Chapter 1. Bestirring

“Fer the fooking last time, ye’re not fooking Discord!” Celestia grunted, rubbing her eyebrows as migraine spread across her head. “Ye ain’t the real Discord. Just a fooking glass in a frame. A petty painting on a piece of fooking melted sand. Just’a thing on a wall!”

The so-called Discord chuckled and shrugged.

“And you, my dear, are a rather sad and bizarre, picky doodle,” he said, wiggling the shards of glass he was made of in front of a large mirror. “Oh myself, I’m such an Apollo!”

Celestia, or rather the neat and florid doodle of a magnificent and beaming white alicorn, struck her head with her hoof, grumbling from inside the cage she was stuck in: a single piece of paper simply lain above a carpenter’s bench: among pencils, pens, brushes, wrenches, charcoal, and gears, everything covered in a thick layer of dust. Forgotten. Old. Abandoned.

“Fer the last time, piece o’glass. Put yo ass back on th’workbench before th’carpenter’s back!” paper-Celestia warned, gritting her teeth. “Last time he caught us. He ain’t happy.”

“Come on, Celi… Would you kindly let me call you Celi? Oh, why am I even asking, of course you do like that name, sweetheart.”

Celestia grumbled as if it would make the headache seep out of her ears, nose, and mouth.

“Oh, ah’ve got the feelin’ ye’re going to make me shat mah sanity…”

“I definitely wonder what your sanity would look like,” said Discord, pondering, a paw under his glassy, coloured shin where dust had gathered into a dusty disheveled beard.

“Probably a tiny copy of ya!” Celestia spat back through the same clenched teeth.

“Then, it will faithfully write you a letter about how wonderfully it tried to apply your lessons. Not sure if butt lessons count though.”

Caged in her piece of rough drawing paper, Celestia vented her rage, gurgling bubbles as she turned her back to the glass-made reproduction of Discord.

“Oh, you’re such a treat,” his teasing voice soothed at her.

Celestia did not answer. Tiny drops of blue ink fell from her eyes, rolling all over the paper the carpenter had drawn her on until they vanished at his bottom.

“Come on Celestia,” Discord whispered, jumping off the frame of the mirror to land next to the drawing paper, making some screws roll away. “You’re making me look like the bad guy.”

Celestia’s head swivelled, glaring scribbled bolts of thunder out of her blue-dot eyes. “Ye sure are, ye piece o’disposal.”

Discord walked up to Celestia, looking down at her as he put a steady clawed foot on the piece of paper.

“Hey, don’t ye step on me!”

“I will not. Pinkie-promise,” Discord declaimed religiously. “Cross my heart and hope to fly, stick a cupcake in my eye. OUCH!”

Celestia puffed in laughter at the hole Discord had stuck in his forehead, one of his glassy fingers going through like a needle. Getting his digit out, throwing a few bits of himself onto the paper, Discord hid a meekly smile.

“Something is bothering you, Celestia.” Discord stated, his voice grimly carrying away. “I can see it, even through your smiley face.”

She sighed, drifting her eyes from the shining shape of her interlocutor.

“How long has it been since the carpenter went out?”

Discord shrugged with disdain. Yet, as he started pondering, carelessness gave place to wrinkles on his features. Troubled, he looked at the dwindling flame balancing on the wick of a nearly consumed candle on the far side of the table. The flame was in fact long gone since he had last paid attention to it. Its wax had trickled all over the burnished desk and dust had since amassed in small hills blanketing everything on the desk and further.

“Now that you mention it, it’s rather... unusual.”

“Ah told ya. Sumethin’s strange.” Celestia shivered, holding her hooves tight against her chest. “It’s like he abandoned us.” Turning over, she eyed for Discord’s location. “Wow, wow, wow, what’cha doing there?”

Holding a pen as large as himself, Discord was stuck in motion, tip-toeing toward Celestia.

“Drawing you a moustache. What else would I be doing with a sharpie?” Then a grinn sparked on his face, slowly crawling up to his ears. “Or, would you rather have something kinky? I knew mares who would give their souls to be redrawn at the tip of a pen?”

