’t even want chaos magic, it’s barely useful,” Tirek snapped back.
“I am going to trap Discord in a crystal and throw you out the window if the two of you can’t stop sniping at each other,” Sombra said to Tirek. “Here. Take this and stop feeding the chaos troll.” He made a ball of magic and enclosed it in a very, very thin layer of black crystal, then passed it over to Tirek. “You should easily be able to crack that with your hoof and consume the magic inside.”
Discord wasn’t waiting. He slid his entire long body out the window. The vines hadn’t managed to fasten it closed again, although there was one ivy runner that had bridged across it vertically. “HEY, LUNA!” he shouted.
Luna had dragged a cloud into place and was putting out the fire that presumably Celestia had started. She couldn’t hear him, or was acting like she couldn’t hear him, so he zipped over to her. “Luna! I see you got out the window!”
“Hello, Discord. Do you know where the rest of the team is?”
“In my bedroom, trying to figure out how to get out and get to you. Shall I go get them?”
“We’re meeting down there,” Luna said, pointing a hoof at the ground. There was Greenie, in a small circle of grasses and vines that were bending away from her. “Chryssy says we need to go to Canterlot; King Thorax has a message for Queen Twilight.”
“Well, isn’t that convenient! Queen Twilight has a message for us that we need to go meet with her! Apparently we have to teleport, trees have broken up the train tracks and there’s a storm system too powerful to fly into.”
Luna made a face. “I vote to go with the group that teleports with Celestia.”
“None of you appreciate my teleports even though I’m much better at it than Celestia.”
“No one has forgotten the time you accidentally took us to that world with the giant worms coming out of the sand that almost ate us,” Luna said.
“Oh, sure, bring that up again. That was one time.”
Within the next five minutes, the entire group, plus Starswirl, had gathered on the ground. Greenie reported what was going on at Sweet Apple Acres, and how she was sure this was coming from the Everfree; Chrysalis relayed her father’s message, and pointed out that the Badlands were nowhere near the Everfree; Starswirl relayed Queen Twilight’s message; and Discord tried several tricks to redirect the chaotic portion of the magic, none of which worked as well as he hoped.
“All right,” Celestia said. “It seems like this is definitely some kind of magical crisis. Queen Twilight has asked us to come to Canterlot, and warned us that we’ll have to teleport. Sombra, I think you know how to teleport yourself, but not others, right?”
“Yes; I can turn into shadow and teleport, but I’ve no idea how to do that for anyone else,” Sombra admitted.
“Chrysalis, can you teleport?”
The changeling shook her head. “Not yet.”
“All right. Sombra, you teleport yourself. I’ll take Starswirl and Luna; Discord, you take Chrysalis, Greenie and Tirek.” Chaos magic was better at teleportation than harmony magic was; Discord had been teleporting since early childhood and was much more experienced than Celestia at it. “We meet up inside the main hall at Canterlot Palace.”
There were seven Elements of Magic, three held by ponies – one of each race – and four held by other species.
Celestia, the unicorn, was Sun; her dominion was light, heat, fire, energy, and clarity – scrying spells, restoring damaged text, even sometimes prophetic dreams.
Luna, the pegasus, was Moon; she had of course the usual pegasus abilities, like Celestia had telekinesis and other normal unicorn abilities, but far more than that. When she slept, she could enter the dreams of others and dispel, or create, nightmares. With her wings, she could shape shadow around herself or others, to virtually disappear… or she could push aside shadows at nighttime, to reveal things hiding in the darkness, not by shining light on them but by simply making them visible in darkness. Due to the connection between the Moon and the tides, she could also affect bodies of water, far more than the average pegasus – she could make water flow or disperse without having to pull it into the air first.
Greensmith, the earth pony, was Earth; she had nature magic, and a connection to the rocks and stones and dirt that the planet itself was made of. Like most earth ponies, she was extremely strong; unlike most earth ponies, she was very aware of, and able to use consciously, her earth pony magic.
Sombra, the Umbrum, was Order; he could crystallize magic into solid objects, which usually appeared as black crystals. Like other Umbrum, he could transform into a shadow form and teleport in that way, and he was a master of controlling dark magic, a feat nearly impossible for most. He was also adept at mind control spells, and equally adept at resisting them. Superficially he looked like a unicorn, but he had no cutie mark.
