Opposition, 7 AM

Twilight was exhausted when she returned to the library, after making sure that the prisoners were securely bound and bespelled to remain unconscious long enough to be transported to Canterlot. The two Rainbow Dashes were still missing, and if the alternate overpowered the Rainbow of Twilight's world, Twilight certainly didn't want her to be able to find the other alternates here in Ponyville. Besides, their disposition was most appropriate to leave up to Princess Celestia anyway, though Twilight had some ideas as to what would be necessary.

"Spike," she called. "Get me some coffee, now."

"Uh, sure thing, Twilight!" If he thought eagerness to assist was going to make her forgive him or relent on his punishment for letting himself be deceived by Discord, he would learn otherwise, she thought. She had used a spell to identify all the secret hiding places for his hoard and had confiscated all of his gems, leaving him only a small bag of fossils he'd collected – she approved of an interest in science, and she knew that Spike considered the taste of ordinary rock disgusting, similar to how a pony would react to moldy hay, so she knew he wouldn't eat them. In a week, if he proved himself worthy, she might return his gems to him. He'd struggled not to cry when she told him, but at least in the end he had managed to avoid pointless bawling.

The alternates were dangerous. Particularly the alicorn. She was sloppy – perhaps even sloppier than Twilight had been before the Diadem – but so powerful. Twilight knew herself to be the most powerful living unicorn in Equestria, but the alicorn's mana pool dwarfed hers. Anger and resentment at Discord for not telling her that her counterpart was an alicorn shot through her, but she pushed it down – what did she expect of him? For a moment she thought of interrogating him to find out how the other one (she could not even think of the alicorn as herself; the magic she radiated was so very different) had become an alicorn, but then she realized that this would reveal that she'd met the other one, confirming to Discord that a rescue attempt was in fact being made. This could not be allowed. Discord would take strength from knowing his so-called "friends" were trying to save him, and then it would be even harder to break him.

If they were sent back to their world, they would simply find a way to return, even if Twilight forced Discord to destroy that particular portal. He'd mentioned that this dimension was porous, and he could not yet be trusted to be allowed to seal it. And they were a serious threat. The two Applejacks and the two Rarities seemed evenly matched; Applejack had told Twilight that although she was winning the fight when the alternate Pinkie interfered, it had been close and partly up to luck. Though that might be Applejack spinning it. Where Rainbow Dash self-aggrandized by insisting her opponents were pathetic and weak, Applejack tended to go in the opposite direction, talking them up to make them seem tougher than they actually were, which created the illusion that she was being honest and modest while actually excusing her from any failures and making any victories seem all the more impressive. Still, the two Rarities had obviously been close in ability, so logically the Applejacks might well be.

And while Pinkie's description of the fight made it clear that her alternate was far less vicious, ruthless and experienced in combat, it was also clear that the alternate Pinkie was more focused, less impulsive, and possibly even smarter. The Rainbow Dashes were likely evenly matched. The Fluttershys wouldn't be, of course; their own Fluttershy had to be much more competent in combat than the alternate could ever be. But one pony with a clear superiority to her alternate didn't make up for four ponies who were close to the same... and the alicorn was an alicorn.

Twilight had burned a hole cleanly through her wing, cauterizing it, and by the time she was done defeating the other alternates and had returned for her captive, the wing had fully regenerated. She was careless with her power, but she had it to burn. She was, very likely, close to immortal. When Twilight had ordered the captives bound, she'd had unicorn limiter rings put on both the alicorn and the other Rarity... and then magic limiter bracelets on all four hooves and a wing binder with magic limiting runes woven into it, because the alicorn might potentially be able to cast if either pegasus or earth pony channels were open to her, even if her horn was blocked. And still, part of the reason she was having the Changelings take them all to Celestia was that she wasn't even sure that would be enough. The only reason Twilight had won that fight was the Diadem enhancing her reaction time and tactical abilities.

Since taking the Diadem and uniting herself with it, bonding it to the Element of Magic, Twilight had been afraid of very, very few things. She'd been afraid of Discord after his reappearance, when he'd stolen the other five's corrupted elements and hid them at the center of a perpetually shifting maze so he'd have the freedom to wreak havoc in Canterlot and Manehatten – rightly so, because the maze had been literally impossible to navigate, and only taking Discord on directly with the Sweet Dreams spell had allowed her to dispel the maze entirely and recover her teammates' Elements. If the Sweet Dreams spell hadn't worked, she wouldn't have had another option. Discord claimed he'd been planning to leave in a few days anyway, but at the time, not only had she not known that, but she hadn't even had confirmation that he wasn't their original Discord returned from the dead.

And now that he was bound, she continued to be afraid of the fragile harmony between the Bearers breaking down and freeing him from the spells that held him. Since capturing Discord, she had barely been able to do anything to control the excesses of her friends. Fluttershy had moderated her own behavior, turning to Discord for relief of her darker urges instead of continuing to harm innocent animals as she had before. But Pinkie Pie had increased her demands for raw materials for her "special ingredients", Applejack had demanded that Twilight use her influence with Celestia to grant Sweet Apple Acres all sorts of concessions from the Crown, Rarity had forced Twilight to give her an entire platoon of Royal Guards to wipe out the Diamond Dogs in the area and take their gem supply for herself, and Rainbow Dash had been around even less often than she'd been before, mostly showing up only for the opportunity to take out some frustrations by beating up Discord every two or three weeks. And Twilight had had to tolerate all of this, because any serious conflict beyond schoolfilly insults could shatter what was left of their harmony. The Opposition elements were much more resilient to disharmony than the elements had been when they were pure Harmony, but they wouldn't be able to take out-and-out strife between the Bearers.

Nothing else had frightened her since adopting the Diadem. Until today, when she confronted an alternate self in league with Chaos, and that other self was an alicorn.

Spike returned with the coffee. "Here you are, Twilight! Hot and fresh, just how you like it!"

Toadying. Disgusting. She wondered sometimes if killing Discord had done him so much psychological damage that he was effectively a different dragon; she remembered loving him, being proud of him, but in the past few months he'd been nothing but an annoyance. "Take a letter, Spike."

