Tempest in a Teacup

by GroaningGreyAgony

Rating: everyone
Tags: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dark, Sad, Fluttershy, Adventure, Discord
Length: 1120

It takes such a long time for the lava to cool down... Maybe you should try blowing on it?

Some grow upset as they age and the world no longer makes sense to them.

For some, it's the opposite.

The first draft of this story was written for the November 2019 Writeoff, where it came in fifth.

Art by the amazingly talented Anon Y Mous.

Published 2022-12-14 20:50:00 UTC
Last updated 2022-12-14 20:50:00 UTC

From 4 PM to Eternity

“Be careful, Discord, it’s hot!” she says, slipping the saucer before me.

I draw one careful breath, but all the memories surge through me at once, eons in an instant—

Heavenly fire, a plasma formed from starblood, made a deadly arc over the sky towards us as we soared above the new-blown world of Equus, which was as delicate as a glass globe or soap bubble at its birth. “Take care, Discord! Mind the blaze!” cried noble Elganath as he guarded the sensitive Bludgeon of Scattered Desires, which was crafted from eleven different varieties of black ice and bound by gossamer spun from tears.

I reared before our foe, Syvarth the Despoiled, onetime ally turned foul with her own greed, and blew a shield woven of uncertainty and disquieting thoughts that dissipated her attack of unbearable heat and turned it back on her in a corona of swirling flame.

But things were tighter than we knew, and until Reisuch, she of nimble rhythms, slipped in from otherwhen and struck Syvarth the Despoiled from behind, there was surely no way that we could have prevailed. Even though my entropic shields were glittering like frozen space and Elganath held the Bludgeon, Syvarth would still have beaten us down and reshaped the nascent world below us to her own revolting ends.

But Reisuch darted back from the Was-To-Be and struck with all might at Syvarth’s unguarded double tails, slicing through her supports, and down the miserable monstrosity fell, landing with a great awhoom on the world below. The poor little globe trembled, its barely formed continental masses rippling in crackling waves. As she struggled with the fractured rock, we reformed our defenses.

It was a brief respite; Syvarth rose from the congealed magma again, cunning and glassy, and uttered a challenge that filled the black sparkling sky with thin deadly shards.

I stamped hard into the glowing rock and it splashed an umbrella around me and my associates, which cooled just as the blades fell. They chipped and cracked the thin shell, but it held, ah yes, it held!

And now Elganath stepped forward and his Bludgeon danced, striking hard at Syvarth’s unwholesome and lethal intentions, shattering and scattering her will. And I stepped forward to spread pure chaos below her supporting tendrils, laughing with draconic equanimity as she slipped in possibility and danced through happenstance and was mired in trifles. And lithe Reisuch, she—she was not here, now, but this surely was the point where she nimbly slipped back through time and gave Syvarth the backstabbing nudge that would ensure our victory.

Syvarth howled and struck at us again and again with her wiles and her knives, but we held the ascendancy now. Brave Elganath brought down his ice-shining bludgeon like a silver hammer, and I made bedlam of the ground underfoot, and Reisuch, popping back to the present, lashed out with a glowing whip of binding. Syvarth raged in despair, for she knew her rude challenges for the fate of our little world that we’d all built together were now at an end.

Reisuch’s whip spiralled inexorably around Syvarth’s multiple tendrils and my entropic forces eased the way as the mighty Bludgeon descended and struck the final blow! With a wail of despair and shock, Syvarth shot like an arrow straight down into the semi-molten world below, passing through rudely formed mantle and incandescent magma to come to her permanent resting place at the center; a fit punishment for her presumption and betrayal.

She had caused massive and irreparable damage to the globe of Equus on the way down, and we only had eons to try to adjust our plans to deal with it, salvage the pieces. I stared down at the crater she'd left, white hot at the rim with the brown roiling smoke inside—

Art by Anon Y Mous

“Discord? Is the tea not to your liking?”

—And the whole noodly forking length of me, unfolding through time like a bolt of lightning, gets frozen to one spine-cracking point. Here I am, not elsewhen where most of the action is happened, or did happening, or… grammar breaks down, it is simply not adequate to express what I have lost.

I stare down at the tiny white porcelain circle with the literal spot of swirling tannin-stained water in it. From the corners of my eyes I see through the windows distant mountains, eroded to roundness now, but once spiky with the force that threw them up, the very edges of the crater that Syvarth made as she fell screaming for the last time. If the ponies could look down through the ground, as I can, past the blazing depths of Tartarus, they’d be able to see that curled form bound at the heart of the world, her fearsome skull with jaws spread in one last eternal challenge.

And strong Elganath of the Cool Dark Cunning, Reisuch who slipped through instants of time like the thinnest possible blade, Olsibena with his great round maw that swallowed rocks and asteroids and then worlds until he eventually ate enough to become a star… where are they? The paths they took through space and time do not seem to even exist any more; they have vanished not only from present and future but also past, so that now I only have my shaky memories to recall them, and must wonder if I only deceive myself to think that such terrible splendor ever blazed its way through existence.

The leakage of Syvarth’s howling dreams, rising like bubbles from the core of the world, now have lent their diluted power to such trivial little schemers as Grogar and Tirek, who have not the wit to comprehend what true chaos was, or the soul to understand what true power once meant. And I in my little encroaching fences cannot hold my own against even these milktoast foes. My potential still branches through pasts and futures like a tree, but like an evergreen now, smaller and smaller in radius as it grows upward into the glory of the New Order. I, who once played with the forges of Creation, reduced to parlor tricks and niceties...

“A fire has to burn; how else can it be a fire?” I mutter.

“What was that, Discord?” says Fluttershy as she sets a plate of crumpets on the table, blinking with cowlike innocence. “Would you like some more honey with that?”

I extend the tiny, insultingly cool cup, the tiny bubble of congealed ceramic matter that I could fragment to gamma rays if I just squeezed my claws one tiny bit harder.

“Do make with the bee-barf, dearie,” I say through my teeth.