"Release me!" Hydia writhed against the chains binding her to the ledge near the top of the volcano. "Else thou shalt seal thy doom, foul witch!"
The sunlight flashed against the lamia queen's dark-green scales as if she were wearing jade armor, but Celestia refused to squint. It was her sunlight, after all. "Of us two," she said, landing lightly among the scattered rocks, "methinks 'witch' best applieth to thee." The merest flicker of her magic hauled her equally dark-green carfgo into view. "For it is thy hideous spellcraft and that of thy daughters that hath brought about this entire situation."
Hydia's forked tongue lashed. "My daughters!" she wailed, straining more urgently, her arms wrapped so tightly to her sides, they could scarcely flex. "What hast thou done to them? What hast thou done?"
Celestia cut the power to her horn and let the two younger lamias drop, their long, broken bodies flopping to the stone surface between her and Hydia. "I offered them a choice: harmony or death."
"No!" The chains groaned under Hydia's onslaught, but Celestia knew they would hold. Luna had forged them herself in the fires of this very volcano, the engine by which the three lamias had sought the destruction of Equestria. "Thou hadst no right!" Droplets shimmered at the corners of Hydia's eyes. "My babies!" Her screeching voice cracked into low, wracking sobs. "My darling, wonderful babies..."
Impatience prickled the pink hair at the base of Celestia mane, and granite shattered when she stomped a hoof. "I warned them!" she bellowed. "As I warned thee, Queen Hydia! 'Twas thy refusal to—!"
"Kill thee, kill thee, kill thee," Hydia was muttering, rocking back and forth as much as her chains would allow, her eyes bunched to mere slits. "Boil thy blood within thy veins and shrivel thee up with poison; melt thy bones and char thy flesh and feast on thy succulent marrow..."
Firing her horn, Celestia reluctantly channeled power into the spell Luna had devised. Celestia hadn't seen the need for such a thing, but Luna, tears streaming down her face after the battle with the two lamia sisters, had made Celestia swear by the long-dead gods that she would employ this spell from now on rather than killing Equestria's enemies. "To Tartarus with thee, then." The very word felt jagged against her tongue. "Thou shalt find it as empty as thy shriveled heart."
Under the weight of her magic, the mountain shivered, then shook, then cracked. "For shouldst thou behave as a mindless animal," she added with a bit more volume, "thou shalt be caged as a mindless animal." A flap of her wings carried her upward as the entire side of the volcano shuttered with spasms, quivered in place for perhaps two heartbeats, and finally collapsed into the depths below, taking Hydia and her lifeless daughters from Celestia's sight.
Staring at the earth sloshing like water to fill the hole left by the volcano's descent, Celestia tried to shake that weeping serpentine face from her mind's eye. And yet she found she couldn't.
"Thou darest?" Tirek's wispy husk of a voice asked from within the cage. "Mine is the immunity of the diplomat!"
Celestia nearly spat. "Thine is the fate of the invader." She stepped back, the thick and muggy magic of Tartarus making the air more like soup to her lungs. "This, therefore, shall be the entirety of thy world until the spells woven herein convince thee to choose a more harmonious path."
He merely glowered, and that suited Celestia fine. As far as she was concerned, Luna had already wasted too many words remonstrating with this ruffian; what he truly needed—and deserved—was a well aimed axe to the face. That Luna considered reformation possible for a creature like Tirek showed more than anything else how her dream-walking powers had adversely affected her judgment in the hard reality of the waking world. After all, if villains had consciences to which appeals could be successfully directed, they wouldn't be villains in the first place.
But Celestia had promised, and for all that she considered it an exercise in futility, she would hold her tongue and allow Luna's magical dungeon yet another inmate.
Turning, she marched down from the platform upon which she and Luna had placed Tirek's cage, her attention fixed and her hooves guiding her only toward the giant double doors that would allow her egress from—
"Foul witch," came a whispered sort of hiss from her right, and Celestia snapped her head over to see glowing green narrow eyes, their pupils nothing but black slits in the shadowy light of the place.
For the briefest of instants, Celestia's pink mane bristled, but then she registered the bars of the cage that stood between her and its occupant. "Again, Hydia," she murmured, "those words are a better fit for thee."
The quiet and raspy laugh that followed froze the step Celestia had been about to take. "Perhaps so," the lamia said. "For most assiduously can I imagine that, had my plans come to fruition, thou and thy little ponies would have resorted to far more indecorous epithets when referring to me."
Celestia turned to gape. A light and bantering tone? Whence had that come? The smile that sat almost gently upon the slit of Hydia's mouth; the sleek smoothness of her coils; her hands merely wrapped around the cage's bars instead of clenching them: everything about the lamia queen seemed a great deal more relaxed than Celestia had ever seen—or had certainly ever expected to see.