"Okay! Right on it!"

"Dear Princess Celestia, the prisoners I am sending you, courtesy of Princess Lambda and her team, are not changelings, nor are they magical constructs. My theory that the Discord we hold prisoner is in fact from an alternate timeline to our own has proven correct; Discord confirmed it under questioning, and confessed that the letter Spike was tricked into sending, the one that he believed would be going to you and sent you a followup regarding, was in fact sent to his home universe, requesting assistance. The alternate versions of myself and my friends are from that universe. They claim to have reformed Discord by befriending him, a claim that seems highly dubious given the chaos he engaged in when he arrived here. More to the point, Discord has admitted that they released him and 'reformed' him at the request of your counterpart, who was employing him in sealing dimensional barriers so extradimensional travelers – such as Discord himself is to us – could not enter their universe."

Spike stopped writing. "Really? Is that what he was doing?"

Twilight rolled her eyes. "Did you genuinely believe he was doing anything else? It is unbelievable that you could be so idiotic as to believe Discord had anything other than wholly selfish intentions. If I hadn't heard the evidence for myself, I'd never have believed you could be such a fool as to be tricked by Discord, of all creatures. How could you have entertained for a moment the notion that he was anything other than completely evil?"

"But... he's not the one I killed. He didn't do any of those things to you and the others. Isn't he under a spell that he can't lie?"

"He didn't do any of those things because he never had the opportunity; the point of difference between our timelines appears to be that our Discord recognized that we had re-activated the Elements sooner than the one we now hold captive did, and had time to evade. That one was turned to stone before he had the chance, and of course if their Princess Celestia foolishly believed he could be tamed by 'friendship', he would have taken the opportunity to pretend that it had worked, to gain his freedom. They did nothing to stop him from coming here and wreaking havoc."

"Well, yeah, but... he made it rain fish and stuff like that. Nothing like the really bad stuff he did – I mean the other one did. Is that really wreaking havoc?"

Twilight glared at Spike. She wanted to slap him, but his dragon skin would make him impervious to any blow light enough not to cause internal damage. "It was chaos, Spike. That's the definition of havoc. Any deliberate assault on the laws of physics and nature is chaos, and chaos is evil. Now be quiet and take dictation."

Spike nodded rapidly, and Twilight continued. "Because he is plainly valuable to their version of you, and possibly because they are either foolish enough or corrupted enough to genuinely believe that he is their 'friend', they have come to take him from us. I need not tell you how disastrous this would be to our plans, Princess. We will never be able to free you from the burden you carry without Discord in our hooves and under our control." She glared at Spike again. "And that, Spike, is why you should not have interfered. Even if this version of Discord is practically angelic in comparison to the one we defeated, Princess Celestia's health depends on having another being who can raise the sun and moon, and with Princess Luna's death, Discord is the only being with that power. If we cannot break him and make him serve, Princess Celestia will suffer. You don't want Princess Celestia to suffer, do you?"

"Of course not!"

"Sometimes I wonder," Twilight said coldly. "Your actions in collaborating with Discord were deeply disloyal. You're aware of that, correct?"

Spike hung his head. "I'm sorry, Twilight. I'm really sorry."

"So you claim. Continue taking dictation." He took up his quill again, and she began dictating again. "These alternates are a serious threat to us. The alternate Pinkie Pie actually defeated our Pinkie; the alternates of Rarity and Applejack seem evenly matched to ours; and my own alternate is an alicorn, Princess." She leaned over Spike. "No, not 'alicorn princess', we don't actually know if she is acknowledged as a princess in her home dimension. It's alicorn, comma, capital P Princess, because I'm addressing our Princess."

"Sorry." Spike scratched out the offending phrase and rewrote it.

"I defeated her only through the aid of Princess Lambda and her team of changelings, many of whom were injured in the battle, and I cannot guarantee that I will be able to do it again. She is far more powerful than I am. The Diadem gives me some advantage over her in that I appear to react faster than she does, but this will not indefinitely compensate for the fact that she is immortal and I am not, let alone her amplified power.

"I regret to advise this, but I believe you must have all four of them executed immediately. The danger they present is too great to let them live. At the very least, even if you choose to be merciful and spare the others, the alicorn version of myself should be executed at the earliest possible opportunity. I do not know how long the alicorn binders on her will contain her power. The alternates of Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy are currently still at large, so sparing the other three might have value in that it would leave us with hostages, but there is no possible use for the alicorn that outweighs the danger she presents."

Spike interrupted. "But she's you, Twilight! How can you tell Princess Celestia to kill her?"

"She is dangerous, Spike. As dangerous as Discord was. He could be defeated by the Elements, but how can the Elements defeat an Element Bearer? Nightmare Moon had lost her connection to her Elements when she was corrupted, but we have every reason to think these Bearers still hold their connections." Of course, they weren't wearing their physical Elements, any of them, but that wasn't a good reason to assume they weren't still Bearers. With Discord to consult on matters regarding the science of traveling between universes, the alternates might well believe that taking their Elements into another dimension would endanger the Elements, and who knew, perhaps that might even be true.

"But still – we're not supposed to kill ponies!"

"Says the dragon who murdered a contained foe."

Spike made a sound halfway between a sigh and a moan. "I told you, Twilight. I told all of you. I'm going to live a long, long time, and turning him to stone wasn't going to be permanent – he got out once, he could do it again. And I'm just a dragon. You saw what he did to that poor red dragon Fluttershy talked out of sleeping near Ponyville." The dragon had made the mistake of challenging Discord because Discord's antics had woken him, and though old, he wasn't a thousand years old – he'd had no idea what he was dealing with. Discord had thrown him into space, without wings. He might even still be alive up there, somewhere. "I'll be powerful when I'm grown, but I won't be any match for Discord even then, and I ... I just couldn't bear having that hanging over my head. Knowing that he could break out and ruin all our lives again any time, and there would be nothing I could do about it."