Discord, the draconequus, was Chaos; an experienced chaos mage, he could use his powers to teleport, levitate, and generate any number of bizarre effects. He was the member of the group with the most raw power, but chaos magic was notoriously hard to control, so he couldn’t always make things happen the way he wanted them to.
Chrysalis, the changeling, was Love; it was ironic, as she was a changeling who fed on love but could not feed by sharing it. She could sense emotions in others, and could drain them – including emotions like anger and fear, though she wasn’t fond of doing so. She could cast spells that made others feel specific emotions, such as love, or calmness… or darker ones. As a princess of the changelings, she could call on any changelings she met to assist her, though as a student of Friendship University she had sworn to do so only in genuine need, so she couldn’t get another changeling to do her homework or something like that.
Tirek, the centaur, was Self; he could drain magic from any living creature that possessed it, including animals and plants, and channel it either into unicorn-style spells, or health, strength and greater size. Since he could drain magic, it was almost impossible to affect him with magic unless he chose, making him immune to mind control and emotion altering spells. The stronger he became and the more magic he held, the more magic he could drain, and the less resistance others could mount against his metamagical abilities.
All seven of them attended Queen Twilight Sparkle’s Friendship University, in Ponyville, on the edge of the Everfree Forest. The University was open to any individual of any species who wanted to attend, so long as they were willing to act in the spirit of friendship and tolerance. Celestia had been Queen Twilight’s personal student in Canterlot, at the School of Magic, before she and her sister Luna had both been accepted to the University.
They existed in three groups of partnership and opposition – Celestia, Luna and Greenie as Sun, Moon and Earth; Discord and Sombra as Chaos and Order; Chryssy and Tirek as Love and Self. Together, last year, they’d freed Good Queen Rarity of the Crystal Empire from being the cruel and deadly Diamond Queen, who wanted to turn all of Equestria into beautiful gems, and her consort Spike the dragon, and earned Queen Twilight’s eternal gratitude. And now, it seemed, they would be called on again.
Author's Note
Yes, yes. I am supposed to be working on finishing what I've got unfinished already, but there was a contest.
I'd been planning this roleswap AU for years, but I've only gotten off my butt to do anything about it because of the contest. So even if I don't finish in time for the contest deadline, which I almost certainly won't, at least the contest got me to get it out there.
Note that Discord is actually a lot less powerful in this AU than normal, but so far it's been hard to demonstrate that, because he's the magical powerhouse of the group. We'll see more of his limitations later.
The Spirit of Nature and the Alicorn of Storms
“Thank you for coming so quickly,” Queen Twilight said. Her long, flowing mane, usually smooth and fluid, had frazzled parts sticking out of it, particularly on top of her head. Celestia hadn’t even known Queen Twilight’s mane could do that.
Discord bowed, holding a rose that hadn’t been there a moment ago. “We are at your service, Your Majesty,” he said, practically purring it.
“It’s no problem, Your Majesty, we wanna stop this craziness with the plants as much as you do!” Greenie declared.
“King Thorax wanted me to tell you that the Badlands are being affected as well; there’s a huge hurricane-like storm system above our hive, and massive overgrowth of plants everywhere,” Chrysalis said.
Queen Twilight nodded. “I thought that might be the case. I’m expecting that everywhere in Equestria will be affected, but the closer to the Everfree, the more intense the effects become. At least, the nature effects. I strongly expect that the storms will appear over places where storms of that type almost never appear, because she’ll be showing off her power and seeking out challenges.”
“She?” Sombra and Tirek said at the same time, while Celestia herself said, “Queen Twilight, you know who’s doing this?”
“Sadly, yes, I do,” she said. “There are two of them, actually. Nowadays they call themselves Sylvan, the Spirit of Nature, and the Storm Queen, alicorn of weather.”
“Two of them?” Greenie scowled. “That’s darn surprising.”
“Yes,” Luna said. “We’re learning in Ancient History that most opponents of Equestria have typically not known the magic of friendship. Even Queen Rarity as the Diamond Queen had a consort, and she was mind-controlling him to make him obey her… not exactly friendly.”
“I know,” Twilight said. “One of the reasons Sylvan and the Storm Queen are so very dangerous is that they are best friends. They’re not evil, either of them. Not even to the degree of the Diamond Queen; the Diamond Queen was Rarity’s greatest desires, corrupted and turned cruel. Sylvan doesn’t want to harm ponies, but she wants us to exist in harmony with nature—”
“But don’t we exist in harmony with nature already?” Celestia asked, puzzled.
