With a laugh like the side of a mountain disintegrating into the sea, Discord shattered his stone prison. Masonry crumbled to dust around him as he leapt into the air. Confetti, streamers, and group of very irate summer turnips burst into the air around him. Free at last!
After twisting his neck through a 360 degree turn that generated wince inducing pops for miles, he looked around. He eagerly sought the force which had finally broken his binds. A garden party turned into a pie fight? A pair of siblings arguing over who had to be the pink ranger?
His eyes finally caught movement. An ant was crawling across the podium where he had stood for thousands of years. He scooped the creature up in a paw and held it before his eyes.
“You?” he asked the miserable speck. Well, all mortals were miserable specks, but this one was more miserable and speckish than most. Even those squabbling foals were more worthy of him than this.
Still, the Spirit of Chaos was nothing if not generous, and so with a tap of his claw he affixed a bright red party hat to the insect.
The ant crawled across the leather surface of a pad, prodding the ground before it with its antennae, oblivious to its new headgear. It proceeded in its slow trek to the back of his paw.
Discord was able to amuse himself for several moments by allowing the ant to crawl across the back of one claw and onto the next. He imagined the miniature being in his power desperately struggling forward, unable to understand why it never reached the end of its course.
The ant, however, lacked his imagination and continued forward oblivious to the chaos which should be warping its reality and filling its mind with despair.
With a sigh, Discord flicked the creature away. It was momentarily disoriented upon hitting the ground, but soon resumed its ridiculous trudge.
It was absurd. Ants? Another one crept along by his hoof. The Spirit of Chaos reached down, and gripped its antenna between two talons. He pulled upward, stretching the ants body with a sound like straining rubber. Once it had reached sufficient height, he grasped its gaster and pulled until the ant stood the size of a pony.
With a smack on the rump, he propelled the creature forward. “Go find an entomologist!” Nerds always got so angry about little things like oxygen diffusion and termites the size of elephants devouring their homes.
Having exhausted the entertainment value of insects, he looked for something else. His ears cocked open, seeking the sound of hoofsteps or shouts in the distance. Nothing.
The sky provided no information either. The sun struggled through an empty slate grey haze that filtered its beams like a dirty window.
There was no way it could have been ants responsible for freeing him...
Unless...
He was in the air in a moment, his body twisting snakelike as it flew. Beyond the garden’s gates, the city of Canterlot was a ruin. Patterns swirled in the dust below him, driven by winds that restlessly searched the ground for life.
He continued on. Buildings slumped dejectedly as they tried to slip into the shelter of their basements. Broken beams and cracked stones turned once flat roofs into mazeworks of disorder. A train stood in rusting agony just outside the station; its metal sides eaten away to a feeble brown and red splotched skin.
The tracks were rotten and rusted, and the train keeled crazily to the side. Without pausing to think, the Spirit of Chaos produced a can of spray paint.
“Discord Rulez,” he laughed to himself. Before he’d finished the first D, the pressure of the aerosol spray caused the carriage to topple the rest of the way over on its side. The sudden movement pulled the carriages to either side down, and the chain reaction carried on until the entire train was laying on its side.
The sun remained immobile in the sky behind him as he followed the rails east.
.
Manehattan had fared worse than Canterlot. The subway system, once the pride of the city, had turned feral. Skyscrapers had been devoured by the tunnels as their supports collapsed. The entire city was an enormous sinkhole, buildings leaning against and through each other.
And beyond the heap, he found the ocean. The water was as still and gray as the sky. Sluggishly it pushed itself against the shore, then fell back with a sigh as if wondering why it still bothered. In the distance, an island of plastic wastes and dead bodies moved slightly in a circle.
As he proceeded along the docks, a single burst of color caught his eye against the blacktop. A burst of red and green that materialized into a rose as he approached.
The flower stood tall and proud in its crack. Discord swooped upon it in an instant, grabbing hungrily at the colors.
Tall and proud, but centuries too early for anything to appreciate it. The rose was well passed dead. Its carcass had never decayed because there was nothing left to decay it. No bacteria, no scavengers, no ponies.
Dried and preserved by accident.
Dead as the world around him.
.
It may have been days later when he finally returned to Canterlot, or it may have been hours. The sun never moved.