"So you took it on yourself to be a hero, and damaged the world near-irreparably."

"I know! I'm sorry... I shouldn't have done it, I knew I shouldn't be doing it even when I did it, but... I just felt like all the options were bad and I thought I was picking the lesser of two evils."

"Well, killing the alicorn is the lesser of two evils, I assure you. I am not comfortable ordering my own death, either." This was a lie. Twilight desperately wanted the alicorn dead. The thought of another self, another version of herself, only more powerful, and so twisted she called Chaos incarnate a friend, made her sick. "End the letter with my usual closing, and send it. I need to speak to Fluttershy."

She trotted over to her workroom, her hooves clopping against the wood floor perhaps a trifle louder than they would normally, and used her magic to unlock the door, yanking it open, hoping that Fluttershy had the decency to be... well, decent, at this time of the morning.

Fluttershy was curled up on blankets next to Discord, who was still bound spread-eagle in the rune circle, the same as she'd left him last night. He was awake, his head turning to look at her with a blank, unreadable expression. "Fluttershy," Twilight called. "Wake up. There is a matter that requires your attention, with the animals."

Fluttershy's head jerked up. "Oh, dear," she said. "I overslept! I meant to get up and go over there to feed them... what time is it?"

"Seven twenty am," Twilight said.

Fluttershy relaxed. "Oh, well, I haven't overslept then. I usually feed them at seven thirty, so I just need to fly over there quickly and get them fed. Should I take Discord back?"

"No. Remember what we discussed last night. He is to remain here."

"Oh... right, about the... yes. I remember." She got to a kneeling position, legs still folded under her. "You'll be okay here at Twilight's for a little while without me, won't you, sweetie?" she said to Discord, nuzzling his neck. Sickening.

"It isn't as if I have a choice, now do I?" Discord asked, bitterness in his voice.

"Oh, don't be that way," Fluttershy said, getting to her hooves. "I have to go away for a little while, but I'll be right back. And if you're sarcastic with me now, I'll take that into consideration when I come back, so I think you'll want to moderate your tone."

Discord looked up at the ceiling. "I'm sure nothing will happen to me that you would disapprove of," he said in a dull tone.

"That's the spirit," Fluttershy said. "Oh, and don't forget not to let anything damage your collar today! See you later, sweetie!"

She left the room with Twilight. Twilight closed the door, but didn't bother to lock it; Discord was chained, and once Fluttershy had dealt with her counterpart and could return, Twilight, who desperately needed to get some sleep, didn't want to have to wake up and unlock the door for her. "Is there really something going on with my animals?" Fluttershy asked, once the door was securely shut.

The workroom wasn't truly soundproof – Spike had complained more than once of hearing Discord's screams, before Twilight had made it adequately clear to him that she considered his squeamishness about Discord's suffering borderline treasonous – but it was impossible to hear the sound of normal conversation through the door. Still, Twilight led Fluttershy a short distance away before answering. "They came through. Last night."

"Oh, dear! Do we have to go fight them?"

"You may have to fight yours. All of the rest of us defeated ours except for Rainbow Dash; her combat was still ongoing the last I saw her, and since it was an aerial battle, I have no idea where the two of them have ended up. But your counterpart wasn't with the others. Since Discord would have informed our counterparts that he was being held at your home, I imagine that's where she went, and without support from her friends or any knowledge of where Discord is, I greatly doubt she'd have the courage to leave the cottage and go exploring."

"So you think she's still there." Fluttershy's eyes narrowed. "The version of me that Discord claimed to love."

Twilight's first reaction was to reject Fluttershy's emotionalism in exasperation. Discord had been ordered to lie, and had responded with a claim that he loved Fluttershy. Why Fluttershy insisted on interpreting this as a true statement that applied to the other one rather than a lie that applied to her, Twilight wasn't sure... no, strike that, of course she knew why. Becoming cruel had turned Fluttershy into a jealous monster. And if turning her jealousy on her other self made her more effective... in this case, perhaps Fluttershy's senseless and overblown emotions would work toward Twilight's goals. So she pushed aside her first impulse and said, "Yes."

"Is there any particular reason why we don't want her fertilizing my garden?"

"None whatsoever. I've already advised Princess Celestia to kill the other counterparts."

A sadistic smile glittered on Fluttershy's face. "Can we tell him? After they're all taken care of?"

"What purpose would that serve?"

"Oh, honestly, Twilight! You're a genius, you don't need to be so dense. He pinned all his hopes on that letter, but he doesn't really believe they're coming for him because he doesn't think they're his friends. So when we tell him, oh yes they did come for him, but we killed them all... and possibly show him his Fluttershy's head as proof..."

Twilight blinked. That was a depth of sadism she hadn't imagined, herself. "You believe this will help to break him?"

"Help? I think it'll be the last straw. He's close, Twilight, I can tell. Just a little bit more, and he'll be ours forever."

If Discord could safely be interrogated about the alicorn, because she was dead and he had been informed of such, Twilight might be able to learn from him how she ascended to alicornhood, and duplicate the feat for herself. Discord wouldn't even be necessary if she could become an alicorn herself; then she could help Princess Celestia directly, the way Princess Luna had done once. She could officially take Princess Celestia's place as her second-in-command, in charge while Princess Celestia recovered from the damage the long year of chaos had done to her mind and heart.

And then once Princess Celestia had healed... they would rule together. Instead of two sisters, they would be more akin to mother and daughter, but they would still be family ruling together, as it had been for Princess Celestia when Luna was alive. Twilight swallowed at the thought. Becoming an alicorn herself had never been an option she imagined, but now that she knew it was possible, she wanted it more than she'd thought possible. To be Celestia's fellow princess... to have the power to protect her, carry her burdens when she faltered, be there through the centuries for her...

For a moment a brief fantasy flickered through her mind, of promising Discord his freedom if he made her into an alicorn. She could even spare his friends. Perhaps, promise him his freedom, become an alicorn, and then execute him mercifully as he'd begged for last night... he couldn't actually allowed to be free, after all, that would be horribly irresponsible, but she could promise him his friends' lives in exchange...