Could...could Luna be right? Were the introspection spells that formed the very atmosphere of Equestria's only prison working their way into that prison's first inmate? Had contemplation of her crimes begun to guide Hydia toward redemption's path?
It hardly seemed possible. And yet—
"Of course," Hydia was going on, "you all may yet have recourse to such language." All trace of humor vanished, her eyes flaring and the entirety of her long body tensing as she shrieked, "For I fully intend to bathe myself in thy bodily fluids and empty my cloaca repeatedly over thy crushed and severed head when I finally make my escape from this wretched hole! And that goeth doubly for thy sister!"
Celestia let her hoof touch the ground, let her legs carry her away from Hydia's increasingly flamboyant description of Equestria's future—or lack thereof—should she ever get herself back to the surface.
Not that such an occurrence was likely: more than a century now she'd been locked in, and the spells securing the place seemed as sturdy as ever.
The rehabilitation and self-reflection spells, on the other hoof, definitely appeared in need of Luna's attention.
Huddled beneath a rocky outcropping at the bottom of a ravine in the farthest depths of Tartarus, Celestia covered her face with her wings and tried not to think.
Of course, the accursed spells permeating the very rocks and air around her continued whispering, urging her to dwell on her recent actions, wheedling and whining about the responsibility she bore for turning Equestria's long-standing diarchy into a monarchy.
It was why she had buried herself here, after all. She deserved every corrosive splash of the guilt that lapped against her as insistently as a rising tide.
An actual sound struck her, then: a breathy sort of giggle. "Poor, foul little witch," said a voice she hadn't heard in at least a century. "How sweet thy misery, and yet? How sorely insubstantial."
A cage sat at the other side of the ravine, a cage that hadn't been there when Celestia had hurtled down a few minutes or hours or days ago. "Hydia? How didst thou—?"
And all of a sudden, that last word made her stop, made rage burst through her brain, made her leap from under the stone pressing upon her and stomp her hoof with a power that shook the entire firmament. "No! Not thou! Never again thou! The only creature on this entire plane of existence who deserved to be called thou, I have sent into exile! In my overweening hubris, I failed her, failed the world, failed the whole of the cosmos, and I shall never again suffer that pronoun to be used in my presence!"
She aimed a hoof at the cage. "You, Hydia! You have somehow found a way to translocate your cage about the confines of Tartarus, and I would be well within my rights as your eternal jailer to grind your very essence to powder and scatter it across the fires that burn ceaselessly at the world's heart!"
"Yes," the lamia hissed. "That's the easiest answer to every problem, isn't it? Destruction doth satisfy in ways no other actions can, wouldst thou not agree, Celestia?"
"You!" Celestia seized the cage in her hornglow and slammed it against the cliffs that rose on either side of the narrow space. "I demand that you call me you!"
"So forceful." Despite the cage smashing, crashing, bashing back and forth between the stone walls, Hydia's tones somehow remained gentle, soothing, hypnotic almost. "So commanding. So righteous in thy fury. When thy very motto, 'harmony or death,' doth battle within itself, the weakness of its beginning flailing ineffectually against the strength of its ending, doth it not feel so good to let that tension fly free? So good to let that volcano burst forth and sweep away all that standeth in thy way..."
"Your way!" Gritting her teeth, Celestia engorged the fire of her power even further, let her rainbow mane flare like the light of a supernova filtered through a dispersive prism, and reared onto her hind legs to hurl the cage with all her strength one last time against the rocks. "Your way! Your way! Your—!"
The words hit her hard, and she froze, realizing two things at the same time. First, the cage she'd been abusing wasn't Hydia's: it was too small, completely empty, obviously a magical duplicate, she could see now that she was bothering to look. And second—
"It is your way," she whispered, the sound barely audible among the echoes of her outburst still roaring around the chasm. "You would goad me to embrace your madness, Hydia, the irrational hatred that led you to attempt Equestria's obliteration." As tenderly as she might a foal, she set the now misshapen cage back onto the chasm's floor. "Instead, however, I will inform you, lamia, that I reject your overtures."
Raising her head, she sniffed, found a trace of Hydia's stench, spread her wings, and followed the wavering trail back to the lamia queen's actual cage, tucked into the same out-of-the-way corner it had always occupied.
"Harmony or death, Hydia." Celestia peered through the bars at the serpentine coils piled in the cell's darkest corner, those green and black slitted eyes glowing among the shadows. "When my sister doth return in a thousand years to judge me, whether she cometh in fire and brimstone seeking carnage and my destruction or in gentleness and tears seeking reconciliation and my forgiveness, she will find a changed pony awaiting her, a pony who hath renounced her past ways, a pony who hath transformed herself, truly embraced harmony, and become the pony she should have been all along."