From above, there was a logic to the decay. A retreat from the oceans and toward the capital that found its final resting place in a granary.
A collection of bones, all burned black, marked a funeral pyre outside the front door. Within, the last stand against inevitability had been waged. Pegasi, Earth Ponies and a single Unicorn lay together. Their bodies were slumped over what had been their last meal.
In a corner, lay a single empty bottle. The label blurred and reddened until only one word remained visible, “Cyanide.”
“No.”
It was the first word he’d spoken since following the worm-like weaving of the train tracks.
“No.”
It sounded good. He snapped the digits on his eagle talon and dragged the bodies back to their hooves.
"Dance, my little ponies!"
The cadavers cavorted chaotically around him. The two Pegasi danced a frenzied tango until their heads rattled off their feeble necks. The foals wheezed with artificial laughter as they chased each other in a circle. In the corner, the Unicorn was doing something very, quite rude with its horn and an Earth Pony.
A rain of chocolate milk coated the carcasses, matting their fur in a brown mass. Discord laughed and tapped his claws to an invisible drum beat, losing himself in madness. Then one of the corpses picked up a disintegrating fruit pie and flung it at him.
The mealy substance spattered on his fur. The feel of its grainy semi-liquid filling on his skin sobered him.
“That was absolutely disgusting,” he told the pony before severing the magical strings that held it and its fellows aloft.
.
Unable to find the corpse of an Alicorn, he’d selected a Unicorn skull and a pair of mostly intact Pegasus wings, white naturally. Drawing up dirt from the ground, he molded it a familiar tall and shapely body.
“A Brontocorn!” he declared at the patchwork creation and forced himself to laugh at his own joke.
A few more moments work, and a pair of manufactured vocal cords sprang to life. The mouth of the skull moved slowly in time with the fluttering of the wings as it spoke.
“You monster.”
“Oh, you flatter me,” Discord replied, slicking back his mane.
“Discord.”
“That’s my name! What’s yours?”
“Show yourself!”
“I’m right here.”
It wasn’t quite right. Discord lifted into the air over the Brontocorn and released a torrent of white feces over it. He dropped back to the ground before the white princess.
“Perfect,” he assured her as she dripped across the ground.
“You'll never get away with this, Discord.”
“I don’t think you’ve got much of a chance. I can fly and you’re stuck-”
The artificial vocal cords didn’t listen, only continued, “I will hate you forever.”
“That’s a long time.” His voice dipped slightly.
.
He sat on the heap of what had once been a wagon and watched the sun setting through the talons of his eagle claw. The rays slid by, one at a time.
Behind him, the Brontocorn, his sole rival for dominance in the world, continued arguing, “Get off there and put ‘em up. Come on. Let’s go.”
The sun finished its descent, and with a single gesture of his lion’s paw he brought it back up. He had lost count of how many times he’d watched the sun die through his claws.
“What have you done with the Elements of Harmony?”
“What did you do with them?” The destruction had been so … orderly. Things just ended. Falling inward until the last ponies had decided there was no point in delaying the inevitable. Dominoes, like the train collapsing.
“I will hate you forever.”
He was really starting to hate that word. Forever.
The sun finished its descent again, and he left it beneath the horizon. No stars or moon decorated the sky, it was simple blackness.
“I will hate you forever.”
He leapt down from his position and landed before the Brontocorn.
“Don’t lie to me.”
“You’ll never get away with this, Discord.”
“Stop lying!”
“Friendship will always find a way.”
“I said stop lying, you whore.”
“I will never let you-”
The voice was cut off as a clenched into a fist smashed the bone jaw free. A second blow removed the head entirely in a burst of sand and shattered bone.
The Spirit of Chaos hurled himself onto the headless creation. His claws sank into the feeble body, tearing pieces free. His teeth snapped through a wing and tasted dirt as the bones cracked.
“You abandoned me. You took all of my hatred, all of our history, and you just threw it away. We were supposed to fight each other for eternity, and you...”
He fought without magic, relying on brute strength to tear the statue to pieces. He hadn’t fought a battle like this since the world was much younger.
The younger sibling was like that. In a fight, Celestia had no subtlety, but Luna had no mind. The berserker had slammed into him at nearly the speed of sound, carving a furrow into the ground with their bodies. She smothered them both in darkness, flashes of lightning and bursts of winter carving into their flesh with equal abandon.