No. No, what was she thinking? Discord was Chaos, and couldn't be trusted. The same trap Spike had fallen into, and she was considering walking into it herself. Once she made ponykind immortal, they would all effectively be alicorns anyway. It was selfish of her to want alicornhood for herself and be willing to give up her dream of ending entropy for ponykind for it. She would proceed with the plan as intended. That being said, if Fluttershy broke him by presenting his friend's severed head to him, the plan could be enacted that much sooner, and she would have no reason to hide from him that she knew her other self was an alicorn, so she'd be able to question him on that matter as well.

"Very well. I agree with the plan. If you can successfully kill the other Fluttershy and retrieve her head, or her corpse, you may present her body to Discord and tell him that the others have all been executed in Canterlot."

"Or!" Fluttershy's grin was now practically manic. "What if I just disabled her, brought her here, and killed her in front of him? That might work really well, too."

Twilight shook her head. "Don't complicate matters. Just kill her, quickly. Before she recruits the animals who have reason to hate you now to assist her."

Fluttershy paled slightly. "I—I doubt she can do that. If Harry sees her, he's likely to tear her apart before she can even get a word out explaining that she isn't me."

"Don't bet your life on underestimating your former self's capabilities. Indulging your sadistic nature is a weakness. Simply kill her."

"All right," Fluttershy sighed. "Let me get my bag. I might need the whip." Twilight gave her a hard look. "For a weapon, Twilight. I'm not going to take any of my animal friends hostage to use against her, and she might have the element of surprise if she's smart enough to realize I have to come home eventually. I mean, I know she's probably there, but not where. She could have booby-trapped the windows for all I know."

"Is that truly likely?"

"They won't be traps that cause physical harm, just traps that alert her. I used to put them up in my house all the time, so I'd have plenty of warning if anypony broke into my home."

"Really? Ponyville has never precisely been a high crime area."

"Yes, really! You know what I used to be like! Now let me go get my bag so I can deal with this!"

"The door to the workroom isn't locked," Twilight said, tiredly.

Fluttershy yanked the door open and flew inside, Twilight following her. "Almost forgot my bag, sweetie!" she caroled at Discord, grabbed her bag, and flew off.

"What sort of animal emergency is she going to deal with?" Discord asked, as Twilight started to walk out through the door. "Some creature hasn't been raped enough?"

The question was bizarre enough, even coming from Discord, that Twilight had to turn and stare at him. "What are you talking about?"

"Well, that's what's in the bag. Sex toys. Also her whip, so I suppose the emergency could be an animal who hasn't been whipped enough, but unless it's an Everfree creature I can't imagine any animals surviving a blow from that whip, so it seems to me it must be the sex toys she needs for her emergency."

Twilight's face wrinkled in disgust. She'd had less than no desire to be reminded of the nature of Fluttershy's use of Discord, or her pets for that matter. "As little as I imagine you're capable of refraining from being disgusting, I must exhort you to try for once in your life. I have no interest in Fluttershy's... extracurricular activites."

"Oh, but you know about them, don't you? You know exactly what she's been doing to me. You may think it's disgusting, but you let her get away with it. So does she walk all over you despite you being approximately seventeen times more powerful than she is, or is it part of the master plan for reforming me to let her rape me twice a day? I mean, I'm sure when you read the torture manuals that must have been filed under 'T' here, it told you that rape is an excellent strategy for breaking a slave, but was it your idea to have her do it or was it hers and it's just a fortunate coincidence that her perversions coincide with what you wanted done to me anyway?"

Twilight felt anger rising, blood pounding in her ears and turning her face red hot. Discord hadn't spoken this way to her since shortly after handing him over to Fluttershy. "You appear to be backsliding. Have you forgotten what I have the power to do to you?"

Discord laughed bitterly. "You mean the thing you're going to do to me anyway no matter what I do? You can't have it both ways, dear Twilight; if you're going to torture me twice a week regardless of what I say or do and nothing I do makes you show the slightest bit of mercy, why should I think it matters how I talk to you? It's not as if holding my tongue spares me anything, so why not just tell you exactly what I think? You're the one who cast that honesty spell on me, so obviously you want to know exactly what I think."

"Your premise is faulty. Unless I'm interrogating you I haven't the slightest interest in what you think. And I find this conversation uncomfortable, so I am ending it." She turned back to the door.

"Oh, but your premise is faulty. I'll bet you'd care a lot about what I think about how to make ponies immortal and give yourself near-godlike power."

For a moment she was shocked into stillness. How did he know what she was thinking? Had he learned somehow that his "friends" had come through to rescue him? "Is there a reason you think that would be of interest to me?"

Discord snorted. "Believe it or not, most of the time I can actually hear you perfectly well while I'm screaming. So when you're having Spike write down your notes about exactly what you're learning from filling my entire bloodstream with acid, I'm paying attention. Normally I'd find your scientific endeavors repetitive and dull, but when every cell in your body has been doused with cooking oil and set on fire, you look for distractions wherever you can find them."

Twilight relaxed. He knew nothing about what was going on right now. Perhaps it was an oversight on her part that she hadn't taken steps to muffle his hearing before conducting her experiments, but what good would it do him to know her goals, anyway? "If you have something to say about my experiments, and not more pointless complaining about Fluttershy's behavior, I'll listen." Most likely he was trying to mislead her, but she was smart enough to be able to extract useful information from him anyway.

"Ah, I see. You're willing to let her rape me,  but you don't want me to talk about it because it makes you uncomfortable. Well, trust me, having a mare shove her hoof up your nethers is a lot more uncomfortable, and no one lets me walk away."

That was not a mental image Twilight needed. Ever. "Is there a reason why you've suddenly decided to be crude and repulsive?"

He laughed. "That's what's so refreshing about you, Twilight. You don't pretend to be doing things to me for my own good. You don't claim you're training me to be a good citizen, you don't give me rewards for my cooperation, you don't pretend you love me. You just hate me and everything I stand for, nice and clean. I tell you that your dear friend is subjecting me to one of the most horrifying acts ponykind can imagine, and all you have to say is that I'm being disgusting."