The very tip of Hydia's tail flicked. "A weakling, you mean," that breathy voice whispered.
Celestia couldn't have stopped the smile that spread across her muzzle if she'd wanted to. "Yes," she said, straightening and turning for the path back to the prison's door. "You are completely correct, both in your sentiment and in your pronoun usage."
And although she knew the next ten centuries would be busy ones, she still made a mental note to find Luna's notes on Tartarus's introspection magic and see if she could figure out if it was working correctly.
"Nightmare Night," Celestia told the familiar pile of scales curled around itself at the rear of the cage. "That's what Equestria's ponies have taken to calling it, and you wouldn't believe the odd customs and rituals that have accrued around it just in the last ten or twenty generations. It's like the language: I make one little change, and the ponies themselves start making even more, dropping all the 'doth's and 'hath's and such."
Hydia's only response in the eternal twilight of the place seemed to be the slight expansion and contraction caused by her breathing.
Not that Celestia expected anything different by now. Still, she made it a point to stop by every quarter century on this horrid anniversary. Who else could she talk to, after all? Tirek? She shuddered. That windbag would likely reply to her when she spoke, and the last thing she wanted was to engage in actual conversation with—
"Foul witch." The words almost seemed to get lost in the whispering rumble that filled Tartarus, but Celestia knew she'd heard them: ducking closer, she could now see Hydia's eyes shimmering in the shadows like swamp gas. "Must you constantly annoy me?" the lamia more snapped than said.
Celestia had to blink. "Every twenty-five years hardly counts as 'constantly.'"
"Consistently, then." The green mass shifted, a pointed tail tip coming up to tap the space between those glowing eyes. "And the voices you send to touch me here, to tell me how I must bear responsibility for my actions! That can get a bit annoying as well, especially when coming from a hypocrite like you!"
Not wanting to feel hopeful, not after so long, Celestia still couldn't stop the warm little spark from igniting in her chest. Could Luna's spells still be working even six centuries after she'd last adjusted them? "Hypocrite?" Celestia cocked her head. "Enlighten me, Hydia, as to how exactly that epithet applies."
Hydia flashed like lightning, her entire bulk slamming against the bars of the cage, her fanged snout screaming mere inches from Celestia's face. "Killing my daughters! Exiling your own sister! Lording over the universe in general and this wretched pony land of yours in particular like some sort of goddess! Do you bear responsibility for your actions, Celestia? Do you?"
"I do," Celestia answered without letting herself flinch. "I've made mistakes, yes. I'm sure I'll make more. But I own every one of them absolutely and entirely. The ones I can make amends for, I do, and the ones that I can't..." She had to swallow. "I still try to." Forcing her eyes to narrow, she glared at Hydia. "And what have you done to take responsibility for your actions, Hydia, for the intelligent beings you've eaten, the destruction you wrought, and the misery you've inflicted across the length and breadth of the world? What have you ever done?"
Those eyes now open very wide, Hydia stared, her mouth slightly open and her jaw slightly trembling. "What have I done?" she asked, her voice barely a whisper. "What have you done? To your hair, I mean."
This time, Celestia couldn't stop a startled flinch. "My what?" she asked.
"Your mane." One of the lamia's arms came up, a claw pointing through the bars. "It used to be pink and just sat there. Now it's this whole flowing-pastel-rainbow thing."
Not quite sure she was hearing correctly, Celestia glanced to where her mane undulated beside her and nonetheless answered the question. "It began changing after we defeated Tirek. Luna's—" She had to swallow again before she could push the words out. "Luna's mane and tail similarly began to flow with stars and nebulae, and after we defeated Discord, they became even more—"
"Defeated Discord?" Somehow, Hydia's eyes got even wider. "The Lord of Chaos is here in this prison?"
Celestia shook her head. "The subtle spells that weave this place together would've been tissue paper to that one. Luna and I were forced to employ a form of harmony magic we'd never used before: he's now a stone statue decorating the palace gardens." Her throat tried to close once more, but she forced it open. "I used the same sort of harmony magic to banish Luna six hundred and fifty years ago tonight, actually. But you'll be glad to hear that I'm no longer able to use it."
Hydia had slid down the bars to settle on the floor of the cage, her gaze unfocused and turned to the side. "Perhaps you are a goddess, then," she muttered.
"No." This was familiar ground to Celestia, a point about which she'd had to put her hoof down gently but firmly multiple times over the past half-dozen centuries. She closed her eyes. "You of all creatures should know that I'm nothing but a self-righteous and swinish heap of intolerance who got swept into the embrace of forces she still doesn't understand and thrust into a position she's unfit to occupy."