“Yeah, last I checked, farmers like my family are all about nature,” Greenie said.
“No,” Tirek said. “You only know nature as it appears in Equestria and its nearest environs. Outside the range of pony influence… in my homeland, and many other places, storms rage wild, and it’s all we can do to predict them. Controlling them? Out of the question. Fierce animals who prey on any creature they can find roam everywhere, not just one single forest. Prey animals will just as soon gore or trample or bite you, for they consider every creature that’s not one of their own kind to be a potential danger.”
Sombra nodded. “And the Umbra come from the lands around the Crystal Empire, outside the range of their magic. Up there, it’s cold and vicious. Every animal is for itself. I was surprised when I came down to Equestria that you ponies have to manage nature itself – help birds find food in the springtime, wake animals from hibernation, that sort of thing. Nothing like that happens in my homeland.”
“Just like the Everfree,” Discord said. “Somehow I always suspected that Equestria’s harmony was an aberration and the natural state of the world is chaos.” He stuck his tongue out at Sombra.
Sombra rolled his eyes. “Yes, of course the natural state of the world is chaos. The natural state of everything is chaos. Order is all about imposing structures that allow people to survive and thrive, eliminating the natural chaos to create law and civilization.”
“And Sylvan’s belief is that we ponies have gone far too far in the direction of order,” Queen Twilight said. “That what we have is not harmony, but rigid control. She was banished to the Everfree a few hundred years ago—”
“Oh!” Starswirl practically bounced in place, his favorite floppy hat flopping over his eyes. “I get it! So that’s why the Everfree is always wild and you can’t control it!”
“Right,” Queen Twilight said, smiling down at him. “The Everfree storms are under the control of the Storm Queen, and while she delights in creating terrifying weather systems that only she can control, she generally follows Sylvan’s lead and lets nature create the weather. Ordinary pegasi don’t have nearly enough magic to push back against her.”
“The Everfree seems a strange place to banish someone, though,” Luna said. “Because we can just walk into the Everfree when we want, so why couldn’t they just walk out? And why has no one seen them?”
”I used to live there,” Discord said. “I never saw a couple of alicorns running around.”
“Sylvan is not… exactly… an alicorn. Nature magic is chaotic. She’s not quite as unusual in appearance as a draconequus, but she definitely shows aspects of being a chaos mage.”
“Hmm,” Discord said, rubbing his hands together. “That sounds very interesting.”
“She is an enemy of Equestria. Not a potential girlfriend,” Tirek sneered.
“I’ll bet she’s better looking than you,” Discord retorted.
“That’s not what you used to say.”
“Before you betrayed me, you mean?”
Celestia magicked both their snouts closed with her telekinesis. It didn’t last – Tirek consumed the magic and Discord used chaos to dispel it – but it lasted long enough for her to say, “Enough, both of you. Queen Twilight is briefing us.”
“How did they get out of their banishment, then?” Sombra asked.
“I banished them originally with… different tools. Not the Elements of Magic. At one point we had a different set of magical tools, the Elements of Harmony. But… for reasons… banishing them with the Elements of Harmony broke the Elements of Harmony. Possibly forever.” Queen Twilight sighed. “So I have been working for a very long time on creating the Elements of Magic, because I knew we would need something when the Diamond Queen reappeared. And as soon as you purged the corruption and turned her into Queen Rarity again… the bindings holding Sylvan and the Storm Queen in the Everfree began to fail.”
“So this was inevitable,” Luna said somberly.
“If it was inevitable, how come you’re just telling us about it now? No offense, Your Majesty, but it’d have been durned helpful for my family to know this might happen,” Greenie said.
“I was hoping that they would come to me first, to negotiate,” Queen Twilight said. “They knew I never wanted to banish them; they knew I wanted to try to negotiate with them, to find some compromise where we can all get some of what we want.” She sighed. “We were friends once,” she said, and it was almost a whisper. “I thought maybe that would mean something.”
“You were friends?” Celestia asked, gently. She knew what it was like to lose friends. It was terrible.
