Wittgenstein's Chessboard
"The The The The The The The", That is only one of the words and sounds drifting erratically through the mental plane that was once the most powerful beings in Equestria, though now it'd be slightly remiss to call it a being. One the Thes floats aimlessly through the swirling void of letters bisecting others as what little mind there is writhed trying to grasp it. A mind once dedicated solely to causing chaos now trying to make a single lick of sense from what was once him to hold onto, an island in a nauseating churning sea that didn't stop and most likely never would. There wasn't enough of him to make a narrative but there was enough of him to know he needed it.
His mind had seemingly been broken down to its most basic particles, tiny thought packets arising and submerging in an ocean of unease and confusion. For Discord, this was a very new experience, if he could even be said to have experiences. Before when he was alive, his consciousness had been spread throughout his whole form, indeed as a non organic magical organism one could almost say he was pure consciousness imitating matter. Like a hologram every bit of him contained a smaller version of his mind at least in potentiality, but in each spot a different bit was emphasized. He could start a sentence or a train of thought in his toe and end it in his head, something that he relished as contrarian. Feeling the predatory lion's paws savage thoughts be turned into masterpieces of horror by his serpent tail's cunning.
Yet despite how strange this process would seem to a pony, this process was almost always linear. A thought would start somewhere with one idea in the forefront before concluding and making room for or triggering another. Verbs acted on nouns, subjects prefaced objects. All and all his mind would be a strange book but like most of Finnegan's Wake it was grammatically correct. But now, now, now as a collection of pebbles still held loosely together by some magical law he could no longer hope to understand, there was no control. No forefront, just noise and confusion, with number and volume taking precedence over any kind of intentionality.
Around this particular The several other points and vortices were currently spewing out various conjunctions, adverbs and prepositions. Each a nearly endless stream possibly representing every word he'd use in his seemingly immortal life, now with nowhere else to go as his mouth lay still and disconnected. Occasionally the words would combine like atoms in a fusion reactor often times taking up quite a bit of his undivided focus. More often than not they didn't make sense just as The began to collide with And. The combination giving off a light that to any observer would seem brighter than the sun as millions of mind's eyes turned towards it.
The larger structure had more place to latch onto other as it spiraled around, occasionally smashing one of the few nouns present into its constituent letters. This word in particular was 'fun' perhaps the thing he tried the hardest to keep intact. For a brief moment images of wars he started flashed through his eyes, living chess, families torn apart, and a particular greenish purple mare being stretched like taffy. Before hand he'd found those things fun, schadenfraude to make him feel better but now.. well now they were just strange. It wasn't like he felt moral revulsion or remorse for his actions, far from it. But these pageants of operatic mischief and cruelty now seemed hollow and uncanny. Like Marionettes jerkily wordlessly preforming an out of order play, their pointlessness on full display for all the world to see.
'The And one more hooked onto a word, mother. Mother. Did he ever have a mother? He remembered mothers as a vague concept or image of a larger feminine entity standing next to a smaller one. The memories themselves were often negative involving beatings, pain and sometimes even murder. Beforehand a favorite 'game' of his had been making parents despise their own children before purifying them and allowing them to see what they'd done. Before he'd make a snide comment on how pointless love or loyalty was, but at the moment he was just fishing for context. The light dimmed with an agonizing crack in his psyche sending pixels and comas flying like the bastard love child of a word processer and a fission reactor. The process starting anew as the word When joined the fray causing it to grow larger as his mind was forced into grasping it.
Was When and the mother his mother? It was larger than him, or at least it certainly felt larger than the bit that could grasp things. It was feminine to an extent, and it was causing him immense pain. Maybe not, a feeling that mother implied precedence came into his shattered mind but time was fuzzy. In that case mother would have to predate him? Him bubbled up from the abyss causing a shower of numbers that he was forced to calculate, squashing and stretching his mind as it's geometry was forced to accommodate these abominable ratios. A minor distraction as he began to wonder just when exactly he as him started, leading to more uncanny Marionette shows. A thousand distracting screams of Discord filling his mind as they shot out of still mouths of ponies contorted in horror. He was Discord once, but to be fair a baby was also sperm once and the testicle was not a mother.
Perhaps then the pony who smashed him was his mother, she created him, was feminine and caused him immense suffering. Yes, that made sense. For some reason out of all his memories that one was the only one that was clear. A grey pegasus, though too vibrant a grey to have been affected by him, blonde maned and yellow eyed, sledgehammer in mouth, tears staining a look of rage, then cheering. A sole blip of consciousness, fear, and perhaps a bit of smugness and then this. He was in his current state and it felt like both an eternity and a mere microsecond ago. Yes this was his mother, he made her into a mother by making her hurt the smaller pony and enjoy it. Or maybe not, maybe the Hammer was his mother? It wasn't crying after all. The smaller pony looked angry but not at the Mother too.
Then a bolt of pain shot through him once more as his own little nightmare world began to fold in on itself, words slowly beginning to combine in incoherent chains thousands long all around him. His focus torn as pylons and knots of pure mental imagery began to form, puppets and marionettes warping. Their faces blending together and splitting apart in bizarre and frightful combinations. Then a chain began to form, perhaps the first coherent chain in his new existence. Each feeling like a boulder hitting the ground.This. Lasts. Forever. And with that he screamed as time or at least an understanding of time was sealed into his mental landscape. He couldn't understand much, but he could understand two things. One that this was wrong, and Two, this wouldn't stop. All he could do now was try to remember how to scream.
Pavement Painter's Pov
Pavement gave a contemplative glance at his work, still feeling both unclean and insanely powerful for the materials he had used. Not sure whether to wash his hooves for an hour, or declare himself equal to Celestia for reshaping what was once seen to be the embodiment of a universal constant. He levitated his pencil between his eyes to gage the length just before the permanent adhesive set in. The horn was a bit off but he could logically say that he'd always gone for 'abstract', whatever that meant nowadays.
He shook his head positioning himself in another perspective. After all the point really wasn't how it looked, the depiction of a Crying Alicorn for remembrance could be done Abex and would still be seen as powerful as long as there was plaque. Sensing his work was over, Pavement trotted back to the Castle to see if his work was actually over.