A hiss folded Celestia's ears. "Spare me," Hydia said, and Celestia opened her eyes to see the lamia glaring back at her. "You tell me you accept responsibility for your actions, and then you whine that your success is undeserved?"
"Success?" The word hit Celestia like bucketful of ice water. "How can you possibly—"
"Responsibility!" Hydia's hands gripped the cage's bars. "It cuts both ways, witch! You must own your mistakes and your triumphs! For I can tell you quite definitively that I was not defeated by some swinish heap!" She crooked a thumb at herself. "I was defeated by an immortal princess who controls the very motion of the sun! A being so devoted to harmony and truth, she drove her own sister into a millennium of exile rather than risk the welfare of those who look to her for protection!"
Not sure she was still breathing, Celestia stared.
With another hiss, Hydia slung herself back into the far corner of the cage again. "Such simpering!" Her head vanished into the depths of her coils, but Celestia could still hear her muttering: "She overcomes the Prince of the Centaurs, the Queen of the Lamias, the very Lord of Chaos, and who knows what other forces that have dared to threaten her little ponies! And still she prattles on as uncertainly as an unweaned hatchling! Unbelievable!"
Silence descended, and it was an actual silence, Celesita noted with a start. The rustling voices that always scuttled through her head like beetles through fallen leaves, the voices that accompanied both her waking hours and her sleeping as she went about her duties, those voices had vanished.
Celestia's mind raced. The spells that permeated Tartarus were designed to induce self-reflection in its prisoners, to prod them toward thinking about their actions and the consequences thereof. So...could Hydia be right? Could the lack of recriminatory voices be the introspection spells' way of telling Celestia that...that she'd done both well and good?
A blink, and she realized that she'd been standing there staring at the cage for she had no idea how long. Inside, only the slight expansion and contraction of Hydia's body met her eyes, but Celestia didn't mind at all. Because she had succeeded, hadn't she? It hadn't been in any way that she'd wanted to, hadn't been in any way that she'd planned, but still, the world was a much safer place than when she and Luna had first set out to clear those brigands from their lairs in the Everfree Forest fifteen or so centuries ago...
Breath entering her lungs shakily, Celestia managed to say, "Thank you, Hydia." Rising, turning, thoughts spinning—with Luna due to return bearing judgment in three hundred and fifty years, perhaps Celestia could do some more good, could set in motion a chain of events that would actually help instead of merely folding herself up and leaving the whole thing to chance.
She practically galloped for the entryway.
"So." Luna sniffed the front edge of Hydia's cage. "It indeed doth appear, lamia, that thou hast succeeded in circumventing certain of the restrictions we have imposed upon those who dwell within this place. That thou canst cause small cages to manifest in random locations is naught but annoying, but it should be impossible. Wouldst thou care to explain thyself?"
Even in the dank confines of Tartarus, Celestia could scarcely keep herself from breaking into a dance, she was still so giddy at Luna's return. And even though the light from Luna's horn wavered as a mere shadow of its former strength, Celestia refused to feel guilty. The last several days of Luna telling her over and over again that she had no cause to feel guilt, insisting that it was she herself who had failed in her duties, had almost convinced her.
"Dost thou hear me, prisoner?" Luna was asking, her hornglow barely illuminating the green scaly coils piled in the cage's farthest corner. "Or hast thou succumbed to thine own putrescence during my absence?"
"Whose absence?" came that quiet hiss. "Thine absence? Or your absence?"
Luna's head drew back, her ears dipping, and Celestia felt suddenly very glad she was behind Luna so that her sister couldn't see her blush. "In truth," Luna said, "both instances are correct: my individual absence and the collective absence of my sister and me."
"Whose sister?" The coils undulated until pale green eyes cracked open in long slits near the top. "Thy sister? Or your sister?"
Her ears folding even further, Luna looked over her shoulder. "Hath the former queen lost her mind? Or is she simply no longer able to understand the difference between singular and plural?"
Celestia had her blush under control by this time, and for the briefest of instants, she considered telling Luna about the altered state of the language.
Except, of course, that that alteration was something the old Celestia had done, the same Celestia who had reacted so poorly and overwhelmingly to Luna's difficulties. The new Celestia, well, the continued changes to her mane and her physical stature over the past thousand years symbolized deeper changes to her manner and character, she knew. The Celestia she was these days would never force the entire world under pain of her fiery displeasure to begin using the second-person plural and formal pronoun in place of the second-person singular and familiar. She was absolutely certain that she wouldn't.
But with Luna so freshly returned and so many culture shocks undoubtedly ahead of her...