Queen Twilight drew a deep breath. “That was a long time ago. Let’s focus on right now.” She strode over to a vault door, and placed her horn in the lock. “I’m sorry to say that we may have to banish them again, if they insist on destroying Equestria as it is without any regard for the lives and livelihoods of ponies.” The door slid open. “I’d rather not, if we can talk to them, but it if comes to it, I’m sure you can use these to banish them back—”
She stared into her vault. An absurdly large number of rats stared back.
Greenie shrieked, and Luna took to the air. Celestia shielded herself instinctively, and Starswirl jumped onto her back with a cry of his own. Tirek backed up frantically. The rats squeaked in equal fear, and streamed out of the vault, some of them stuffing themselves rapidly through a hole in the wall at the bottom of the vault, the others racing forward and escaping into Queen Twilight’s audience room.
Discord snapped his fingers, and turned one rat into a balloon, but before he could do it to any others, Queen Twilight shook her head. “No. We won’t harm them. They’re innocent animals.” Sombra pulled back his own attack, where he’d been about to fire crystals into them. The Queen lifted rats in her telekinesis. There must have been dozens of them. She strode out of the audience room, dozens of rats squeaking around her head, including the one who had been a balloon until Discord undid his spell. She put them all back in the vault and closed the door.
“What happened to the Elements?” Chryssy demanded.
“Sylvan has them, almost certainly,” Queen Twilight said grimly. “She can control animals to do her bidding, as easily as she can force plants to grow.”
“I prefer to think of it as ‘persuading’ them,” a beautiful soft voice said.
Queen Twilight took a step back. “How – we were teleport-shielded!”
“You always relied too much on magic to solve your problems, Twilight,” the… being… in the doorway said. “I came in on your stargazing and sun-raising balcony. None of your pegasus guards are currently airborne, and the ones in the hallway were… persuadable.”
She wasn’t, exactly, an alicorn. It was honestly impossible to tell what she was. In face and in the front, she was clearly an alicorn pony, of similar age and strength to Queen Twilight – she was taller, but also thinner and more delicate-seeming. She had a golden, shimmering coat and a mane like Queen Twilight, that flowed and moved of its own accord. It was pink, but greenery grew in it – occasional vines, some flowers, sometimes a branch covered with leaves. As she walked forward and the rest of her body came out of the doorway’s shadow, though, her strangeness became apparent.
To begin with, she had three pairs of wings – delicate butterfly wings in many colors, pink pegasus wings, and bat wings in a dark pink that was almost purple. Her body was much longer than a pony’s, to accommodate the extra wings; her barrel was as thick as the Queen’s, relatively speaking and accounting for the fact that she was overall thinner, but somewhat snaky and reminiscent of Discord’s. Like any other pony, she had four hooves. Unlike any other pony, she had a lion tail. When she spoke, they could see that in her mouth there were small fangs, not large imposing ones like Discord’s one snaggletooth.
She should have looked freakish, but despite her strange body, she was incredibly graceful. Her steps were soft, as if her hooves were sinking into forest loam instead of clopping against the polished stone floor. Air flowed around her as her butterfly wings beat gently, even as the other two pairs lay still on her back.
“Whoa,” Discord whispered, maybe just a little too loudly. Hearts glittered in his eyes, and his pupils were suddenly ridiculously large, like a Neighponese artistic depiction of a teenage filly seeing a handsome stallion.
Celestia stepped on his foot. The dragon foot – it was more resistant to pain and also bigger and easier to step on. “Discord! This is our opponent!” she hissed. “Be professional!”
Queen Twilight started to say, “Fl—”
“Sylvan,” the strange pony-like mare corrected her. “No other name. Not anymore.”
“Sylvan,” the Queen repeated. “Why did you attack out of nowhere? Why not come to me and discuss things first?”
Sylvan wound her way around Queen Twilight, pacing in circles. Her lion tail swished, making her look like a predator. “Discuss what? Didn’t we discuss everything there was to discuss the last time? Before you locked Storm and me into the trees and the winds of the forest?” She tilted her head, looking into the Queen’s eyes with her own large, sad pools of blue. “I didn’t like not having a body anymore,” she said softly. “Not to eat, to breathe, to touch my animals unless they choose to climb me…”
“You used to say a long time ago that you’d like to be a tree,” the Queen said. “I never wanted to banish you and seal you away in the first place, but if I had to do it, I thought sealing you into the trees would be the most… kind thing to do.”