“Ye wot, mate!?” Celestia howled, her blue stroke turning in shades of violet and red.

Discord brandished the pen like a sword, giggling. “En garde!”

“Oh, fock all kind of chimeras! Ye won’t!”

“Make me,” Discord murmured through pinched lips.

Eyes sparkling with anger, Celestia rushed out of Discord’s range as he kept chasing her around the piece of paper. Laughter carrying away, Discord drew a single moustache in the midle of the drawing paper, threw the pen across, which ricocheted and spilled ink onto the page.

“Ye ain’t a clean guy, ain’t ya?”

With no time spared to answer, Discord jumped off the ebony workbench and landed in a puff of dust. On her own, Celestia, trapped in her two-dimension cage of paper, tried to see what misdeed her companion was brewing… to no avail.

Celestia winced as a shrieking sound of breaking items falling over erupted. “Piece o’glass, whatcha doing? STAPH!”

Discord was climbing up a mass of rejects from the carpenter: screws, pieces of scrap metal, splinters of wood, throwing it all away from beneath his paws.

“Staph, Discord, ye’re gonna get us put in the trash can!”

“Oh, Celestia. Your entitlement to panic will always amuse me,” Discord answered as he set his paws on the lock of a skylight. “Mmmh… Pretty cloudy outside.”

“What the actual fock are ye doing?”

“Let me guess. Opening a window. Maybe?” Discord grinned.

“Don’t ye dare!”

“Come get me,” he cackled, lifting the lock and forcing the rusty hinges of the dormer to creak forth.

Discord opened it a crack and a wave of fog washed over him. Coughing and clumsy, his mass of multicoloured glass hurtled down the steep the pyramid of reject had formed, bringing it down with him a massive and noisy landslide of bric-a-brac.

“Ah fooking told ya,” Celestia grunted from the top of the workbench. “Ain’t ye a messy dude.”

“Damn it,” Discord pouted. “Why isn’t my magic woking?”

“Maybe because ye ain’t Luna-fooking Discord!”

“Hush with nonsenses, Princess,” he said, lifting a paw at her once he was again up on top of the pile of trash. “I’ve got a carpenter to check upon.”

From the skylight was pouring a thick smog, slowly trickling down to the ground, blanketing everything with a cloudy lid, slowly swallowing the tiles.

“Ye won’t leave me there, will ya?” Celestia brought forth, a vibrant fear in a voice.

Discord had just disappeared through the swallowed open window. Upon Celestia’s call, his head pierced through the mist.

“Why shouldn’t I?” Discord contested. “Would you draw a line on our short-term love if I were to leave a few seconds?”

Celestia frowned. “It su’e is unsafe out…”

“Eh,” Discord cut her off and giggled. “’Draw a line’, get it?”

Celestia paused, blinked, and grunted loudly. “Ah’m so going to kill ya…” she sighed.

“Why such a drawl?”

“Just shut…” Celestia’s eyes widened in shock and fear struck her face even before she could scream her warning. “WATCH OUT!”

From the fog stretched out two black tendrils, shredded, and torn like the scattered branches of a long dead tree. Weaving and cracking in silence, they thrust their tips around Discord.

Discord dodged with difficulty. Yelping, he escaped the dreary thorns of darkness and fell down the scrap mass a second time, the seeping monstruosities in his stead.

Like a mouth vomiting an overwhelming flow of bile, the skylight burst out with blackening, dank mist, crumbling like water inside the carpenter’s basement. A third tendril appeared, followed with another… and another… and from beyond the mist, a crystalline, slythering voice, as soothing as silk, and yet frightening as the dead of the night.

“...the magic, it must be all mine...” a marish voice hooted.

Phantasmal greyish hooves crawled through the vent with two blood red eyes glowing from beyond the mist. A ghostly smile creeped across the opening.

“H’lp me!” Celestia yelled, her hooves striking against the threshold of the sheet of paper as the tendrils reached the border of the workbench, bitting in the dark wood like a knife through butter. “Ple-e-ease!”

