Applying the Finishing Touch
“Well, it was nice while it lasted,” Sunny said, looking at the shoreline that until recently had hosted a truly fantastical water park.
Izzy went over her thoughts just before it had all evaporated into clouds of glittering vapor. Then she considered those same thoughts as applied to other places. And then, because any good unicycler recognizes which bits are too dangerous to even touch, much less salvage, she dropped that whole line of thought and reported her findings: “I feel like that might have been my fault.”
And everypony laughed, Izzy along with them. After all, while she may have poofed away the water park as quickly and accidentally as she’d made it, at least nopony had gotten hurt. It was her second summer in Maretime Bay, and she was still trying to get a handle the size of the ocean. Especially the concept of drowning. If somepony wanted to drown in the Bridlewood, they had work for it, and thankfully nopony had ever had both the right mood and any actual drive to exert effort in Izzy’s lifetime.
Her hooves followed the group as her mind kept going, remembering the run-in with Destiny while Izzy was shaking off the blockywockys. Thankfully the Brighthouse had thought to pack her a rebreather. (The others weren’t always sure what to think of the building’s increasing awareness. Izzy just liked getting immediate feedback on her remodeling ideas, to say nothing of the odd helping hoof while crafting.)
Although… hadn’t Izzy had another adventure with many more seaponies? And at least one weird crab guy? She definitely recalled a book series she loved… or maybe she just remembered she remembered it. Like with her parents.
And as Izzy’s brow furrowed while her thoughts hit that well-trod path, she tripped over nothing.
As her attention returned to her surroundings, she looked back and saw that was the perfect description for what had just happened. The nothing was a crack in… everything. Not the boardwalk along the edge of Maretime Bay; not unless that had been made with some very unusual materials.
Izzy couldn’t completely rule it out, but she wouldn’t put any bits on it. So she turned to the experts.
“Hey Sunny, Hitch? Was the boardwalk built on top of an infinite void that glows not white but an unearthly radiance both more and less than any color on Equestria? Just checking.”
That was met with silence. Izzy managed to drag her gaze away from the crack to see if it was a confused silence or a “everypony had kept trotting while she was distracted” silence.
The answer was worse than either option. Her friends all stood frozen in place, Zipp in midflap, Comet in midstumble. And they weren’t the only ones. Everywhere Izzy looked, ponies and critters hung motionless. Fluttering awnings, drifting clouds, even the waves of the oceans were perfectly still.
And all around them were more cracks into nothing. Cracks in the sky, cracks in buildings, even one shining through the hairs of Pipp's tail.
Worst of all was how quiet it was. Nopony had talked much in the Bridlewood before magic came back, but there was always something making noise in a forest. But now, with everything locked in place, the only sounds were the ones Izzy made. For a second, she thought the surf had restarted, but looking at the frozen waves made her realize she was hearing the blood moving through her ears for lack of anything else.
"Cut it close, didn't I?"
Izzy turned, relieved to hear anything. Then she looked at what had spoken and wasn't so sure.
But wait, didn't she know him?
No, surely not. There was no way she could have forgotten such a hodgepodge of parts, wings and limbs and still-regrowing horns all mismatched like she'd made Señor Butterscotch out of a taxidermist's scraps.
But then why did he seem so familiar? Why was he smiling at her like they were already friends? How did she know he was a "he"?
But but but...
The questions on questions halted suddenly. Izzy blinked and saw one of the not-a-stranger's lion claws poking her forehead, tracing counterclockwise circles that got her out of the spiral. “I hope you can appreciate how momentous this is," he said with a smirk. "In my bad old days, I’d have been disgusted by the idea of holding together a pony’s sanity.”
“Discord?" said Izzy, who now remembered him. She also remembered not remembering him, but a unicycler also recognized which piles not to poke. "What’s going on?”
He sighed and looked out at the fractured coast. The cracks kept going past the horizon, too small to see but forming a diffuse glow like a midday fog. “The end of the world, I’m afraid.”
“What!?" Izzy looked down at the Boardtrot, now on the wrong end of dozens of cracks. "Oh gosh, and the Nova Charm is all split up! We—”
“I'll stop you there," Discord said with a shake of his head. "Anywhere that trinket might have taken you is going through the same thing." He leaned back, elbow resting on thin air. "I should have suspected something like this when you never wrote, but I figured you were all simply enjoying this brave new world that has such ponies in it. What with the roller derbies and summer camps...”
Izzy looked around, just in case she'd find somewhere that hadn't started breaking apart. She didn't. “How did this happen?”
