Carry On

Absolution

Discord watched her rage in silence.

The four had long since lost the energy to talk openly. Telepathy was actually much less strenuous, but the communication was far more... raw. Luna and Celestia both sat unmoving, eyes plagued with untold horror and sadness. Everything he had ever done to them came back in full, unrelenting force. Chaos had given him pleasure, once. When she had left him. Anger and fear and pure, free hatred had flown willingly from him, destroying them... the alicorns. Well, mostly. The destruction was nearly complete when they had stopped his takeover with the Elements. Only a few left... nearly gone, his goal nearly completed.

Had it been worth it?

The question resounded throughout his brain, kicking him like a downed dog. Beating the dead pony. He knew the answer, but guilt forced him to revisit it.

No. No, it was most certainly not worth it. Not worth being encased in stone for three millenia. Not worth coming out again, angry and distraught, just to lose. Just to fail. Not worth nearly wiping out a species, not worth being forever corrupted by chaos.

Another question found Discord in that moment. Why was he so glum? Guilt would fix nothing now, so why did he feel it? He looked to the royal sisters ponderously. Perhaps they were subconsciously attributing something to him and channeling it through magic without knowing it. It was a possibility.

Possibilities seemed to be all he had left in the end.

Dying brought a certain air of pointlessness to his whole life. Millenia spent waging a war that would never end. Chaos and harmony. You couldn't have one without the other, after all. And neither would mean a lack of anything... any existence at all. For a moment he wondered if his death would end chaos. He knew that Celestia's death meant nothing in the larger scheme of things. Harmony was passed through ages, generally in pairs or hextuplets. But Discord had never died, nor truly succeeded in using Chaos to completeness. A spike of dread crawled through him. What if he had no successor? No future embodiment of spontaneity and madness?

Would it even matter? Just harmony... he tried to imagine a world like that. No war, no hatred. He couldn't. It was those things--just those two critically important things--that brought ponies together. And that was the essence of harmony, wasn't it? Being... together. Hating something, but doing it with your friends. In the lives of everything that could breathe, there was certainly never a lack of things to hate. Sickness, cold, heat, thirst, hunger.

Death.

With that, he concluded his deliberation. Discord would not worry away his last hours wondering if ponies would stop not liking the things in life--or the lack of that content. He returned his attention to the two princesses of a dead kingdom.

Celestia was blank. Nothingness gripped her by the shoulders. Luna looked as if she might cry.

Then, a disembodied thought appeared in Discord's head.

The three words were saturated with hesitation. A shroud of calmness covered a final feeling, veiled behind a mask of confusion...

Was that disappointment? Just a fraction of a percent... yes. She--no, they--were disappointed in him. He knew it, they knew it, and the thought connection came to an abrupt halt.

As the winds blew dust across the scorched earth, one thing was clear.

He was certainly not forgiven.

*******************

"It's going to explode within the next month," the brown unicorn said, levitating electronic datapads and examining data. "Quite a monumentous event. The death of our first solar system," he said, fiddling with a his holographic keyboard. "Wish I could have seen it in its prime."

The captain, a light brown earth pony, listened, detached and informal in his stance, gray eyes distant as they looked at but did not see Equus.

"We're here to run a few tests and observe the supernova from a safe distance. That is all. No time travel or mysterious adventures for me, thank you," the Captain responded, reminding the unicorn of their purpose while not being so harsh as to lose the approval of his crew. It was a little bit disconcerting, though--the ESD decided to send one of its most powerful ships to run tests on planets and stars. The Morning Star is a massive warship, not some science probe, the Captain thought with some disdain. But his complaining to the up-highs would have to wait. "Ensign, back to your station. Foucault," he called to the navigation officer, "give us a course in low orbit, over old Canterlot. I, Marine squad F-9, and Wesley here will take a shuttle to get down there, take some readings, and leave. Nurman, you're up," the Captain said, indicating his XO.

The crew focused on what tasks they had as the Captain left the bridge, his team falling in line behind him. The brown unicorn, Wesley, came up on his right. The civilian was on loan from the Equestrian Space Department Science Division. Curly locks of hair fell over his head. His coat was a darker shade of Captain Ares color, his flank mark a bubbling vial. Ares found him a slight nuisance, and was admittedly suspicious that he was really some snoop.