Holding his glass head between his paws, Discord escaped another assault from the black tendrils. Switfly, he jumped up on top of the top of the desk and, weary of the many gashing tentacles advancing slowly on Celestia’s paper, he set up a plan. Proud, readjusting his glass head over his shoulders, he stood between her and those eerie enemies and the creature controlling them gratting at the entry of the dormer.

“Definitely not my fetish,” he assessed.

“Halp me, instea’ of waitin’ there like a dumbo!”

He chuckled, “as you wish, my peasant milady.” And a tendril struck, wiping off clean one of his arms. Discord screamed.

Celestia gasped, tears rolling on her check. “Discord!”

“You finally call me by my name,” he stood high, pointing the ceiling in a pose of victory with his remaining paw. His scream had been more from surprise than pain. “You finally acknowledge my all-powerfulness!”

“Ye… Are ye for real?” Celestia babbled, dumbstruck as Discord carelessly walked up to a corner of the workbench and started picking up scrap glass.

“I have the advantage to come in spare parts,” he casually said aloud, building his arm anew.

As he turned back to face the dark entity, the red eyes looking at him with a hungry glare, he put up on his muzzle a set of two pieces of somber glass, stretched out his indexes at the creature from beyond the fog, “You, miss, are trying to catch me on a foggy day? Well let’s play a game of hit and mist!”

“H’lp me!” Celestia cried out, calling back Discord’s attention on here.

The tendrils had bitten into the paper, gnawing it away with an irresistible hunger. Discord stood at the other extremity of the paper, pulling it away to rip it off the Black Death’s embrace. Too weak to enforce his idea, Discord leaped across the paper under Celestia’s horrified eyes.

“Chaos-chop!”

Striking the black from the back of his paw, Discord’s arm wobbled away as if he had struck a concrete wall. Hopping back, holding his painful limb now scarred with tiny cracks, he glared around, searching for any way to get as far as possible with his doodled friend. He bit his lips.

“Do you trust me, Celestia?” he asked as the dreadful tentacle gobbled a new piece of the drawing paper.

“Ah’m not… Oh, fook it!” Celestia saw Discord heading claw-first at her. Shudders. “Whattcha doing?!”

“Hum…” Discorded stopped and wondered, looking at the ceiling now crawling with tendrils from which was pouring away streams of fog. “Cutting a way out?”

“Ye gonna hurt me!”

“Just a papercut,” Discord joked as his claws started slitting through the paper.

A few seconds later, Discord had cleaned cut around Celestia’s forced immobile stance. Grabbing her, and rolling her under his arm, muffling any of her supplications and flows of swearing, Discord rushed across the room, leaving a puffing trail of dust in his back. He reached the basement door, turned over to look at the two red eyes peering down at him from beyond the skylight, and smiled meekly.

“Come back…” it hissed. “I need it!”

“Not today, monster.”

And he slid away through the door interstice, the creature’s howl following him through the rotten wood of the door.

Discord blasted through empty, dirty hallways which cathedral-like columns was putting to a new scale even the biggest pony. From his three-apple height, Discord felt like an ant in a monstrous lair.

He walked in the main passageway of a Castle, the ten… hundreds of majestic stained glasses decorating the whole chamber laid shattered, desecrated, or simply crumbled over from their screws and stands. Fog was slowly creeping in, covering the white marble that tiled the flood with a thin but impenetrable lid of cloud. The tapestries had been ripped off, shredded, and pulled apart with an ungodly strength, now laying obscenely onto the ground, rotten and splattered by time. In the back of the room sat, like king and queen, two secular items.

“Canterlot… What happened to you?” Discord murmured as he approached two thrones, one sewed with crimson and gold, the other with night blue and silver, dusty, damaged, and abandoned.

“Mmmmhmhmhmhmmhm,” a muffled shrieking voice broke the eerie contemplation.

“Excuse me?” Discord frowned at the scroll folded under his armpit.

“Mhmhmmhmhmhmh,” it continued.

“I beg your pardon?”

Putting a paw over the paper, Discord folded down a third of it.

“Would ya kindly put me fooking back down ta earth!” Celestia barked.

“Of course your Majesty, thy will is thy order.”

Smirking, Discord readied himself and strained on his imaginary muscles. In a swift jerk, he threw the scrolled up Celestia into the air.

