***

Celestia's Throne Room, Canterlot Palace, Canterlot. November 12th, Year 3 of the New Diarchy Calendar.

Princess Celestia was expecting a guest - more specifically, she was expecting Discord. She had summoned him especially, and he was due to arrive any moment. He was perhaps the most dangerous guest she could ask to come to Canterlot Palace: certainly, he claimed to be reformed, and he might even have believed it, but she knew him of old. He was even older than she was (which was certainly an impressive achievement, given the fact that she’d passed her eleventh millennium over a century ago), and she highly doubted his old ways would have changed so much. Or at least, while she wanted them to have, she had not survived ten thousand years and a whole host of petty wars (and more than a few that qualified as far more than “petty”) without being ready for the worst.

When he arrived, it was in a flash of light, a sunhat on his head and sunglasses on his face, as though he had been sunbathing. He might have been, for all she knew, but it was just as likely it was a masquerade. She never took anything for granted when it came to him.

“Discord,” she said amiably. “Welcome to the palace.”

“Celly!” he replied, in a tone that matched hers in the sort of mocking way he had perfected thousands of years ago. “Thank you! Have you redecorated? It’s slightly more beige than last time.”

Celestia ignored this. “Please, take a seat.”

She indicated a pair of comfortable plush chairs she had set out for this task.

“Why thank you,” he replied, snapping a claw. One of the seats disappeared. Celestia raised an eyebrow. “It’ll go well with the walls back in the ol’ homestead.”

“You have an abode now?” Celestia asked, ignoring the disruption as Discord summoned his own chair, a pale brown leather seat with glass armrests that seemed to have a pattern of yellow and orange squares set within them.

“No,” Discord admitted. “Flutters has a room spare if I want it, and I can always make a roof if I want one, but honestly I don’t need it. Never did, as you recall.”

Celestia ignored this. “You may be wondering why I’ve summoned you.”

“Some boring reason, no doubt,” he commented idly.

“I had a question.”

“42.”

Celestia raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

“Meaning of life, the universe and everything,” Discord said with a shrug. “What? That’s usually what people and ponies want to ask me. Either that or ‘why are you doing X thing’.”

Celestia sighed. “A different question.”

“I’m all ears,” Discord said with a grin, his ears growing somewhat as he spoke.

Celestia took a breath before speaking. “Why?”

Discord’s ears shrank to normal. He narrowed his eyes slightly. “Why? Why what? Why is your mane that ridiculous shade of multicoloured?”

“You know what I’m asking,” Celestia said softly.

Discord scowled. He did - she could tell from his expression and his blasé reaction that he knew exactly what she was asking. To his credit, he didn’t respond with japes or mockery.

“Why now?” he asked instead.

“Because you have been ‘reformed’ for some time,” she said quietly. “I believed it was the appropriate time.”

Discord sighed. He snapped his claw again, and a bottle of wine appeared, pouring two glasses for the pair of them.

“Poisoned?” Celestia joked.

“Chateau Picard, circa 2319,” Discord replied with a mumble. “Good year.”

He drained his glass in one gulp, apparently ill-content to wait for a toast. He poured another as Celestia levitated her glass to her mouth.

“It’s… an interesting flavour,” she said, tasting it tentatively. It didn’t taste like any wine she had ever tried before.

“I’ll let Jean-Luc know you like it,” Discord said airily. He affixed her with an oddly piercing stare, his normal joking air almost entirely absent. “Seriously. Why now?”

Celestia met his eyes evenly. “Because I always wanted to know. However, between attacks on Equestria and your own difficult to pin down nature…” She sighed. “I have never had the chance to ask before. I would like to remedy that.”

“What good does knowing do?” he asked, frowning.

Celestia took a deep breath, closing her eyes for a moment. Suddenly, the glass in her grip was hurled across the room, smashing against a wall, and she had leaned in close to his face, her eyes blazing.

“Two thousand, four hundred and four years,” she said, her voice a sibilant, furious whisper. “For two thousand, four hundred and four years, you terrorised Equestria. You unleashed monsters upon the entire world. And you dare ask what good knowing does?”

He raised an eyebrow. “You really shouldn’t bottle up that anger. It can’t be good for you. Look at what it did to Lu -”

“Shut up,” she hissed. “Now.”

Discord sighed. “You haven’t answered me. What good does me telling you why I did things I did eight thousand years ago…”

“Because you murdered millions,” Celestia said. “I have been willing to forgive you, Discord…”

“And I am very grateful you decided to let me out,” Discord replied, frowning slightly. “Being stone is… not pleasant.”

“But you still owe me that explanation,” Celestia finished with a snort.

Discord sniggered. “Oh, I owe you an explanation, do I?”

“Yes,” she growled. She was honestly surprised at how angry she was feeling - she hadn’t thought about the Discordant Ages for a long time - but talking about it, coupled with Discord’s dismissive attitude, was bringing back all sorts of memories…

The smell of fire and blood in the air, almost making her gag. The sound of screams as hordes of monsters charged into the ranks of Guards, and the guttural death-cries of the abominable creatures as they died…

“You owe far more than an explanation,” she added quietly.