“And then Fluttershy mumbled the order and the baker thought she’d ordered two cakes...” When she turned back, she saw Discord had taken on the same faraway look she'd often seen on Elderflower. Whatever he was looking at, it wasn't now.
Fortunately, that also meant she knew how to address the problem. “Discord!” she cried, tugging on his tail like those fancy servant-calling ropes at the Zephyr Heights palace.
He blinked, looking around as his brain tried to catch up to the present. “Hmm?”
“What’s with all of the shiny cracks in everything?” Izzy furrowed her brow as all the draconequus had done and tried to do to the Unity Crystals came to mind, all in the name of making her feel better about herself. "You didn't..."
He waved that off. "Oh, perish the thought. Even at my worst, I understood that breaking my toys meant I wouldn't get to play with them anymore."
"So what did do it?" She spotted Discord's gaze starting to drift away again and stomped a hoof. "Hey!"
That sent a shudder through his body, a little wave of chromatic aberrations going from one end to the other. “Oh, yes. Apologies, old age hits you hard when you’re accustomed to immortality." Discord cleared his throat and wound his way through the air to look at the nearest fracture. "In any case, you’ve asked a simple question with several answers of varying complexity. The dangers of high-density magic, the tensile strength of timelines, the whims of capitalism…”
Most of that went over Izzy's head, but her mind went back to the vanishing water park. “High-density…" A pit formed in her stomach. "Did... Did I do this?”
To her relief, Discord shook his head. “Not in any way that merits blame." That kind of spoiled the relief. "You and your friends were only trying to restore Equestria to its former glory and beyond. None of you realized that too much magic can be worse than none at all. And that was only one of the factors." He glared at nothing Izzy could see. "Had forces far beyond your control played out differently, you would have only helped. As it is…” With a sigh and a shrug, he concluded, “You did what you could.”
Izzy bit her lip, looking over the damage. “So what can I do now?”
“Now?" Discord gave her the same baffled look all of her friends gave her from time to time. "Izzy, I don't think you understand. There’s barely any now left. When the fabric of reality’s already worn this thin, there’s only a fraction of a second left before it tears itself to shreds. This has advanced beyond your ability to repair, even with all the glitter glue in the world.”
Her thoughts raced, looking for an alternative. “Maybe Sunny could—”
Discord shook his head. “I’d have gone to her if she could help. Throwing an alicorn at magical overload, even a part-timer like her, is like trying to put out a fire with kerosene.”
“Then you—”
He waved a paw across his body. “I may have mellowed in my old age, but I am still the Spirit of Chaos and Disharmony. Preservation is outside of my remit. Stretching out this moment is pushing it as it is.”
“Then… then…” Izzy's ears drooped. Tears welled in her ears. "There has to be something!"
Discord sighed, knelt next to her, and wrapped her in a serpentine hug. “Izzy. I didn’t dilate time so you could bear witness to the draconequus ex machina who saves all of reality and shower me with praise afterwards. I did it to apologize because I can’t. And because you deserve an apology from me more than most sapients, given how I tried to throw Twilight's Plan U into a volcano for your sake.”
Izzy didn't say anything for a moment, not until she registered the feeling of tears soaking into her fur. “Oh.”
“I’m sorry," Discord said, pulling back and wiping his eyes. "I truly am."
"Plan U for Unity?" she couldn't help but ask.
That got a weary grin out of him. "No, she literally tried to stop Opaline twenty other ways first." Discord sighed. "And I thought through and rejected many more before I came to see you now. I wish I could just snap my talons and set this right. But at this point, no one can. It isn’t fair, but in all my years I’ve never been able to track down any spirit of justice." He glowered at the sky. "Believe me, I'll have quite a few words for them if I do.”
And because Izzy was Izzy, her mind kept going even when her heart couldn't keep up. “You know, I can’t help but think of a story I found in Sunny’s dad’s old stuff.”
That brought Discord's attention back to her. “Oh?”
She nodded. “It was about your old friends, like Pinkie Pie, who ran Sugarcube Corner.”
Discord waggled his lion paw. “More or less. Strictly speaking, the Cake family always owned the deed.”
“She had her friends had all kinds of fun adventures, lots of them starting with the fun magic potions she kept there.”
“Potions?" Discord tilted his head. "Wait, what books did you—”
“And the adventures were so much fun that they didn’t even realize their friend Discord had been playing pranks on them for a long time, at least until he stepped things up and nearly broke the world." Izzy looked to him with new hope. "But in the end, everything got fixed and he wrote that very book about it.”
He squirmed under her scrutiny for a few moments before shaking his head. “That was just a story, Izzy. One I wrote, yes, and that should tell you how much basis it has in reality. Potion Nova and Lightning Chill and all the rest were just characters.”
