The War for Summer

Coming back from his impromptu vacation, Discord didn't know what to expect. It was strange to think that the embodiment of chaos and disharmony would be concerned about predicting the future, but a cautious immortal draconequus was an immortal draconequus that wouldn't be stuck as a stone statue for another thousand years.

Celly, did I tell you that I love what you've done with the palace? The violence? The drama? The CHAOS? Discord began to laugh, but then shook his head dejectedly and crossed his arms. No, too boring and cliche. Hmm...

Floating around Canterlot castle not-so stealthily stuffing his entire form into a distorted and misshaped cloud, he looked around at the chaos of the battlefield bellow him. There were probably a million different forms he could flawlessly mimic to be completely undetected by anypony looking, but there was no fun in being perfect.

Secretly, Discord had began to come and go from the Canterlot royal gardens long before his supposed escape and first meeting with the new wielders of the Elements of Harmony. Celestia's power over the elements of harmony had weakened from her traumatic experience of banishing Luna to the moon, and Celestia alone was not strong enough to imprison him permanently as was originally intended. Despite this, her knowledge of the magical arts was still strong enough to imprison him for years at a time. As a result a strange new relationship between the two had formed; an immortal jailer overseeing an immortal prisoner, both with too much time on their hands and surrounded by others with never enough. As much as he loathed to admit it (rose-tinted sentimentality made him nauseous), those comical years of secret escapes and being secretly captured had been almost as enjoyable as the time before...Equestria.

Before Equestria. Before stupid responsibilities, higher causes, duties and obligations, and dumb attachments.

All of the things that left a sour taste in his mouth. Bah. Bleck. Bluh.

Regardless; the strange (and chaotically violent) disturbances in Equestria as of the late had been more than satisfying enough to watch before his unexpected parole. The return of a goddess possessed by evil nightmare spirits, a swarm of magically mutated bugs that could eat anything, an invasion by parasitic insectoid equines, an attack on Canterlot by a gigantic cockatrice and its minions, the emergence of a long-lost empire ruled by a shadowy tyrant king; just to name a few. Some of the aforementioned events had been amusing, while others had just been downright strange. Even for him.

Returning to find both alicorn sisters at war with each other over the season of summer was...both.

But in his own words, what fun was there in making sense?

I must be careful about this; this could be my greatest work ever! But only if everything goes right! Discord thought, as he tapped the digits of his mismatched hands together. Bellow him he could hear the sounds of battle echoing through the different rooms of the castle. Above and around him in the skies, fliers from both armies ran patrols and fought each other in dogfights with crazy contraptions of magic and clouds.

I dare say, the time has come for ORGANIZED CHAOS! AH HAH HAH HAAAAH!

Balling both his claw and paw into fists, Discord began to concentrate his magic.

"Soon! All of Canterlot will be...will be... Heeey, waaaait a minute..."

Discord stopped concentrating and blinked; he didn't have a clue where or what to start with first.

In fact...

All around him Canterlot really was in chaos. Not the same chaos as reversing gravity or having pink cotton candy clouds rain chocolate milk, but the chaos of two whole armies running amuck and chasing each other down violently in a city filled with ponies that desperately did not want to get caught in the middle. The city was literally being painted both red and blue, with property being broken and windows getting smashed just as fast as workers from the castle were fixing them. Gardens and the arrangements in them were being destroyed and stripped, just in time for more workers from the castle to uproot everything and replace them with healthy ones. In the skies both armies fought with airships and crazy cloud creations. The weather around Canterlot was constantly changing from gusting gales with lightning storms back to a light sunny breeze in a matter of minutes. It was as if he were caught in a strange dimension, where construction and destruction were in some race with to outpace the other.

Then it hit him. A feeling of dread struck him, going from his swerved spine right into the pits of his stomach.

"I know what's happening here!" Discord shouted, suddenly enraged. "I've been REPLACED! HOW DARE--!"

But the mismatched draconequus never got a chance to finish, as stray lightning bolt from a pair of dueling cloud ships struck him from behind. Bursting into flames, Discord fell out from his own cloud as black as a charcoal briquette, spiraling downward and landing with a splash into one of the filled fountains in the royal garden.

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