Twilight's eyes narrowed. "After all you've done, do you truly expect me to feel sympathy for you?"

"What do you mean, after all I've done? Didn't we just go through this last night? I didn't do any of that. My Bearers were obviously more competent than you and your pals were, because they turned me to stone. Or are you going to seriously try to argue that fish rain and floating pies is worth torture and rape, and if so, how long did they have you on the rack for turning your parents into potted plants?"

"Regardless of the differences between what you spent the last year doing, and what he did before we turned him to stone... you are Chaos. You and I are natural enemies. You are evil, and everything I have eternally sworn to fight, and I am no more capable of caring that you suffer than you care about the fate of filth after you wash it off your body."

Discord's eyes narrowed. "Natural enemies? I think that might be taking it a bit far, don't you think? You've caused your fair share of chaos in your life."

Twilight smiled, for the first time since this conversation had started. She knew something Discord didn't, and she was going to enjoy rubbing his face in it. "Have you never wondered what the opposite of Magic is, Discord?"

Discord squinted at her, brow furrowing in concentration. His eyes then went wide, an expression of horror forming on his face. "You didn't."

"I see you know already. As I might have expected. Of course the Lord of Chaos knows that at its base, magic is chaos. The universe has two separate set of laws – one clean and predictable, wholly governed by math, and the other dominated by emotion and desire, with the ability to alter the world based on the will or the whim of the individual. Without Harmony, magic would have torn the world apart with its ability to amplify senselessness, to make real that which should not be. Magic is chaos... thus, the opposite of chaos is—"

"Order," Discord whispered. "Dear gods. You bonded yourself to Matrisse, didn't you?"

Twilight frowned. "I found an item called the Diadem of Order, and I incorporated it into my Element. This made it an Element of Opposition, permitting me to harmonize with those that you created. And while you introduced chaos and disharmony to harmony, what I introduced was order, rebalancing the equation. With the Diadem enhancing my abilities, I was able to devise a plan to defeat your counterpart, and unravel the spell he'd placed on us that kept us from meeting together."

Discord shook his head. "Oh, Twilight," he said softly. "I'm so sorry he drove you to that. Do you have any idea what you've done to yourself? Do you even know you committed suicide the moment you put that Diadem on?"

Twilight scowled. "What do you mean? The Diadem has enhanced me. It's made me more intelligent; it's improved my control of my magic."

"At the cost of everything Twilight Sparkle was," Discord said. "There's nothing left of you but Matrisse now, running on a pony brain, and you don't even know it. The fragments of Twilight left in you are just enough to confuse you into thinking you're still her, but you're not. You may be more than a pony, but you're far, far less than Twilight Sparkle."

Rage welled. Twilight wanted to hurt him, to punish him for his lying words. How could she possibly be less than she'd been? The Diadem had made her superior in every way, helping her control the emotions that tormented her, bringing clarity to her thinking. She had defeated an alicorn version of herself. She'd defeated Discord himself, twice. He was lying here on the floor of her workroom, bound and helpless, because the Diadem had made her better than she was. "I would not expect Chaos to understand the superiority that Order has brought me," she sneered. "Now, I believe you promised me a discussion of power, and how I might go about making ponies immortal. Was that a lie to lure me into listening to you so you could amuse yourself by sniping at me?"

"You have so little faith in your own abilities," he said. "How many times do you need it proven to you that I can't lie? It was your own spell, you'd think you'd have more confidence."

"I am strongly considering attaching the apparatus to you and beginning an experimental protocol. The schedule has already been thrown off, and you appear to be more fully recovered from my last protocol than you have been in some time."

That finally got an expression of fear from him. "No, no, that won't be necessary," he said hastily. "What I wanted to tell you is that you're going about your experiments all wrong. You're trying to derive how to control entropy through me, but entropy is only one aspect of chaos, and frankly one of the least controllable aspects, and magic itself is subject to it. Nothing you can do to fight entropy itself can do anything other than accelerate it; the best you can do is move it around, shift it to a different location so you don't have to worry about it anymore. And there's no way you can do that on the scale you want to do it on with my magic... directly."

"Is there any reason why I shouldn't consider everything you say on this topic a transparently self-serving attempt to make me stop experimenting on you?"

"Yes. I do, in fact, know how to get you the power you need, and how you can shift the burden of entropy by taking advantage of the different physical laws of dimensions outside this one."

"And you're prepared to tell me, for a price. Let me guess. Remove Fluttershy's libido magically and let you free."

Discord laughed. "Oh, that would be tempting, if there was the tiniest hope in hell that you'd do it, but I know better. No, the payoff for me is inherent in the ritual itself. There's nothing separate you'd need to do."

"Why should I perform a ritual that you admit requires me to do something to your benefit?"

His mouth twisted into a sour smile. "Because it's only to my benefit now, and only because I've changed my priorities. It wouldn't have been to my benefit at all yesterday."

Again the cold touch of suspicion crawled down her spine. "Why is that?"

"Because yesterday I didn't want to die."

Twilight blinked at him in surprise. "What?"

Discord turned away from her, looking up at the ceiling. "Fluttershy said... well, she proved to me that nopony is coming for me. The mares I called my friends were never my friends. And maybe that wouldn't be enough to make me want to die, if I weren't a prisoner, and helpless, and all I have to look forward in the future is a lifetime of torture, and – and rape, and being told that hate is love and abuse is kind until eventually I crack and start believing it, and..." His voice cracked, as if he were fighting off tears. "...and I'd rather die horribly than keep living that way, if there's no hope I'll ever get free. It took me a thousand years to break out of the Elements' hold, last time. This has been less than a year – less than a season – and it's already far past unbearable, and I just want to make it end. And the only way to end it is to die. And you won't let me die, unless I make it worth your while."

"Are you implying that this ritual will kill you?"

