The worst challenge that Celestia ever gave Discord was being an adult. How she managed to make that even more difficult should have frustrated him from the moment he met her, and instead, all it did was whip every shred of frustration he had into raw focus. He was never a draconequus of pride or cunning and all things so dark, gloomy, and brooding. No, he just craved that taste of victory, the idea that he could be a being so effortless like a little white filly of grace and poise who grew into an ethereal mare. Chaos was all big shows, bigger sounds, and oodles of effort to get a maximum reaction from every creature that witnessed it.
That was the thing about chaos; it needed witnesses and challenges as much as the stone needed Sisyphus to get it rolling.
Discord just never would admit to such a thing, or, at least never in a way that anypony would understand. No fun could come from such a thing.
…
The first time that they had laid eyes on one another, there were two things to notice. First, Discord knew that Celestia was utterly different from him. Second, it was in their differences that they were the same. They carried themselves like they cast no shadows, or at the very least that every other creature was their shadow, and only he would admit to that. Even as a filly and a cub, each of them acted like the guests of honor at a party that had not been set up yet - a party that they were only half-aware of that they were supposed to star in. That very concept was one he would learn centuries later, as an older draconequus who knew both the worship of the forefathers of Saddle Arabians and the refined ways of Celestia’s little ponies.
He rarely bothered to call her princess, even after he had learned that she had been another civilization’s long before the tribal ponies of the northern wastes had gotten their hooves on the diamond that this young goddess was and called her coal. To him, it was just too evident in the way that nopony called a teacup dinky or breakable because it was too obvious. Instead, testing out those qualities would be that much more fun.
Why talk about a lyre’s quality when there were so many notes to show off a song?
When presented with the Alicorn dubbed by mortal ponies as their most perfect and beloved hero-princess, why not put every quality to the test? Better yet, why not make it one that befits the draconequus who could not see himself as anything but a bard of life?
In the earliest moments of their shared youth, his motives had been much more simple. When confronted with the prettiest, most fascinating thing he had seen since the first incarnation of blue cheese, why not tell her by giving that irresistible mane a gentle pull and asking if she wanted to see him touch his tongue to his elbow?
He promised it would work that time and the stupified reaction that he saw on her face as it worked made him come to two very important realizations.
For all her attempts at the girlish predecessor to adult coyness, she was rather pretty. Even upside down, and certainly past her bizarre, sand-white, totally symmetrical features. Long after they split from where their diverging adolescence lead them, Discord remembered her mane and its dawn-pink splash of color.
Second, and most importantly, he realized that elbows just did not taste very good, no matter what species one’s body part came from.
…
Immaturity had numerous indulgences. Discord had never felt guilty for a single foray into such hedonism before Celestia. By Tartarus, he never even called his chaotic temptations’ results hedonism before. Doing so was to admit that there was a lack of control over the one thing he wanted to have a grip on: himself. Nothing had ever been more perplexing than to have his hilarity thrown in his face as hilarious, as though he were a laughing stock. Even when he was faced by a former friend bogged down in speech not her own and mortal folly and their boring ways - the very ones that he had come to save them from - her dimmed light made him look dimmer still.
She spoke of him as a child, with her sister as her own ghost, though neither of them could know death. His own friend had a war declared on him and his grand design of un-design and disorder. In doing so, she who thought herself so adult made him a child.
And by Tartarus, she was vocal about it.
Forget how much that stung, for a fellow in eternity to forsake him for the cruel and temporary. She had shown herself to be a master of the strings as much as he was, only her strings were hooked to herself more than any other creature. Celestia was perfect in that way, keeping herself queenly cold and measure for measure.
If her oldest friend threatened with war and dismissed her work as an ‘invasion’ this and ‘colt-beast’s playground’ that, she would have never caved in to that challenge.
Celestia would never have granted herself the indulgence.
By the time Discord realized he wanted that kind of status - that of a frozen one, colder at heart than any frozen north she had returned from, and able to bury it all, he was petrified with no chance to shake the follies of youth from himself.