"Hydia's mind was ever a mystery," Celestia said. "Perhaps we can finally plumb her to her depths now that thou art returned hale and truly thyself again."
"Whose self?" The arched mockery of Hydia's tone sliced straight through Celestia's desire to blush and began stoking a sensation even hotter and redder. "Thyself? Or yourself?"
Luna was shaking her head. "How very peculiar."
"Yes." Celestia stretched a wing over Luna's back, her sister's solid warmth swinging her mood toward dancing again. "Come, then, and we shall begin our examination of the self-reflection spells. They have been crying out for thy touch."
"Whose touch?" Hydia asked, but this time, she merely snickered instead of completing the pattern she'd established.
Celestia was already guiding Luna away, but she cast one more glare at the lamia's cage. Luna would notice the new pronoun usage and verb conjugations once she started getting out among their little ponies once again, and she would quickly adapt. But for now, Celestia wanted to provide Luna with as much of a cushion against any sort of a hard landing as she could. So she turned a deaf ear to Hydia's sibilant chuckles and walked with Luna toward Tartarus's exit.
"You see?" Luna gestured to the empty cage tucked into its all-too-familiar out-of-the-way nook.
The gelatinous air of Tartarus seemed especially thick around Celestia all of a sudden. "How long?" she managed to ask.
Luna shrugged. "I only noticed she wasn't here when we were installing Cozy Glow into the self-examination field last week. If I were to hazard a guess, I would surmise that she took advantage of the same defensive breach as Tirek, and with all the kerfuffle surrounding his rampage, his defeat, the return of our cutie marks, and the appearance of Twilight's castle, we all simply overlooked Hydia's absence."
Stepping forward, Celestia brushed her magic against the cage. "Well, it's definitely not one of those duplicate cages she learned to create," she muttered. Thinking furiously, she looked back at Luna. "But if she's truly been at large all these moons, surely we would've heard something!"
"Indeed." Luna shrugged again. "Still, she was never as great a danger to our little ponies as Tirek, and considering that she was exposed to our self-examination spell down here for centuries longer than he was, I have to wonder if she might not have abandoned all her plans against Equestria and made her way back to Lamuria, never to trouble us again."
The very idea made Celestia blink. "You honestly think that might be a possibility?"
"It fits the available facts." She tossed her starry mane. "Subtlety was never a part of her skill set: recall that her original plan a millennium and a half ago involved a volcano. I simply can't imagine her concocting, say, some long-drawn-out revenge scheme encompassing the both of us and possibly Twilight Sparkle in her role as your surrogate daughter." She tapped the stone with the tip of a silver shoe. "Still, it might be wise to mention her to Twilight when we inform her of her upcoming accession to the throne upon our retirements."
Celestia wrinkled her nose and turned once more to the cage. "No," she said. "These next few months will be strenuous enough for Twilight. And besides, Hydia's been my problem from the beginning. If she dares threaten Equestria again, I'll crush her, plain and simple."
The words came out without her even thinking, shocked Celestia into folding her ears and touching a hoof to her lips.
Luna raised an eyebrow. "Now there's a sentiment I've not heard from my sister in centuries."
"I—" Celestia began, but she didn't know where to go from there, her heart suddenly pounding so loud, it seemed to shake her whole body, mane to fetlocks. She wanted to spin, wanted to flare her wings and rush into Luna's embrace, reassure her that she didn't mean it, that she'd kept her promise when it came to Equestria's enemies for all the long, lonely centuries Luna had been away.
But she didn't do any of those things. Because the feelings that were coursing hot and wild through her chest at the thought of Hydia at large—
A hoof touched her shoulder, and Celestia started back, Luna gazing up at her. "I'll not request another promise from you, Sister, but I will reiterate my opinion. The Queen of the Lamias has left our jurisdiction, and venturing out in search of her would serve no purpose whatsoever."
Signaling agreement would have been the easiest thing in the world, but Celestia couldn't bring herself to so much as nod.
A moment of silence—or were those quiet, murmuring voices Celestia heard?—then Luna's horn powered up. "But I shall defer to your judgment on this matter and return to my duties. There's much I've yet to do before I can even begin the process of extricating myself from the various thaumaturgical processes I shall need to leave behind for a successful retirement. Until dawn, then, Sister." And she vanished in a puff of something that made Celestia think of moonlight on water.
Celestia took a shaky breath. The warmth of Luna's trust soothed her more molten impulses and pushed back the whispering—except for one tiny voice that wondered if perhaps Luna's trust was misplaced in this particular instance...
More breathing steadied her, and she found her mind flashing quickly through the few 'missing pony' cases that had been reported over the last several moons. Even immortal lamia queens had to eat, after all.