"Implying? I'm outright stating it. You use my blood to activate the ritual, and while I'm still alive you feed me to entities outside this reality. They siphon entropy through me, feeding on it, decreasing the available entropy in your world. Shifting the burden to another reality, as I said. And as you might imagine, just as consuming energy increases entropy, consuming entropy increases energy. What comes back from the ritual will be a surge of energy so powerful that you could use it to remake the world. I'd thought you'd need to use the Elements, but if you have the Diadem of Order, that's actually all you'd need."

"A living sacrifice," Twilight murmured. "But if they want to feed, why would they return more energy than you possess within you? It seems that if I could find a way to siphon your energy directly, it would be more efficient and grant more energy."

"You couldn't make use of my magical energy directly."

"I'm aware. That is why my experiments have been directed at finding a way to perform a lossless conversion of chaotic magic to harmonic."

Discord sighed. "There's no such thing. The control structures you have to put on chaos to make it harmonic get their magical energy from somewhere. A lossless conversion isn't possible no matter how many times you torture me."

"I believe I will maintain my own counsel on this particular matter; you have an obvious bias."

"Fair enough. But the reason the ritual works is that they aren't just taking what's in my mana pool. I could, theoretically, channel enough energy to remake the entire world, myself, but I wouldn't because that much chaos would probably kill everything, including myself. As the entities siphon entropy out of the world through me, what comes back to you is magic purified, by your standards at least... by my standards, dead, but Order has never cared about the life of magic. The lossless conversion you want to perform is exactly what the ritual does, not by imposing constraints on magic, but by removing the disorder from it. And magic will be far easier for you to shape and form if it comes to you in controlled streams, with disorder pulled out of it."

Twilight couldn't control a tremor of excitement. If he wasn't lying... and she'd performed a spell check just last night; he'd writhed and begged and cried with pain rather than lie, claiming he couldn't do it, and when he'd finally managed to force one out, he'd had a seizure immediately afterward. But she couldn't trust Discord. Everything he said was self-serving... but he admitted this was self-serving. He'd certainly shown every sign of falling into despair last night, and the fact that he'd reverted to the sarcastic, verbally cruel persona he'd had when he'd first been captured could be a side effect of giving up completely. He seemed to no longer believe he could do anything to spare himself suffering, and therefore there was no point in moderating his behavior to avoid it. It was consistent...

...but this was Discord. There had to be a catch. "It sounds enticing. Which is exactly why I don't believe you. Even if you want to die, why would you give me, your enemy, everything I want?"

"Because if that's the price I have to pay to escape my life with some sliver of my identity intact, then so be it," Discord said. "I don't think you're getting it. I want you to exsanguinate me and then invite creatures from outside our reality to eat me, while pulling even more magic through me than your horrible experiments do. Make no mistake, this will be an awful way to die... but unlike your experiments, it'll end. It'll be finite and then there'll be no more pain, ever. I will do anything for that, Twilight. Even give my enemy what she wants. Because if I don't give you what you want, you won't let me die, and I'll do anything to make sure Fluttercruel never gets to touch me again."

Twilight raised an eyebrow. "Fluttercruel?"

"Oh, what's the point? They both are," Discord said bitterly. "Yes, all right, I admit it, I've been calling her Fluttercruel in my head to try not to mix her up with my friend. My dear, sweet, lovely friend, who I reformed for, who I came here to create chaos for rather than staying home just so she wouldn't get mad at me. My friend who was lying to me to control me, the whole time. They're both Fluttercruel." He swallowed. "I know you have no empathy for me, but can't you understand logically how I might want to die rather than be raped again by someone who pretends to love me and who looks just like someone else who pretended to be my friend and was lying about it?"

The last words he spoke came out on a near-sob. "If you're going to cry, this conversation is over," Twilight said. "Your attempts to manipulate my emotions are transparent, pathetic and useless."

Discord chuckled. "No, no, I'm not planning to cry. I promised myself last night I'd never do that again. Particularly not in front of you." Despite his words of bravado, there was still a tremor in his voice. "But, I mean, I know you have no empathy but you do still understand that emotions are things, right? That creatures who aren't you can feel? That even creatures you despise with all your heart are capable of feeling things? Why have you been letting them beat me, and torture me every way they can think of, and, and force me into this parody of passion and make me actually pretend I like it so I won't get beaten afterward... you know I hate this, right? You're doing these things, you're letting them do them, so I'll be utterly miserable and I'll want to do anything to make it stop, right? So why are you surprised if it's working?"

"I'm aware that you find your circumstances unpleasant. But I'm finding it difficult to imagine that you'd be willing to give the world over to Order. When we began this conversation, you say you thought I would need to channel the power through the Elements of Harmony. Now that you know I could use the Diadem of Order instead, and that I would indeed do so, why doesn't your nature as the avatar of chaos rebel against the concept?"

Discord breathed hard, staring at the ceiling fixedly, the paws bound out at angles from his body clenching. "I expect an answer," Twilight said sharply.

"Fine!" His head turned to face her, eyes wet with tears, but the hysteria in his voice was more fury than weeping. "Because you've broken me, all right? You got what you wanted! I don't care about Chaos anymore, I don't – I don't care about anything except making it end, and you're just going to keep torturing me over and over and she's going to keep touching me and telling me I like it and she loves me and it's all a lie and it hurts most of the time and when it doesn't hurt it feels like she's pulling my heart to shreds and I can't take any more, don't you understand? I'll give the world to Matrisse if I have to! You broke me, you win, I'll give you everything you ever wanted, all you have to do is let me die because all I want is to escape and even if I got away it'd be in my mind for the rest of time! I'd have nightmares, I'd have flashbacks, I'd keep living it over and over just like I did with that damn statue even if it was over, and it would never really be over because it'd be engraved in my mind and I don't want that, all right? I don't want to be free to just go relive everything the six of you have done to me, over and over. I want it to stop. I want to stop feeling, stop remembering, stop being afraid, just stop. I want to die. Just let it end forever. Please."