Screaming, Celestia unfolded, waving her paper legs in the air as she started descending…slowly, like a leaf prey to a weak breeze. Bemused, she landed silently on her four legs on top of the gold throne. Searching for Discord, she found him next to her, lying on the crimson frame of the regal chair, smiling wickedly, swallowing down his upcoming burst of laughter.

Celestia glared daggers at him, eyes narrowed with cartoonish bolts of thunder rushing out of them. Then, curious, she cocked up her head and watched over the deserted and crumbling throne room.

“Where’re we?” she whispered.

“Welcome back on your throne,” Discord solemnly announced, lifting his paw and sweeping it before him. “This is all yours.”

A mass of rubble, broken shards of glass, and empty hallways, everything throw in stark relief under a greyish light that struggled to pierce the smog enveloping the castle.

“Ah’m not… Oh, fook it…” She sighed heavily, questions bubbling in her mind. “What happened ta Canterlot?”

Discord paused, thinking, greatly troubled. After a moment, he looked back at his scribbled interlocutor, reaching out at her with his glassy paw. Before Celestia even had time to protest, Discord put his index onto her lips.

“Shhh… It’s okay,” he huffed. “Everypony is gone somewhere... I think.”

Doubt was eating away at him, washing all his assertiveness away, bleaching the colours out of his cracked features.

“Everypony… is gone.” He nearly chocked.

“Eh, ye… Discord, ah’m sor…”

“BOO!” a shrilling voice brashed from behind.

Discord and Celestia jumped on their feet, hooves, or whatever and fell down the top of the throne.

Celestia planed down slowly and landed ten seconds after her glassy counterpart had crashed down on the old and raggedy velour.

“What the actual fook!” Celestia blurted.

From the top of the chair rested a small pink filly, her indigo mane struck with a white lock of hair. Her flank sported a  greyish tiara.

“I. Am. Bored!” the filly wailed, jumping off her position to land between Celestia and Discord, blowing the first away in her landing. Celestia hit one of the armrest and flopped down, two crosses barring her face instead of her pair of eyes.

“Diamond… Tiara?” Discord asked, surprised and a tiny horrified to meet the filly. From the crusaders’ tales, he knew she was a pest.

It was rather a doll of Diamond Tiara, painted with matching colours, her eyes, two globes of porcelain with two bright blue dots, and limbs showing expertly crafted articulations. She started stomping the ground with her artificial hooves. Cogwheels could be seen from a hole in her chest. Her limbs were marked with cracks and scratches.

“I. Am. So. Bored!!” she screamed. “I wanna play!”

As Celestia slowly woke up from her short-lived unconsciousness, she saw Discord trying to calm her.

“Who’re you?” Celestia asked.

“Diamond Tiara,” she beamed, prancing over. “The sweetest filly in Equestria, like… ever!”

Discord gave ‘that’ look at Celestia, the latter giving it back with the same level of hopelessness.

“Sweet Celestia,” Discord muttered.

“Oh fooking Discord,” Celestia outbid.

“What’ve we got ourselves in?” they finished together, their voices echoing in the empty skeleton of Canterlot… Long dead. Long forgotten. Swallowed in a strange mist that only filtered a grim light.

A castle creaking over its aeon-old foundations.

There, In this cathedral of death, three souls remained.

The carpenter’s bench is the place where the hooves give shape to raw materials, could it be wood, glass, or simple paper. Through melding, moulding, planning, painting, carving, and writing, only the carpenter was able to nurture the wanted shapes.

Some said the best carpenters could even light life in their creations.

Below Canterlot was a carpenter’s bench. The carpenter, famous for having made the two Sisters’ castle windows, had dedicated his life to creating, to the search of artistic awe itself. His basement… his kiln, not many ever saw it. However, those who did visited him speak about the toys, drawings, mechanisms, and paintings populating the walls of his place. They tell about the toys’ eyes following the visitors, the paintings, never really fixed on their support, as if the whole place was bursting with a life that the common eye couldn’t fathom.

But no object ever told the tale until one day, the carpenter never came back. Next Chapter: Chapter 2. History Estimated time remaining: 23 Minutes