…
He had been moved. The whole city had. Discord knew that he was in a city because after Tia and Luna had unleashed the World Tree’s artifacts upon him, it was Celestia who positioned him in the most intact of all the cities in their land. There, the ponies could gawk at his state as an example of the divine sisters’ union with the World Tree and the untold power it produced - and the way that monsters were slain if they messed with the goddesses. He was only the first, or so it seemed. Distantly he knew that some other statues had been added. That he could sense.
None had voices. All were without minds. That was just one of the many tortures that came with his state.
He had realized that the World Tree, that old primeval thing, would have artifacts beyond any measure that the gods of the world would be able to tap into. When Celestia ordered her-shadow-that-had-once-been-Luna to wage mortal warfare against him, he knew that eventually, the realization that powerful, beyond-mortal means were needed to defeat him would dawn upon both. Being the fine draconequus usurper that he was, he had to stay enough steps ahead of them.
What better thing to do then slowly sicken the heart of the planet, the great World Tree? Faith had to be on his side, the faith that the artifacts of uncontrollable power would no longer work without where their roots sank into the earth.
In that respect, he had been wrong. What he was right about was a truly terrible thing; no matter the divinity of the now-active goddesses that had once been those closest to him, they had no control over the results that were brought by their rinky-dink new toys.
That was why they could move him like he were an ordinary lawn ornament. Except he was no longer sure that there was a ‘they’ anymore. For what little certainty he had, it had been far too long since he heard Luna’s voice. During their war on him, Luna was a shadow who spoke little and whose eyes held untold sorrows. She was too pathetic to him, all internal gloom and a pale shade of the powerfully clever little filly he had known. Without any brashness and boldness, he was inevitably drawn to Celestia alone, as was inevitable. She was the constant figurehead, the politician, the one who never shut up, the very lady who doth proclaim too much and that much more.
(Now that, of course, was a fine line. Perhaps even one fit for a tale one day, if anypony dare dream it once again.)
Luna had simply faded, with the frightening abruptness of a mortal. Like a war casualty, it was like he had blinked and missed her. In some ways, Discord was certain he had. There was no more Luna and a great magical imbalance had managed to reach him at one point. Nothing was the same in stone, but he had at least felt the profound sensation enough to know what was meant by the lesser version of the spasms that had rocked him in his free days.
With Luna gone, the world had become both frighteningly more active and profoundly dead all at once. He was unsure how to explain the latter, it was one of the many screams-he-could-not-unleash in his current state with just how frustrating it was. The narrowness of his world was just another form of agony he had to endure in a life that had previously held next to nothing in the way of physical pain. Not only had he been moved, but the whole mountain was also teeming with the sounds of construction and revitalization.
Discord could no longer pick out the sounds and minimal sensation of life so clearly. That waned quickly, in what he imagined would have been the first few days and nights. Only after the time after Luna and the shaking of Canterhorn mountain with the voices of laborers and symphonies of a city being built up for something grander had two points become quite clear.
At some point shortly after the hollowness where Luna had been was quite keen, Celestia had visited him. During that visit, she had been crying. Celestia always hated crying, cursing it as the weakest of emotions even as a filly, one that was shameful, uncontrollable in a way suggesting masculinity before she even fully understand what that meant. At the ages Discord had seen her crying, in the times when he knew to cheer her up, the only thing she had really known to insist was that crying was for colts. Echoes in his maelstrom of memory where nothing ended and began clearly any more thrust this crying Celestia to mind, one who wept as he had never known her to.
Lastly, when he realized that he had been thinking of her again, there was a vine of roses winding up the base of his statue; the sensation of their thorns against his hindlegs just barely there.
Author's Note
I am desperately sorry to have inflicted the horror of spontaneous midnight fanfiction upon you all. The editing I did on this is so minimal I'm ashamed to even mention the word 'editing' in this. Though, I will mention that this had more flashbacks in whatever the fuck the hasty outline I had for this was, even though the idea of outlining something you clack out in an hour is stupid. If y'all want me to pull this version and slip those flashbacks in at some point, yell at me in the comments.
Uhh, might be worth mentioning that I have some in-progress one-shots with these two in them buried somewhere in my rotating list of projects. They'll see the light of day eventually, as does everything I write.
