Six Truths From Discord

by RB_

Rating: teen
Tags: Discord, Anthology, Main 6, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Length: 2293

Six Ponies. Six Poems. Six sides of the same bitter truth.

Six Ponies. Six Poems. Six sides of the same bitter truth.

Written for the 2024 Pony Poetry Contest. Read the other entries here!

Preread by the ever-wonderful OP! Check out their poem too! It has dragons in it! Everybody loves dragons!

Published 2024-09-24 01:10:01 UTC
Last updated 2024-09-24 01:10:01 UTC

Rainbow Dash and the Spiked Collar

Rainbow Dash
Flies
With a spiked collar
Around her neck.

Its spikes point inward
Scratching
Poking her
Drawing blood sometimes.

You see,
Rainbow
Lost a friend recently
And that
Injected the poison
into her brain.

You see,
Rainbow
Is getting older, now
Her body
Doesn't heal as fast
Her bones
Are a little more brittle.

So what if
The next flight
Does her in?

What if she
Misjudges a turn?
(She'd never do that, she tells herself)
(But what if)
And she careens into a barricade
And her skull fractures
And there's bits of bone in her brain
And so much blood
And there's nothing
The doctors
Can do?

She's already past her prime
(Though she doesn't want to admit it).
Already on
The way out.

But what if
She doesn't make it
To that nice Wonderbolts retirement package?

This never bothered her
Until now.
She'd never even thought about it.

And she compartmentalizes it.
She has to.
Tucks it away in her mind
Any time she's on the job.

But at night
In bed
It always escapes its confinement.
Gnaws at her.

The spiked collar
Gets tighter.

Is this it?
Is tomorrow's race...
It?

She thinks about resigning
But that would be cowardly.
Disloyal.
This was her dream, she can't be
Scared now, she
Put so much
Time
Effort
Sweat
(Blood)
Into getting here, how can she
Be so
Afraid?

One day
Fate will grab that spiked collar
And give it a yank
And her head will come flying off.

One day.

Who knows when.

(Me)

(I know when.)

But for now
All she can do
Is not sleep
And barely eat
And tell everyone she's fine.

Applejack and the Ten Foot Fence

Applejack has,
In true farmpony fashion,
Built a fence around her heart.

It's ten feet tall
And electrified
And topped with barbed wire.

She first started building it when her parents died
And has been adding to it ever since.

You see,
Applejack
Isn't very honest
With herself.

She's the tough one,
Or so she thinks.
She can't
Be allowed
To feel
Pain
At all the death that surrounds her.

She's the rock of the group
Standing resolute in the rushing waters
That everyone else can cling to.

But rocks erode.

Fences can be scaled
Even if they're electrified
Even if the barbed wire at the top
Cuts and nicks at your underbelly.
Threatens to rip you to shreds.
Even if it makes you bleed.

Someday someone's going to scale that fence.
Reach that fleshy, warm, vulnerable heart
And then the fence itself will come tumbling down
And everyone will be able to see how scared she is.

That's what she hopes, anyway.
That's what she wants.
That's what she can't be honest about.
Not to herself.
Not to anyone.

But no one ever will.
She built it too tall.

And when that heart stops beating
That fence
Rusty, now
Will still be standing.

It will outlast even her.

Pinkie Pie and the Joyous Sun

Pinkie Pie is
(Contrary to what you might expect)
Genuinely a happy pony.

She has a daughter, now
(Or is it a son?)
And a loving husband
And she is content.

But she is happy because
She has known misery
Before.

I am not saying
That one can only be happy
If they have been sad.
There are certainly many ponies
Who have been very content with their lives
Who have never been hungry.

But Pinkie
Is happy because
She has tasted misery in her life.
And she swore that she would do
Whatever it took
To keep from falling back
Into its depths
And becoming stuck
In the bog
And the muck
And the blood
Again.

And she also swore
She would do whatever it took
To help others escape it.

And ah, you're thinking to yourself
"She is misguided!"
"Suffering
Is necessary, sometimes!"
"She will shelter that child!"
"And they will grow up fragile!"

This
Is not who Pinkie is.