The Captain almost drew his sidearm and shot himself when one of the hatches on the left popped open, revealing Eastley, Wesley's twin brother. If he wasn't shackled to the thing's legs by regulations and red tape, he'd have thrown the "pony" out the airlock. Supposedly he was fairly intelligent, or something like that. There were darker whispers that he was somehow dangerous--but everything was vague, and lacked evidence. Still... the Captain really wanted nothing to do with him.

"Hey, Mr. Captain Dr. Sir, can I come too? Please?" the eccentric unicorn bounced along, peach fur in complete contrast to the dark brown of his grounded, intelligent brother.

Wesley opened his mouth before the Captain could call out his brother. "Trust me, sir, when I say he should come with us. Eastley has a very good sense for... unknowns," the unicorn assured the Captain as the group found the hangar, Eastley still going through a variety of acrobatic movements and even going so far as to levitating himself in the air, spinning in a pirouette of madness. "Remember why he's on the Morning Star, sir..."

"Right..."

*****************

"We're under L1 now. Opening velocity dump. Activating landing thrusters..." the pilot of the shuttle, Open Sky, informed her passengers of their process in landing on Equus. "There. We'll be at the surface in five."

Captain Ares Sol rose to his hooves, the white environment suit clinking at the joints as he gripped the handles over his head with his hooves, holding himself in place. The Marines and the two unicorns were seated around him, checking information, cleaning weapons and gear, the whole bit. They weren't sure what might be down on the surface, as massive storms had stopped probes from reaching their destination. Thus, a manual inspection was necessary. The Captain took his pride and tradition where he could get it: after all, if you wanted something done right, the best way was to do it yourself.. Having his own boots on the ground also allowed him to survey the operations.

The dull roar of air friction against the hull thrummed through the craft. Ares' ears popped as they continued to descend down and down into the atmosphere, pressure increasing. The gusts of wind rocked the craft savagely, and the hull vibrated.

The shuttle popped through the clouds, and the turbulence stopped.

"Free fall. Closing fuel valves." Open Sky synchronized her notification with the thump and silence of the drop through the burning air.

Three minutes of absolute nothingness passed, and then fwoosh as the landing thrusters engaged, slowing the shuttle from its incredible velocity. Two minutes of crushing pressure on his skeleton would have hurt Ares had he not been used to it entirely. A shudder rustled the passenger cabin as the shuttle settled onto the dust that was Canterlot. The mechanical voice of the computer spoke.

"Equalizing interior pressure with exterior atmosphere... Done. Opening exterior hatch. Warning: Level 5 Heat Hazard Detected." The machine droned as the door hissed open, hydraulics pumping and steam leaking from a faulty seal. That'd have to be fixed. As the whirring sound of gears filled his mind, the Captain wondered if the planet would look remotely like the pictures of the storybooks his mother used to read him.

Ares' first view of Equus was nothing like those illustrations.

Cloud Peak was red and marred with cracks and dust in the distance, Canterlot long disintegrated into nothing but sand and bone. The side of the mountain was caved in where the city had finally collapsed to the amazingly strong wind and blistering heat. It was not like he had expected anything but that, yet... he was still almost disappointed. Angry, even. Nothing? Not even a broken boutique or the wall of an ancient library? Wesley had told him everything there was to know about the surface before they had arrived, but it was not like he'd actually been listening. Thusly, the scene that greeted him was unexpectedly grim and uninteresting.

"Wesley, take what samples and readings you need. Marines, perimeter around the shuttle. Eastley..." he pondered what to do for a moment. "Stick with your brother."

"We certainly have enough hired guns around..." Wesley muttered under his breath, but not so low that the Captain couldn't hear it.

His head snapped to the brown-coated, peach-maned unicorn. "Say something?"

The unicorn gulped and returned to bagging the rocks from the surface. Ares almost smiled. Sometimes, pulling rank was quite amusing. That was about all there was on this blasted rock, anyways.

Then he saw Eastley.