As the Queen spoke, Sombra and Tirek looked at each other, and nodded solemnly. Celestia caught it, and nudged Luna, who tapped Greenie with a wing, and Discord, who was not paying attention, his eyes fixated on the Spirit of Nature. Chrysalis met Celestia’s eyes and did a slow blink, a trick she’d picked up from impersonating cats, to the best of Celestia’s knowledge.
Without any further warning, Sombra and Celestia both fired at the Spirit of Nature, Sombra’s horn emitting a beam of darkness that solidified into black crystals when it struck a target, and Celestia’s firing a beam of raw solar energy. Both struck… a thick green vine that hadn’t been there a moment ago. Luna got above Sylvan and dove, while Greenie slammed a hoof down on the crystal floor of the palace, making it shake and tremble.
Sylvan reared, her elongated body bending backward like no equine body ever should, causing Luna to overshoot her. Grimly Luna climbed again. The floor trembled again, but this time it wasn’t Greenie’s work; more vines burst through the floor, reaching to twine around Greenie and Sombra. Sombra fired his crystals faster than Celestia had ever seen before, but to no effect; the vines caught the crystals, withered, and were replaced by more vines bursting up from below the damaged part.
As soon as the fight started, Discord grabbed his younger brother and disappeared, Starswirl’s cry of “Dis-“ fading as they vanished.
Tirek fired a blast at the equine-like creature. She ducked, going almost completely flat. Luna divebombed her again, but this time, she caught Luna in her mane, which moved like one of the vines she was controlling and flung Celestia’s sister at Chrysalis, who’d been preparing an attack spell. Both of them went down in a tangle, and the vines got them both and tied them down.
“Stop it!” Queen Twilight yelled. “Back down, students! You can’t beat her!”
So far Celestia saw no evidence of that. She used her solar magic to burn away the vines holding Luna and Chrysalis down, freeing them both, and Chrysalis cast her spell, trapping Sylvan in sticky green goo. Tirek fired another of his magic blasts at her, grinning broadly. Obviously he thought he had her on the ropes – she’d either have to use her horn to shield, and then he could eat her magic, or the blast would hit her since she couldn’t dodge.
However, she bent her head and folded her pony wings over it, like a shield, and Tirek’s magic just… fizzled against her wings. And then Celestia heard a strange sound, like a rustling, and looked down.
The entire floor of the room was covered with cockroaches and ants.
Horrified, she screamed, creating a shield to serve as a scoop to run through the bugs and push them aside. They were swarming around Sylvan’s trapped hooves, devouring the goop Chrysalis had trapped her in. Tirek fired at the floor, smashing a large number of them. Discord re-appeared, hovering over the floor in a lounging position, but did nothing. Celestia was beginning to wonder if his obvious aesthetic appreciation of the Spirit of Nature was going to prevent him from participating in the battle at all.
“That wasn’t nice,” Sylvan said sharply, lifting into the air and staring Tirek directly in the eyes. “You are being a very, very bad centaur.”
To Celestia’s horror, Tirek stammered, and then began to sob. Self-possessed, strong-willed Tirek had dropped to all four of his knees. “I’m sorry!” he blubbered. “I’m sorry, please don’t tell Scorpan or Mother or Father, please, I’m sorry…”
Queen Twilight had cut Greenie and Sombra free of the vines as soon as the ants and cockroaches looked as if they were approaching the two too closely. “Hey, nature lady, two can play your game!” Greenie yelled, both hooves pressed hard against the floor and sweat beading all over her body, as slowly Sylvan’s vines started to show signs of withering.
“All of us together!” Celestia shouted, watching as Luna reached the ceiling far above. She, Sombra, Chrysalis, Greenie and Luna concentrated attacks at the same time, Greenie withering Sylvan’s vines, Luna diving at her, and Chrysalis, Sombra and Celestia herself firing spells at her—
--and then the air was full of hornets, and Celestia screamed at the stinging pains in her flank and her neck, beating at the insects with her magic, hearing her friends shrieking in pain as well—
“ENOUGH!” Discord yelled, and all of the hornets dropped out of the air as larvae, squirming on the ground. The vines turned into silly string, easy to pull free of, and the ants and cockroaches became leaves and twigs, that blew away in a sudden wind. He was still in the air, but now upright, eyes glowing. “Thank you for the excellent chaos, dear lady, this feels great! But I draw the line at you attacking my friends with hornets.”