She knows that to be sad is also equine
That happiness and sadness
Joy and misery
Are both to be welcomed
In measured amounts
And at the right times.

But she also knows
That one can be miserable
And still be made to smile.

And so when her father dies
She will throw a party.
Not to distract
But to honour
And to cherish.

And when her mother dies
She will be there to comfort her sisters
And talk about
All the good times
They had together.

And when her friends die
One after another
(She will be the last one standing)
(It's already started)
She will cry
But she will also smile
And she will encourage the others to smile
And she will encourage me to smile
(As she already has)
Because, moreso than even Celestia
She is

The sun.

Rarity and the Tightrope

Rarity,
Though she's only just beginning to realize it,
Walks a T-I-G-H-T-R-O-P-E.

She's been walking it
Balancing along, suspended
Above it all
Ever since she made her first sale
At the Carousel Boutique.

And one day,
She is going
To fall.

On one side of the tightrope,
The artist.

On the other,
The businessmare.

And ne'er the two shall meet.

See,
Rarity
Takes great pride in her art.
But she also
Is her own accountant
Does her own taxes
Runs her own business
A business that's constantly growing
Eating up more and more of her time.

She's an artist at heart
But being an artist at heart
Doesn't put food on the table
(And it certainly doesn't pay for all the wine.)

And it makes her uncomfortable
Every time she has to cut a corner
Every time she has to compromise on a design
So that it can be manufactured
(A dress, manufactured! Perish the thought!)
In three locations
(Soon to be four)
(Soon to be five and six and seven)
(Soon to be in Griffonstone)
(And Yakyakistan)
(And Kludgetown and Mt. Aris and you get the idea)
By dressmakers
Who make less than she did
When she started
(Keep the margins low, darling.)

But it erodes at her
Slowly, at her artist's heart
Clawing and gnawing
And soon she will fall
One way

Or the other

From her perch on high.

Her element was generosity, you know.
That's what she used when she turned me to stone.
But she's always felt that she had to earn it
More than the others
Honesty
Comes so naturally to Applejack
Fluttershy
Always was so kind
(Even to me.)

But Rarity?
Well
She'd just have to put in the effort,
She supposed.

That becomes harder to do
When you're trying to compete
In a cutthroat market.
They'll eat her alive if she's not careful, shows
Any sign of weakness.

At what point
Does a virtue
Become a brand?
Become a selling point?
At what point are you
Just going through the motions?

Ponykind
Created a great beast
And then chained themselves to it.
And now it is in Rarity's home,
Eating Rarity's bread,
Eating Rarity.
Always eating
Chewing and Swallowing
Until it has consumed everything
And begins gnawing at its own legs.

But...

Not yet.

Rarity
Isn't there yet.

But it's coming.

She's going to trip.

She's going to fall.

One way,

Or the other,

And it won't be pretty
Either way.

Twilight and the Leaden Crown

Twilight.

Twilight, Twilight, Twilight.

Twilight isn't prepared to rule.

The leaden crown sits
Upon her head
But she does not know its weight yet.

She thinks she does.
Celestia
Has been preparing her for this all her life
Cadance
Is always ready to give advice
Luna
Will step in if she needs it
(Even though she does not like ruling,
Not really.)

And sure, Twilight
Already feels like she's not ready.
But she does not know how
Not ready she is.

Celestia
Always made it look so
Effortless.
So simple.

Twilight
Wasn't there for the
Hundreds of years
Where Celestia was still learning the ropes.

The famines.

The skirmishes.

The disputes.

The plagues.

(I watched it all from my stone prison, you know.)

If there is any pony alive
Who is more qualified
To lead Equestria
Then I do not know of them
(And I know all of them.)
But ruling
Being a good ruler
Is something you can only learn
Through experience.

She doesn't know
About the turmoil
That lies ahead.
All the
Impossible choices
She will have to make.

The lives
She will have to balance
Against the greater good
Of her flock.

Equestria's future
Is not an easy one.
Not for her.

She's a god now,
Among ponies
And one day
She'll find out
What that truly means.