He ripped off the Brontocorn’s second wing, feeling it twist as it pulled it.
She never screamed. No matter how much pain she was in. The fight only energized her. Luna terrified even her own troops. The donkeys had named her “The Morrigan,” after some ancient deity of theirs, and would refuse to stand anywhere near her.
A disemboweling claw tore through the white sand, and the body finally crumpled, depositing Discord onto the ground.
It wasn’t enough to win, you have to destroy your opponent. Shove them into the deepest darkest hole you can find for a thousand years and let them rot. Celestia, little Celestia, so serious and stern. So hateful. So consistent that a 1,000 years made no difference. They’d always be there when he came out.
“You abandoned me! Everything I did for you, and you abandoned me to this. Is this your idea of joke?! You said you’d always be there to keep me imprisoned.”
His claws raked the ground now, tearing gashes in the dirt. He could think of nothing else to say, and so he went back to his old standby.
“Liar! Liar! Liar!” the ground cracked and shattered under his fists.
Finally, it split and the Spirit of Chaos found himself looking at a series of small holes. Little pinpricks traveling under the city. His eyes finally caught movement, and a flash of color.
It was the ant from before, still wearing its red party hat. He shrank down to get a better look at the thing which had liberated him into this hollow world.
The creature prodded him slightly with its antenna, and then opened a pair of mandibles that were now the size of his foreleg.
“No.” He smacked the creature between the eyes. “Not food.”
The ant closed its mouth and watched him for a moment.
“I suppose you think the hat was not sufficient repayment for my liberation?” Discord walked past the creature, a single claw held behind his back. “Very well, then I shall give you a name.”
The Spirit of Chaos tapped the side of his head, trying to remember the name of one of the fillies who had released him last time.
“Apple … apple … bloomers? No.” He snapped his claw. “Appletrousers.”
He felt a gentle nibbling on his left leg and turned to see the ant was, once again, trying to eat him.
“I said, no!” Discord smacked Appletrousers.
The ant froze in something that was very nearly puzzlement.
“Fine,” Discord sighed and spat into his cupped claws. He rubbed the saliva over his fur, and the liquid soon imitated the smell of the ant’s pheromones.
“Are we good now?”
The ant prodded him with an antennae, and finding familiar smells it walked back into the colony.
Bored, the Spirit of Chaos followed.
The rest of the colony, what there was of it, ignored him as he progressed through the tunnels. In a moment of inspiration, he compounded his eyes, but the headache wasn’t worth it.
He was soon standing in the queen’s chamber. Or, it had been once. The nurse ants were at work on the queen’s carcass, clipping it to pieces and piling it in a corner. Others were shredding the eggs and larva.
He pinched his nostrils shut. The air reeked of misfired pheromones, driving the nurse ants into their murderous frenzy.
So this was what had released him. The last regicide motivated by a fart in the royal chambers.
The nurse ants turned to the two intruders. Their jaws dripped with slime from their butchery. Their antennae twitched furiously as they rushed forward.
“You can’t be serious.”
A single gesture of Discord’s paw sent three of the ants sinking into a centimeter wide pool of quicksand. A single string of cotton candy pinned another two against the wall of the chamber.
The antenna of the last ant disappeared, and Discord stepped aside as it continued its now blind rush out of the chamber.
He sought through the carnage that was left. Pupae snipped in half and eggs ripped open. The belly of the queen was completely opened, her soft exoskeleton dripping gore from its edges, but among the wreckage lay two eggs. Survivors.
The Spirit of Chaos turned to where Appletrousers was eating a hunk of centuries old bread from the royal stores.
“You have done a great service to your people, and so I dub thee, Sir Appletrousers.” He picked up one of the former queen’s antenna and tickled Appletrousers with it. The creature, misinterpreting the gesture, disgorged the contents of its social stomach onto him.
“That is absolutely disgusting,” Discord replied.
...
Discord looked through the glass wall as the new queen burrowed into the dirt. Sir Appletrousers and his red party hat accompanied her as an honor guard. Or maybe it just wanted the piece of bread buried halfway down the jar.
As the queen settled into her nesting chambers, Discord decided that she needed a name.
“Elpis.”