Sylvan’s eyes narrowed. Vines burst through the ground again, reaching upward for Discord – and crumbled, turning to sand. A flock of bats squealed as they descended on him – and veered away, enticed by the appearance of a giant pile of apples over by Queen Twilight’s throne. Discord smirked. “Your magic’s based in chaos,” he said, “and chaos is my element. I can do this all day!”
And then a bolt of lightning struck him, hard, making all his fur and feathers stand on end, and he toppled over, falling to the floor.
“DISCORD!” Celestia yelled, and started toward him, but was blown back by a gust of fierce wind. She looked up, and saw who must have attacked Discord – an alicorn with wings larger than Queen Twilight’s, though her body was slightly smaller, hovering in the air behind Discord. She was grinning arrogantly.
“All day, huh? Maybe you need to look behind you more often!” the alicorn said boastfully. She was deep, dark blue, the color of a stormy sky, her eyes a shade of purple that was almost magenta, and her cutie mark was a thundercloud firing a rainbow-colored lightning bolt. Her mane was much shorter than the two alicorns, rainbow-colored and spiky. It, too, blew in the imaginary breeze that Queen Twilight and Sylvan’s manes moved in, but hers moved with almost violent speed, as if the imaginary breeze was in fact a tornado or a hurricane. A thundercloud floated above her as she hovered, despite the fact that they were all inside Queen Twilight’s throne room.
“Stop it!” Queen Twilight shouted. “Students, stand down!”
Chrysalis’ horn lit up – and then vines burst out of the ground again and wrapped tight around all of them, except for Luna – who’d narrowly avoided the vines, just in time to be caught in a miniature cyclone. The dark blue alicorn smirked at her. “Nice moves, kid, but you gotta get up real early in the morning to beat the Storm Queen!”
“Let my sister go!” Celestia shouted, struggling against the vines.
“Oh, yeah, sure, no problem,” the Storm Queen said. The cyclone stopped, and a thoroughly dizzy Luna pitched to the ground, where the vines grabbed her as well.
Queen Twilight glared at the alicorn and the… whatever Sylvan was. “I don’t appreciate you attacking my students.”
“Your students attacked Sylvan! What, didja think she was just going to sit there and wave her hooves and beg them to stop?” the Storm Queen sneered.
“I told them to stop fighting… and I know perfectly well that Sylvan could have immobilized them at any time. They’re not alicorns; they can’t defend against the Stare.”
“That would be cruel,” Sylvan said softly. “I used it against the centaur because he was killing my creatures, but it’s far too brutal to use it for my own defense.” She gestured with a hoof at the crystal floor. “I do apologize for your floor, though, Twilight.”
“Don’t apologize for something you’re not sorry for,” the Queen said tightly. “You’ll do the same as this to every building in Equestria.”
“Oh, no, this high up on the mountain the vines don’t naturally want to grow so much,” Sylvan said. “I only asked them to because your students were attacking me.”
“But you’re still gonna… ugh… do this to all the buildings in Equestria?” Greenie snapped, panting with the effort to breathe as the vines constricted her, keeping her from breaking them with her earth pony strength. “Why? If you’re gonna ruin our livelihoods and our homes, seems to me you owe us an explanation!”
“Nature owes you nothing,” Sylvan said sharply. “You ponies feel you have the right to control all of nature, to bend it to your will. Plants and animals thrive only in the places ponies have decreed they should be, and only under pony care. My creatures have forgotten how to live for themselves, without ponies tending them as if they were pets. Ponies do not have the right to control nature even if you have the power.”
“We Changelings live in a desert,” Chrysalis snarled. “Nothing grows there! Why did you attack us?”
“I didn’t,” Sylvan said. “I infused all of Equestria with the magic of nature, as it should be, going everywhere, not limited only to the places earth ponies have concentrated it. Why do you think nothing grows in your homeland, Chrysalis? Sombra, why do you think the home of the Umbra is so barren and rocky, with food so hard to grow and to come by?”
“Because the ground is frozen nine out of twelve months,” Sombra growled. “It’s hardly a mystery!”