No patterns struck her, and there weren't nearly enough disappearances to fill Hydia's belly even if she'd been responsible for every one. A final glance at the empty cage, and she started for the main gate, determined to concern herself for the present only with the upcoming transfer of power here in Equestria.
But after that...
Just seeing Discord look nervous, Celestia thought, was almost worth the trip down here all on its own. And even though Twilight, as Equestria's new reigning monarch, had pronounced Discord officially pardoned for his recent actions, Celestia didn't mind at all watching him squirm a bit.
"Hmmm," he said, tugging at his beard in a vain effort to hide the shaking of his eagle talons. "I broke several villains out of Tartarus in an attempt to build Twilight's confidence that instead ended up very nearly destroying Equestria. And now here I am, looking at an empty cage that coincidentally is located smack dab in the middle of beautiful downtown Tartarus." He pointed his half-closed eyes at her. "Were I a less-trusting soul, I might be slightly concerned."
And while fun was fun... "This cage," she told him, "once held Hydia, the Queen of the Lamias."
"Really?" Discord's eyebrows shot upward off his forehead and spun themselves into a camera; he grabbed it and started snapping photos. "I wondered what had happened to her. Did she decorate it herself? Because dark and dreary just isn't in this year."
"I was hoping," Celestia went on: that was usually best when dealing with Discord, she'd discovered long ago, "that you could tell me where she might be right now."
"Me?" The camera vanished with one last flash, the light of it swirling up to form a halo around his horns. "I can solemnly assure you, Celestia, that I had nothing to do with—"
"Yes, I know. She'd actually been gone for more than a year when you freed Cozy Glow and Tirek. But now that I'm officially retired, I thought perhaps I'd look her up." Celestia gave a smile that showed so many of her teeth, it was meant to inspire an observer to begin wondering what she had in mind to do with them all.
"Oh, my," Discord said, his lion paw coming up to touch his chest. "I'd almost forgotten you could do that."
As much as she wanted to, Celestia didn't let her wings flare on either side of her like freshly sharpened harvest sickles, nor did she growl her next words. "Where is she, Discord?"
For a moment, Discord remained stock still, but then his shoulders slumped and he blew out a breath. "You're going to force me to be the voice of reason here, aren't you?"
Maybe a little growl was called for, then. "Discord..."
"Well?" He waved his talons above his head and moved his claws back and forth between them. "We're neither of us the creatures we used to be, SeeSee, and I'm absolutely certain that Equestria is a better place for it. Speaking personally, I do not plan on turning back into the tiny-minded, would-be despot I was before getting to know Fluttershy and various others of your herd, and I'd recommend you follow suit." He snapped the pads of his paw, and a deck of playing cards appeared in front of him. "Speaking of which—" Grinning, he tapped the top of the deck. "Is this your card?" He pulled one out and held it up.
Celestia winced to see her own face, a thousand years younger, looking back at her, her mane pink, her scowl haughty, the words 'Harmony or death' printed above her picture.
Something cracked in the back of her mind, and everything she'd walled up since the day she'd battled Hydia's daughters more than a thousand years ago flooded like storm surge behind her eyes. "They refused harmony," she managed to get out between clenched teeth. "I had no choice."
"Ah, yes." Flicking his wrists sent the cards into two swirling clouds: one black, one red. "Binary's so comforting, isn't it? Even though we've both come to understand that situations are seldom that simple..."
"You weren't there." Celestia swallowed the hot, sticky anger rising in her chest. "I did what I had to do."
Discord bowed his head. "Right on the first count and probably right on the second. Although inquiring minds have always wondered..." The clouds squished together and dropped onto his head as a fedora, a card with the word 'Press' printed on it jutting from the hatband, a notebook and giant, floppy quill pen in his claws. "Back in the old days, rehabilitation never seemed your cup of eggplant." The notebook became a teacup filled with some deep purple beverage, and Discord stirred it with the tip of the pen. "So how'd a 'harmony or death' aficionado like you start using a place like Tartarus anyway?"
"Luna." Just saying her name brought a touch of cool relief to Celestia's insides. "She made me promise."
Making a rude noise with his lips, Discord raised the cup, took a swig of the purple stuff, scrunched up his face, pulled the pen apart, and poured the rest of the cup's contents into it. "Luna was gone for a thousand years. She'd never have known what you did."
Celestia didn't even try to keep the edge out of her voice. "Her absence changed my promise not at all."
"Change?" A snap of his claws, and Discord's hat began flashing through multiple styles: a fez, a bowler, a straw boater, a tri-corner with an enormous ostrich feather sticking up in back. "Funny how so many of us have changed over the centuries, isn't it? Perhaps Hydia has as well." The hat became a beret, and Discord slipped around her to stand in front of the cage again. "Here, though, I wouldn't change a thing." He tapped his chin. "Well, other than putting a snarling wax figure of Hydia inside and playing spooky organ music in the background, of course..."