And she'll pull through it all!
Because she's strong
(Stronger than I)
(Stronger than Celestia)
(And Cadance)
(And Luna.)
(Stronger than anyone.)

But she won't be the same pony
She is now.

There will come a time
When she will look at herself in the mirror
And she will no longer see
The unicorn
She was when she met me.
She will no longer even see
The alicorn
Who overcame so much
To be there.

She will only see the crown.

As Celestia does.

As Cadance will.

As Luna was always afraid to.

And she will breathe.
And she will sigh.
And she will smile at her apprentice
(The last of hundreds)
Upon whom she will inflict
The same fate
Someday.

Fluttershy and the Box of Razor Wire

Fluttershy
Was born in a box of razor wire.

It was a metal box,
Rusty
As long as she'd known it
The wire
Twisting and mingling through its bars like vines.
But she was a small filly
And there was room for her, then.

Her mother
Would come every day to whisper to her
Bring her food, and water, and
Sometimes
Hold her hoof through the bars
And Fluttershy was happy
Because she knew nothing else.

But years went by
And she grew bigger
And sometimes her father would come
And sometimes her brother would come
And she would wonder
"Why am I
The only one in the box?"

And as the years passed
And she grew older
And she became a mare
(Beautiful, maybe)
There was less and less room in the box
And the razor wire
Drew closer and closer
And she had to sit very
Very still
In the center
Staring at the blades.

And her mother
Her father and her brother
Still came around
And she tried to put on
A happy smile
For them
But the question
The ever-present question
Rattled around her skull
Echoing
Getting louder and louder.

And she kept growing
Growing and growing
Until there was no more room
And the razor wire
Dug into her skin
(Beautiful, maybe)
And with every beat of her heart
Every breath
Every twitch
The steel bit deeper
Until it scored her bones.

And her mother
Still asked to hold her hoof sometimes
But Fluttershy couldn't bear the pain
And eventually her mother gave up
And stopped coming
And Fluttershy kept growing
And the razor wire kept cutting ribbons out of her.

And Fluttershy realized then,
As blood mixed with rust
And her heartbeat grew slower
And her vision grew blurry
That it was not a box.
She had been born into a cage.

And I watched her
Slowly,
Slowly,
So slowly,
Bleed to death.

She was,
Of course,
Not the only one in a box.
All of ponykind is
If you think about it.

But hers
Seemed tighter
Than most
And I loved her
So much
And now I can finally
See the bars
The metal
The blades
Closing in

On me.

Discord and the Inevitability of His Fate

The sad part
About all of this
Is that I
Can do nothing about it.

I am a god.
A trickster.
A conniver.
I twist words
(and ponies)
with ease.

But
To twist the truth
You need to know the truth.

I can see
My entire life
The lives of all things
Stretching out in all directions
All the paths they
May take
Will take
Won't take
Could take
Would never take
Wish to take
Dream of taking.

But I am just a pawn
(With a frightening amount of self-awareness, granted.)
I do not truly have free will.
I am merely following the script
That was handed to me
When this world was created.

This is what being a god means.

I have tried to fight it
Tried to run away
But Fate is a stronger force than even Chaos.

(I am not actually that powerful
In the cosmic scheme of things.)

The end to my story
Was written eons ago
And I can see it!
I can see it getting closer!
I can see every domino along the way!

My emergence
My defeat by the sisters
My resurrection from stone
My defeat by these wonderful ponies
My friendship with Fluttershy
All of it was inevitable,
Bullet points
On a list
That only I can see.

That I cannot stop
And I cannot change.

So I cannot help Rainbow
With the spiked collar
that digs at her throat.

I cannot help Applejack
With the fence
That she herself built.

I cannot help Rarity
Off the tightrope
That she must walk.

I cannot help Pinkie Pie
Even as she helps me
Become whole again.

I cannot help Twilight
Bear the leaden crown
That weighs upon her temples.

And I could not help Fluttershy
Escape the prison
That she was born into.

As much as it hurt.

As much as I cried.

I

Can

Do

Nothing.

That is simply how it is.

And that,
My friend
Reading this
Reading these words right now
Is the cruelest joke of all!