Sylvan shook her head. “Life finds a way. It adapts. There would be life all over the realm you call home, if the ponies hadn’t pulled the nature magic out of the ground all around the borders of Equestria and sucked it into their farms and orchards.” She glared at Greenie. “The apple trees certainly grow strong and healthy… but all around the borders of Equestria, desolation encroaches.”
Discord had squirmed out of the vines that held him, or possibly teleported. “If you’re responsible for the Everfree, then do that to the desolations. I can see perfectly well that ponies can’t pull any of the natural magic of the Everfree out; why would you have to destroy all of Equestria just to make the Badlands and the Umbral Territories thrive?”
“I’m surprised it doesn’t disturb you as well,” Sylvan said. “You wield chaos and you claim it for your element, but you’re comfortable with the encroachment of ponies’ ideas of harmony – which are nothing more than control – on the chaos of nature?”
Discord shrugged. “I didn’t say I was comfortable with it, but I don’t think it’s worth hurting millions of ponies over.” He snapped his talon, and the vines that bound them all turned to paper. Celestia broke free of her bindings easily. “I also don’t appreciate you tying up my friends.”
“Well, we don’t appreciate you guys attacking us!” the Storm Queen blustered.
Sylvan held out a hoof in a gesture symbolic of holding the Storm Queen back. “No, Storm, they were defending their nation, and they’re children. We can hardly hold it against them.”
“You don’t even remember, do you,” Queen Twilight whispered. “Storm… don’t you remember when that was us? Sylvan, don’t you?”
“Nope! Not a thing!” the Storm Queen said dismissively. “Don’t care, either!”
Sylvan said, “Perhaps you might have worried about that before committing acts of magic dark and unnatural,” in a lecturing tone of voice. “We certainly do remember where you took us from, and we know well what you must have done.”
Queen Twilight shook her head. “We’ve been over this. It wasn’t like you think it was. And I’ve told you this before. I’d already lost both of you… I couldn’t bear to lose any more. I didn’t know it would draw the two of you back when I did it. And I certainly didn’t know you’d remember nothing of our friendship, or that you’d be dedicated to destroying Equestria when you spent so many years protecting it, by my side.”
Celestia turned, shocked. “Queen Twilight, what happened?”
“At another time, when we don’t have adult business, you might want to ask Twilight about necromancy, and why you shouldn’t do it,” Sylvan said.
“It wasn’t—”
“It doesn’t matter.” Sylvan cut Queen Twilight’s outraged rebuttal off. “I’ve actually come to make you an offer, since you seem to think we can ‘negotiate’ the differences in our beliefs and come to a compromise.”
Queen Twilight’s eyes narrowed and her ears set back. “I’m listening,” she said guardedly.
“I am willing to withdraw my influence, in exchange for two things. My first demand is for concessions. You will create more parks and more wilderness reserves, and you will allow me to exert my energies there, to make them more like the Everfree – truly wild, free of pony control. Earth ponies will withdraw from the borders of Equestria, to allow the lands in the desolate places the opportunity to regenerate their nature magic.”
“I can agree to the first. To the second – I will not tear ponies from their homes, but I am willing to encourage earth ponies to settle in your desolate places, to draw nature magic into the places they may have pulled the magic away from.”
“I will consider that possibility. But I have a second demand.”
“I thought that was your second demand.”
“No, the two things I want are unrelated to each other. All of what I’ve already asked is my first demand.”
“Hey,” the Storm Queen said. “You’ve got everything under control here, so I’m gonna take off, okay?”
Sylvan smiled. “Go on, Storm. I know this part doesn’t interest you.”
From the face the Storm Queen was making, Celestia didn’t think “didn’t interest” would be as accurate a description as “was disgusted by” or “was unhappy with”, but Sylvan either didn’t notice or didn’t want to acknowledge. “Sure thing,” the Storm Queen said, the insouciant grin back on her face as if she had never grimaced at all. And then she was gone, flying so fast she looked like a streak of darkness on the air.
Queen Twilight rubbed the top of her snout with her hoof as if she was wearing glasses and trying to ease where they pinched her. “Very well, Sylvan. What’s your second demand?”
Sylvan looked over at the seven Elements of Magic, examining each one of them, looking them up and down before moving on to the next. Finally her gaze returned to Queen Twilight. “One of them. As my mate.”
Author's Note
OK, after this chapter I think you can all glimpse where I'm going with this one.
Man, I wish more than five character tags were still supported.