"Of course." Whether it was the effect of the self-reflection spells or the realization that she wasn't the same pony she'd been all those years ago, Celestia found herself nodding. Hydia apparently hadn't preyed on any of Equestria's citizens since her escape, after all, and nothing in the final batch of intelligence reports she'd looked through had given her any indication that the lamia might be lurking around the edges of Yakyakistan or the Dragon Lands or any of Equestria's other local allies.
Maybe Luna's prediction had come true and Hydia had gone back to Lamuria. Not that she would like what she found there, and that thought snuffed out the last remnant of Celestia's anger. "Well," she said, turning and starting for the exit, "I'll leave you to design the display, then."
"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" Discord burst into place beside her, a pair of restraining cuffs leaping from nowhere to attach his lion paw to her upper foreleg. "On second thought, maybe I'll let Luna take care of the decorating and never, ever, ever enter this place again for as long as electrons continue orbiting their nuclei."
Laughing, Celestia lit her horn. "You and me both," she said, and for the first time in her life, she teleported out of Tartarus.
Stretched along yet another deserted beach with her eyes closed, simply relaxing in the late afternoon sunlight, Celestia didn't think she'd fallen asleep. But the sudden cold weight coiling around her neck said otherwise.
"Such a lovely day," a quiet voice hissed. "A pity there's this broken-down, foul nag of a witch cluttering it up."
And as much as she'd been frequenting out-of-the-way spots and places that seemed ready made for ambushes in an effort to set up this meeting ever since she'd stepped down from the throne almost ten years ago, Celestia still had to shiver. "You've always had such a low opinion of yourself, Hydia."
That Hydia gave a chuckle lifted Celestia's heart for a moment. But the words that tickled like a forked tongue against her ears then made everything sink again. "What will they think, do you suppose, your little ponies, when word reaches them that their former champion, their former ruler, the formerly mighty Princess Celestia, has been found drained of bodily fluids and grotesquely befouled upon a remote beach in the southwest corner of her former realm, hmmm? Will it unnerve them, do you think? Or will any of them even remember who you were?"
"Ah." Celestia didn't open her eyes, didn't turn her head, didn't move anything other than the bare minimum that she needed to speak. "I'm going to guess that you made your way back to Lamuria and discovered that they've been a constitutional democracy for the past eight hundred and sixty years."
The coil around Celestia's neck tightened, but Hydia actually got quieter. "You destroyed my family, destroyed my life, destroyed my people, destroyed my legacy—"
"Who destroyed?" Following Hydia's lead, Celestia kept things to a murmur. "Once your duly elected successors had sorted themselves out, they accepted the exact offer I made to you when you invaded, and there's been nothing but peace and harmony between our peoples ever since."
"Lies!" Hydia shrieked, and had Celestia been any other creature, she was fairly sure that the force of the sudden stranglehold around her neck would have crushed her larynx. "You warp everything you touch! The words of your mouth tear more sharply than shards of hurtling stone, and the glance of your eyes burns like acidic bile! You force the world into your own image and crush those of us who refuse to go along!"
"I don't deny it." Celestia had to push the words out, the pressure starting to affect her breathing. Lighting her horn at last, she slid a sheet of superheated magic between her neck and Hydia's coils, Hydia hissing and sliding away. "In fact," Celestia went on, rolling to her hooves and looking down at those wide green-and-black eyes, the former queen of the lamias thin and bedraggled, more like a pile of seaweed the waves had washed up than anything else, "I'll even say that I'm proud of making the world a more just and less dangerous place."
"More just!" Hydia sounded like she was about to spit, and for all the sour, salty stink of fear nearly dripping from her scales, she didn't flinch. "Less dangerous! Pretending the world is either of those things distorts all of reality! Or are you saying that mortal beings are children that must be coddled so?"
"Children?" The two syllables emerged from Celestia's lips without her even thinking, and she almost blanched, almost snapped her teeth closed in a vain effort to pull the sounds back.
Hydia froze, but Celestia refused to allow so much as a single one of her muscles to tense. Instead, she slathered herself with the diplomatic blankness she'd learned to present during her centuries on Equestria's throne while inwardly cursing herself for possibly committing the worst blunder she'd ever—
"My children," Hydia more breathed than said, her mouth barely moving. "When looked at in a certain way, I brought my children here so that we could kill and eat your children." She blinked jerkily, as if it wasn't something she'd done for a while, and the edges of that familiar hard reptilian stare wrinkled into something almost gentle. "Didn't I?"