Twilight was not moved by the plea as such – the thought that Discord was suffering so badly he no longer even wanted his freedom and could imagine no relief but the release of death was, honestly, a rather pleasant outcome, given what he had done – but she recognized sincerity in him, for once. Discord would not pretend to having such weaknesses; his pride was too great.

Could she take the risk? She was so tired; if only this had come up later, after she'd had a chance to sleep. But if he was telling the truth – the power to remake the world could make her into an alicorn, as she'd been fantasizing about before this conversation started, and the only thing she'd need to give Discord was a painful death.

And then an inconsistency in his story occurred to her. "Discord. If this ritual requires your death – yours specifically, the Chaos Avatar, and no one else's – how could anypony have discovered it in the first place, given that you aren't dead? How can you know what effect it will have?"

"Do you seriously think this is the only world I've visited where my cognate is dead?" Discord retorted. "I know because I've seen a world where the ritual was performed successfully."

"And did it give those who performed the ritual what they wanted?"

"I have no idea what they wanted. A world with much of the disorder stripped out is deeply unpleasant to me, as you might imagine. I stayed only long enough to study the ritual itself and memorize it, because generally speaking, I like to know everything I can possibly know about anything that might kill me. Though admittedly, usually because I'm avoiding it rather than seeking it out."

It was... plausible, she had to admit. Everything he'd said was plausible.

Twilight made her decision. If she could remake herself into an alicorn, then sacrificing Discord was acceptable, because she would be able to support Princess Celestia herself. Fluttershy would be distressed, but without Discord in the picture, Twilight would no longer have to care what any of her so-called friends thought. Perhaps she could even restore them to their original selves, while maintaining the Diadem for herself. With that much power, why not?

And she could fix the world. Restore Equestria's damaged infrastructure. Undo all the non-fatal changes their Discord had made that hadn't reverted when the Elements bound him.

End the reign of death over ponykind.

They didn't all have to be alicorns. They shouldn't be, in fact; that kind of power could be trusted to very few ponies. But they could all be immortal. Nopony would have to die like Princess Luna, like Cadance, like Zecora, like so many other ponies and changelings and other creatures had died during Discord's year of chaos, and afterward.

At the very least the spell was worth studying. But she needed insurance.

"Wait here," she said, only then realizing that that was a stupid thing to say to someone who was bound. Well, she wasn't going to apologize.

She went down to the lab and spent a few minutes mixing up something she'd been working on for the past two months, a means of controlling Discord even if the elements failed. It had been almost ready – she'd been considering testing it next session, though only if Discord showed signs of being in better health than he'd been during the last one. It rankled her to have to employ it before proper testing, but if Discord was somehow managing to lie and this was an elaborate ploy to win his freedom, she would need something like this in play. As much as she wanted to use Discord, he would be far too dangerous to let live if he got free.

She returned with the solution in a beaker. "Drink this."

"Free my arm and my neck so I can sit up and hold it, unless you want me to dribble it all over everything," Discord said.

Twilight unsnapped all of his restraints except the one attached to his collar. That was all she needed to hold him prisoner unless she was performing an experimental protocol, and the splayed position he'd been in, together with his insistence on talking about Fluttershy's sexual use of him, had been making her increasingly uncomfortable. It looked like a sexual bondage position. The thought had never occurred to her until Fluttershy had asked her to leave Discord in that position because she found it arousing, last night, but now she couldn't unsee it. "Very well. Now drink this."

Slowly Discord got onto his haunches, first sitting down pony-style but with his tail under him, then shifting so he was more on his side. The unpleasant thought occurred to Twilight that he was avoiding resting his weight on what was probably the location of his anus. Damn Discord anyway, why had he had to make such a fuss over Fluttershy's sexual habits? The last thing Twilight wanted to do was think of Discord having sex, in any context.

He took the flask from her and drank. "Yuck. What is this?"

"Drink all of it," Twilight ordered.

Discord sighed, and drank the rest of it. "Fine, slavemistress, I've drunk it. What poison did you just feed me?"

"Interesting that you should phrase it that way," Twilight said. "I performed an extensive study of the black vines that the other Discord employed to devastate Ponyville and the Everfree, and reverse engineered them to determine how to duplicate parts of their nature. What you just drank was a crystal suspension, bespelled to remain dormant so long as your collar is on."

"A crystal suspension. Very informative. Which is sarcasm, by the way."

"I was aware."

"I figured, but you're the one who wrote this stupid honesty spell that makes me tell ponies when I'm being sarcastic. What does the crystal suspension do when it's not dormant?"

"It devours chaos magic and replicates itself."

Discord's eyes went wide again. "You... are aware that I'm saturated with chaos magic."

"If it is truly your desire to die, the crystals will never activate, because your collar will never be removed. If, however, this is an elaborate plot of some kind... then your only freedom will continue to be death. If your collar is removed, the crystals will devour the chaos magic in your body, grow, and replicate. I imagine it would be less than five minutes before you'd feel them, and probably no more than half an hour before enough of your organs would have been impaled from inside that you would bleed to death."

"Lovely," Discord said, swallowing visibly. "Which is more sarcasm. Though I suppose they're no worse a fate than what I've already decided I'm in for."

"It is now time to enlighten me on exactly what you've decided you're in for. Explain the ritual to me, in detail."

Twilight didn't trust Spike with this particular task; she herself wrote down the steps Discord described in her notebook. It didn't sound overly challenging. Probably the only reason it hadn't been performed in the past was the difficulty of capturing and killing Discord. His magic couldn't be blocked, or the ritual wouldn't work; the spells in the collar wouldn't be a problem, because she could simply order Discord to open himself magically to the Beings From Outside, but some more unilateral method of binding him would cause the ritual to fail, and if Discord had his magic it seemed it would be very, very difficult to hold him still for a ritual, let alone kill him.

And then, once she had copied down the ritual in detail, she went to bed, leaving Spike on guard and Discord bound by his collar, with a crystal potion in his system that would kill him quickly and painfully if the collar broke or was removed. He wasn't going to come up with some way of escaping that, and there was no way she wanted to take on a complex and potentially dangerous summoning rite, particularly one driven by sacrifice, without at least a nap.