“Indeed?” Discord said, folding his arms. “And what makes you think you’ll get that explanation? Do you think saying that I owe you anything…”

“I think that if you want to get me angry, you’re going the right way about it,” Celestia interrupted with a snarl. She took a breath. “Is it so hard to answer a question?”

“No,” Discord said airily, grinning. “Is it so hard to have no answer? You’ve managed to survive without knowing for all these millennia…”

“And for all of those years, I have wanted to know - and now I can finally sit with you at the table and ask,” she replied, lowering her head. “If it doesn’t matter to you, why not answer?”

“I never said it didn’t matter, only that it wasn’t hard to answer,” Discord pointed out, his grin fading slightly. “As it happens, it matters a great deal.”

“So… so there was a reason for it?” she asked, looking back up at him. “You didn’t just do it because… because…”

“Because I enjoyed a horde of abominations that nominally swore allegiance to me running around killing everything?” Discord asked. “Well, fun as some of the resulting chaos was, I had far more fun the second time when I was doing everything. With those guys, it was just ‘make the horde, tell the horde to go crazy, the horde goes crazy, question mark, profit’.” He shrugged. “Watching chaos is far more dull than making it happen yourself.”

“Then why did you do it?” Celestia implored.

Discord raised his head and looked down his nose at her. “My reasons… are my own.” Before Celestia could rage at this response, he shuddered. “Mother of me, that’s a pretentious line. I sound like Them.”

“Them?” Celestia repeated.

He waved the question away. “I’m not here to explain my reasons to you, Celestia. Be thankful that I told you I had reasons. Despite what people and ponies and various other assorted annoying things think of me, I almost always have reasons for what I do, even if you don’t think I do.”

“You are a liar,” she said softly, narrowing her eyes at him. “I can see no reason for what you did.”

“Can you not?” Discord asked, folding his arms with a smirk. “Can you really not?”

“It was one of the darkest times in Equestrian history,” Celestia murmured mournfully. “Darker than any time before or since. I don’t believe the world ever truly recovered from the scars of that time.”

“Of course it didn’t,” Discord said, smirking. “And so it won’t forget. The world will never forget what happened - there’ll be rumours of the Discordant Legion when this world finally boils in it’s own star.”

“And that makes you happy?” Celestia asked, feeling vaguely sick. “That your abominations will be remembered?”

“I couldn’t care less about the abominations,” Discord shrugged. “What I do care about is the fact that you and Lulu never let things get so bad again. When Tirek came - you fought him, you won. When the Dazzlings attacked - you fought them, you won. When Sombra went mad, you fought him, you won. Heck, when I came back, it took you but a single decade to undo my reign. I don’t know why you even bother calling that the Second Discordant Age - it was more like the Second Discordant Sunday Afternoon.”

“So it was all… to make us stronger?” Celestia asked.

“I can neither confirm nor deny that,” Discord shrugged. “But you can’t deny that you learnt a great deal from that time.”

“It was a lesson I could have learned without so much death, pain, horror and suffering,” Celestia said icily. “And without the consequences of the conflict that followed - after all, we both know that many of the threats that followed were the scions of your legion.”

“Of course they were,” Discord said. “I made them damn good at what they did.”

“You sound so proud,” Celestia whispered, sickened. “Why did I ever let you go?”

“Because you believe in second chances,” Discord replied. “You never lost that. That’s good - bodes well for you.”

“What makes you say that?” Celestia asked.

The Draconequus shrugged. “Too long to explain, and I can’t be bothered with it - nor can I be bothered with this frankly annoyingly circular conversation.”

“You’re a monster, still,” Celestia said. “Will that ever change?”

“Perhaps not,” Discord shrugged. “But it was for a good reason, even if I can’t - won’t - tell you.”

Celestia noted the slip, and a faint smile graced her features.

“You’re wrong by the way,” Discord added, more serious now. “You could never have learned the lessons you had to without everything that happened - every iota of that pain and suffering was necessary.”

“You’ll forgive me if I disagree,” Celestia commented.

“Disagree all you like,” he shrugged. “‘If you can’t take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed’. You’re a ruler, and an Alicorn. If you thought your life was going to be pretty pink dresses and parties and fun, you were deluding yourself, and sometimes children need to be broken from their delusions.”

“I am not so naive,” Celestia said icily, glaring at him.

“No, you’re not,” he agreed, smirking. “Not anymore.”

And then he was gone.

Celestia let out a breath. It was always frustrating talking to Discord, and this occasion was no different. Still, it had answered one question… partially. There had been a reason for the horrors he had unleashed - he hadn’t told her the reason, but she knew there was one. Maybe in time he would decide to tell her, or maybe he would not.

She sighed. It didn’t matter either way, she supposed. As he had said - that time was long in the past. The future… the future was a different matter.

***