Not sure if it would strengthen the fragile bubble forming around them or burst it beyond repair, Celestia asked softly, "When did you last eat?"
Irritation pulled Hydia's snout, and she waved the tip of her tail at the ocean. "Swimming to Lamuria and back, I developed a taste for seafood. Some of it's quite bracing, all full of teeth and tentacles and such." She swallowed then, her head drooping, and her scent was somehow both dry and damp, both mossy and dusty. "You're asking as my jailer, I assume."
Again, she trod carefully. "You escaped, Hydia: I haven't been your jailer in more than a decade." She swallowed, less sure of herself than she'd possibly ever been in her entire life. "In fact, I can't imagine why you're still here. Even if Lamuria's not a monarchy anymore, it's still home, isn't it?"
In Celestia's racing imagination, Hydia's response passed through every wrenching emotional point from a violent, expletive-laden explosion to a fit of broken-down weeping.
But in reality, the lamia merely lifted her gaze and said in those same quiet tones, "And I can't imagine why you killed my daughters but didn't kill me. 'Harmony or death' was your slogan, if I'm recalling correctly, and yet, during all the time that I've rejected the one, you've never offered me the other." She cocked her head. "Why was that?"
Having to close her eyes, Celestia swallowed. "Because I was a fool."
All she could hear was the steady in-and-out of Hydia's breath. "For letting me live?" Hydia whispered.
"For taking your daughters' lives." Celestia let her legs fold, let herself flop down into the sand. "It turns out that harmony is a process, a process that death pretty much puts an end to. If I'd acted differently, perhaps your daughters might have—" She bit the words off, wouldn't let the thought even continue forming in her mind. "But due to my actions, there's no way of knowing, and I...I'm sorry."
Hydia's breathing stuttered, and for a long moment, only the slosh of the waves against the shore stroked Celestia's ears.
Then quietly, gently, Hydia sighed. "We're quite the pair of fools, aren't we? You, conquering the world but refusing to take your rightful place ruling it, and me, leaping back into my jailer's trap since I can't imagine any other creature in the entire world would understand a single thing I'm talking about."
That made Celestia cough a laugh. "We are the only ones, aren't we? The only ones who lasted through the whole long game of it without getting turned to stone or locked inside a heavenly body or anything like that."
The dry rattle of Hydia clearing her throat brought Celestia's gaze up, the lamia's mouth bunched over sideways. "I did spend most of the time imprisoned within a cavern." She cocked her head. "But then so did you, didn't you? The cavern of your own imagined inadequacies."
Celestia couldn't have stopped her growl if she'd wanted to. "You know they aren't imagined."
"Ha!" Hydia's fists bunched, the tip of her tail snaking forward to poke Celestia in the chest. "Whether you like it or not, Celestia, you are the single most powerful being in this section of the cosmos. That you allow yourself to be defeated time and time again by creatures whose asses aren't worthy of being kicked by you simply indicates a lack of confidence on your part."
"Really." This conversation wasn't going in any direction that Celestia had ever thought it might, and she couldn't have been happier. "Perhaps I should see about hiring a life coach."
Hydia sniffed. "You couldn't afford me. But..." Her eyes took on a shimmer like damp emeralds. "As we're both ex-royalty, I might be able to arrange a discount. And I certainly wouldn't mind if we shared a few tips about how to go about passing the time."
Celestia nodded, brushed a wingtip at the moisture that had gathered in the corners of her eyes. "White-water rafting," she said.
A blankness came across Hydia's face. "Excuse me?"
"Luna refuses to even discuss such things with me any longer." It took some effort for Celestia to keep her own voice from cracking, to keep the joy blossoming in her chest from bursting out in a display that she felt certain would incinerate the détente growing between her and Hydia. "But the roar and rush of the rapids, the jagged rocks, the danger that looms from every corner and at every instant, it quite appeals to the fool in me."
Silence descended, but a slow smile was spreading across Hydia's snout. "Where is this white water?"
Gesturing with a wing, Celestia rose to her hooves. "There's a river about a mile south, and the raft rental landing is a few miles upstream." She shook the sand from her coat. "We can go by land, or if you'd prefer swimming—"
"Slithering's fine." Hydia flicked her fingers. "Or whatever it is you legged creatures call it."
"Strolling." Celestia started forward. "Two old fools just out for a stroll."
Hydia, sliding into place beside her, gave a laugh, and Celestia let herself join in.
Author's Note
In the original, 1980s version of MLP:
Hydia and her daughters were humans and the villains of the first Pony movie and a later ten-episode arc of the TV show called "The End of Flutter Valley." But if FiM can make Tirek and Scorpan into brothers, then I can make the Volcano Witches into lamias. 
Mike