Izzy stared at him for a few more moments before asking, “Who’s Potion Nova?”
“Who's... Didn’t I—” A book with a plain, purple cover flashed into existence in Discord's forelimbs, which he pulled away from a spiderweb of more glowing cracks that formed a moment later. He flipped through it and looked up, dumbfounded. “Oh. Left her out completely. How about that?”
Izzy grinned. “So you could—”
Discord held up a talon. “I could make a record of this. A single slice of spacetime, thin as can be, pressed between the pages of a book. A textual snapshot of your final moments. And then everything keeps going.”
Izzy looked around and thought about everything that had led up to this moment. All the things she had or hadn't done, and some things she had and hadn't done, or had done twice in different ways at the same time. All the times with her friends, all the joy and the misunderstandings and even the scary bits. She took a moment to feel especially bad for Allura and Twitch, far from home and unwilling to make a new one.
And then she looked up at Discord and said, “At least we’ll be remembered.”
Discord's eyes widened in surprise. “I must admit, Izzy, I underestimated you.”
“Why's that?”
“I never expected you to make something out of this much garbage.” And Discord wiped his eyes and shut the book, open to its penultimate page. This one bore the mural on the entrance to the Crystal Brighthouse on its cover, modified to incorporate six notable figures, in particular a unicorn in purple and blue. With tender care, he placed it on the shelf next to the plain purple volume, being especially careful around the bottled singularity with its cracks mostly covered in duct tape.
He sighed. "Truly remarkable."
"What is?"
Discord jumped in his seat and turned. He'd forgotten he'd been in the cottage last time he'd been now; he'd superposed the bookshelf between here and his own home a few years after he and Fluttershy had started using them interchangeably. The mare herself was aging remarkably well, and he could hardly take any credit for it. She'd made her stance on immortality clear, and he wasn't opening that can of worms again any time soon. "Another side project that didn't go the way I'd hoped," he said, nonchalantly as he could while he felt another tear roll down his face.
That prompted a hug. "I'm sorry. I know how hard you work on these." Fluttershy frowned at the new volume. "Even if I don't completely understand what you're doing."
"It's all very technical, my dear. Advanced chaos is as much a science as an art, like baking." He put the book in a greased and parchment-lined 9x13 pan for emphasis before sliding it back onto the shelf, even if it was already done.
"Well, I'm glad you're taking it in stride," Fluttershy said with a sigh.
Perceived centuries apart might have made lesser spirits forget her eccentricities, but Discord spotted the tension in her jaw and irritated wing fluffing immediately. "Is something the matter?"
She hesitated for a moment, clearly weighing whether or not she should bother him with her problems. But years of encouraging her to be more open with them did their work. "There was a very unpleasant unicorn at the market stalls going around saying terribly rude things about pegasi and earth ponies. You'd think Cozy Glow and those others had broken out of the statue."
Discord slid open a peephole in the air and peered through at the Canterlot statue garden, just in case. Sending his mind back shouldn't have disrupted anything, but forking off a new timeline always came with risks. "Still as secure as they were before Twilight took the throne," he said with no small relief. That just left the main order of business. "But this unicorn. Dark purple coat, nearly white mane?"
Fluttershy's eyes widened in surprise. "You know her?"
"I know of her." Discord sat up, cracking knuckles and vertebrae in a series of very satisfying bubble-wrap pops, glad that the paradoxes hadn't resolved in favor of Skyros. He was back in his prime, but he still distinctly recalled a sore hip that wouldn't appreciate such a trek. "And I think I'll take a personal interest in this."
"Don't do anything rash," said Fluttershy.
He grinned at that. How could he not? "Believe me, my dear, I've given this more consideration than you could believe."
Author's Note
Unicorn Opaline shows up during a flashback in the first G5 IDW storyline, which is indeed an aged and bitter Discord trying to take away magic before it creates the very divisions that drove ponykind apart in the first place. She's also implicitly blamed for the catastrophe that led to G5 as we know it.
Pony Life ends in Discord literally closing the book on the spinoff. I also owe some inspiration to Sandman issue #50, where Haroun Al Raschid, Caliph of Baghdad, bargains with Dream of the Endless to forever preserve his city at its fantastical peak in the realms of literal fantasy.
I could say that releasing this story when the next Tell Your Tale short would have aired was a deliberate dramatic choice. I could also say I sat on the story in a 70% complete state for two weeks. Both can be true from the right perspective. 
Goodbye, G5. You were a strange little project, mismanaged but full of unique potential. May you live on as we fill the gaps.