---

As soon as he was sure she was gone and wasn't coming back, Discord stopped trying to hold back the nausea, and retched, vomiting everything in his guts onto the stone floor.

That had been pure agony. Mislead Twilight, hide critical pieces of information from her, for half an hour of conversation, while showing no sign of his nausea on his face, let alone giving in to it. Everything he had said had been true, but without the pieces of information he hadn't given her, it was so misleading it might as well be a lie. Ironically the only reason he'd been able to bear it was the emotional stress; the effort of not crying, and the fact that he was safe to show the effort of not crying, had masked the effort of not throwing up.

The pile of vomit glittered with crystals. For a moment Discord felt a profound relief. Yes, his plan would kill him, just as horribly as Twilight's crystals, and yes, the crystals would never have a chance to activate, because he'd die before Fluttercruel's order not to damage his collar wore off. But the idea that the poison that would kill him was lurking inside him was a thought that had bothered him horribly. At least being devoured would be an attack from the outside.

And then he realized with horror that because he had no way of reaching a trash receptacle of any kind, and no cleaning supplies, that there was only one way to hide the vomit. If Twilight saw that he'd thrown up, she'd know he was hiding something, and if she questioned him he might be forced to tell her the whole truth, and he couldn't have that. If she knew everything, not only would she not go through with his plan, but she might even find a way to turn things around so she did get what she wanted, and since she was more or less completely possessed by Matrisse, what she wanted was not at all what she thought she wanted. Matrisse would be happy to use the power to reshape the world and remove death... by rendering everything into glittering crystalline perfection, a moment of time caught in a snapshot that would never change, never move forward. His plan for the destruction of this world involved Chaos. Even as much as he hated these ponies and this world, he wouldn't let them be sacrificed to Matrisse's madness. They'd die for his own madness, instead, and that would be far preferable.

With great reluctance, Discord bent his head down. He'd been forced to do this before, under orders, where if he hadn't done it he'd have been made into a puppet and the spell would have moved him rather than his will. But he'd never done it by anything even remotely resembling choice. No one was forcing him now except himself, and the knowledge that if he didn't do it, his chance for revenge would be destroyed.

Wincing, trying not to smell it, Discord ate his own vomit, powdery murder crystals and all. At least this was based on chocolate milk and meat, things that had been delicious when they went down. The last time he'd thrown up when he hadn't been having a seizure, it had been rotten eggs and cow manure. He could never have forced himself to eat that. This was disgusting, but it was more bearable than eating that had been even the first time, certainly more bearable than throwing it up had been.

He licked the floor clean, ignoring the taste of hoof dirt on his tongue, in order to hide all the evidence from Twilight. And then he curled up on the floor, resting his aching body and wishing desperately he had some water. Well, even if he didn't get any, his suffering would be over soon enough. And this entire world would join him, because as smart as Twilight thought she was, she wasn't smart enough to turn down everything she'd ever wanted when it was offered to her on a platter.

It was true; opening the gate to the Cold Ones, the Outsiders, the Beings Beyond, would grant power. Brightest Star, a chaos-using unicorn, had turned herself into the alicorn Maelstrom just from bleeding him and opening the gate a fraction of the way. If Twilight completed the ritual, and opened the gate all the way by allowing the Cold Ones to devour Discord's soul, she would have near-infinite power.

For about five minutes. Or less. And then they'd come through the gate. "Eating entropy" was a vast oversimplification of what they'd be doing; entropy was decay itself, and not edible to anything. What they'd really be doing was consuming the energy generated by disorder, spitting back highly ordered strands of magic... which would then be the pathway they'd use to invade this universe, and devour all magic, and all life.

The world Discord had visited where the ritual had completed had, indeed, been very orderly, as any world where all life including microbes had been consumed would be. Nothing moved, nothing changed, everything would remain in its place until the end of time. There hadn't even been any wind, because nothing spun around the world. Celestia's sun had been devoured as well, being a power source; the moon was only a source of mana, not edible energy in and of itself, so it had been there, but locked in a permanent embrace by the world's gravity, never to move again. All of that life had been consumed, absorbed into Them. The Cold Ones, the Many-Angled, the Shadows; they had many names, but one fundamental nature. They devoured. Disorder, motion, suffering, disharmony, light, heat, conflict. Magic. All of it food, and when they were done, nothing would be left but lightless icy cold forever and ever.

But before everyone had been eaten, Discord imagined there had been chaos. There had been screaming, most likely, and praying, and desperate fighting, and weeping. There had been anguish and despair. In the week or two it had taken them to eat all the energy in the world, and even in the solar system, civilization had plainly collapsed. He'd seen signs of attempts to loot, of ponies and other creatures who had murdered each other pre-emptively.

Normally Discord hated that sort of chaos. Anything that ended up with stillness, static emptiness, was not worth it in his opinion. He wanted perpetual motion. But not anymore. Now he wanted the kind of chaos that came to rest in the end and stopped forever. Now he wanted the disorder of entropy to tear him apart, let him dissolve into nothingness, and then take this entire world down with it.

He'd promised himself he would never cry again. So he laughed. A quiet chuckle, then a hearty guffaw, finally scaling up all the way to hysterical manic laughter. Oh, if only he could live just long enough to see all their faces when they realized they were doomed... but it wouldn't work that way. His death was needed to open the gate. And really, did he need to see their faces? He had a good imagination; he could envision what he'd see.

It would be glorious, the most horrific vengeance he could imagine, and the fact that he wouldn't live to see it was only a minor blemish, not when he thought of the suffering Fluttercruel would go through as soon as she realized Twilight was going to kill him. That, he might even get to see. Maybe she would weep, and beg Twilight for his life. Oh, he'd love to see that, and the expression on her face when Twilight said no.

Don't worry, dear Fluttercruel. You'll have hardly any time at all to grieve for me. You'll be too busy screaming in terror as chaos devours your entire planet.

He couldn't wait.