The dreams struck all at once. Olympus falling, the monstrosities of amorphous flesh marching forward endlessly, shredding apart the world with complete abandon, the death of the Aurasi, and a final descent though the atmosphere culminating in an impact at speeds greater than that of light itself. These merged with other memories, of space distorting and flaming, of the sudden shock of traumatic amputation, of lying in a pool of blood with every bone broken. The one common factor through all of them was the pain.

Rainbow Dash became fully conscious quickly, but the pain remained. Internally, she felt as though all the parts of her were being torn in different directions by some terrible force, and as if she were being hacked to pieces.

“Rainbow!” cried Brown. Through the haze of her pain, Rainbow Dash could see that he two was feeling unwell, but not nearly as powerfully as Rainbow Dash. “What’s happening?!”

“It hurts!” cried Rainbow Dash. “Oh Celestia, it hurts so much!”

“There’s not much time,” said a voice. Rainbow Dash looked up and saw a green, antler-horned unicorn. Beside him was another pony, one who did not seem to be speaking, whose head and body seemed to be made purely of gold. Rainbow Dash did not know how either of them had gotten there, or if either of them were real.

“Buttery Snake,” demanded Brown. “What’s happening to her?! Tell me!”

“The Tree of Harmony is getting cut down. Like a tree.”

“And how are you so cheerful?!” cried Rainbow Dash, looking up at the smiling green pony.

“Because I Chaos in my Spirit and Spirit in my Chaos. And then he teleported them to the Tree of Harmony, where Discord and Vale had already arrived!”

Rainbow Dash opened her eyes and gasped. The crystal light of the room she had been in before was replaced with the darkness of the werewood grove. The pain had subsided slightly, but was still grating at her. She slowly stood and felt even every one of her joints- -even the robotic ones- -creak with arthritic inflammation. Rising made her dizzy and nauseous.

Then she looked up, and suddenly felt so much worse. The Tree of Harmony lay in ruins. Its limbs had been stripped away, their ends chipped and shattered. Only the trunk remained, and even most of that had been cut away, revealing the internal structure of its numerous organs. In the center, Rainbow Dash saw its heart: a hoof-sized Crystal Heart, rotating rapidly in fear between two crystal projections.

Standing over it were tall, bipedal creatures, and Rainbow Dash instantly recognized them. They were like the one she had seen in the airship just before its crash near the Crystal Empire. She had not known what they were then, nor did she know now- -aside from the word “Adamantasi”.

Nor had she imagined that there were so many of them. At least thirty of them were standing over the dying Tree of Harmony with bladed instruments in their hands, stained with its blood. They had been the ones to tear into it, and by extension tear into Rainbow Dash herself.

“Get away from that!” cried Rainbow Dash, taking a defensive stance but preparing to attack.

The creatures, seeming somewhat amused, turned toward her. Their white, sightless eyes glared into her.

“Aurasus…” they said in unison.

“Well, that certainly explains several things,” said Discord. He was standing over Fluttershy, who seemed to have been as equally injured as Rainbow Dash by the attack on the Tree.

“Why do I never have a gun when I need it!” cried Brown, reaching into his fluff.

“Here, try this one,” said Discord, tossing Brown a caulking gun.

“What am I supposed to do with this? Re-tile their lavatory?!”

“Why not,” said Buttery Snake.

“Three Chaos entities detected,” said an Adamantus. “Aurasus detected in replication cycle. Avoid damage to Aurasi.”

The air around the Adamantasi shifted, and the dying pieces that had already been cut from the Tree of Harmony began to fragment. The shards were lifted into the air, and integrated into the machines that covered the Adasmantasi.

“Discord,” said Fluttershy, sounding nervous. “What are they doing?”

“Well…if I had to hedge a guess, I would say they are using the Order of the Tree.”

“But you’re Chaos, right? So you should be able to defeat them, right?”

“Um… I think I’m at- -” Discord picked up his wife and transposed her several feet to the left as a tremendous beam of pure-white Order cut into the grove, splitting every tree in its path into charcoal splinters. “- -a distinct disadvantage.”

The Forest seemed to react violently. Werewoods appeared from every direction, swarming into the clearing, roaring and leaping toward the Adamantasi.

“No, stop!” cried Rainbow Dash.

She was too late. Each werewood who leapt at the creatures died instantly, their bodies disintegrating into skeletons and dust, their skin peeled away and disassembled, only to be incorporated into the creatures that had slain them. The Adamantasi had not moved; they simply refused to react to such an insignificant threat.

“NO!” cried Fluttershy, dropping to her knees.

“Move!” cried Discord, grabbing Fluttershy. His legs ran one way while his body hopped in the other direction, barely avoiding a second burst of Order.

“Discord, you have to do something!” cried Rainbow Dash.

“Well,” said Discord, his legs attempting to race back to his body. “As I’m sure you’ve realized by now, I’m quite a bit more a lover than a fighter!”

“That, and I’ve got most of his power,” said Buttery Snake, reclining in the air.

“Then you do something!”

“Can’t. Lawful neutral. I know, right?”

Suddenly, space seemed to explode outward violently. The nearest of the Adamantasi was instantly thrown backward and slammed into the dying trunk of the Tree of Harmony. A figure clad in yellow wrapped its unearthly figures around the creature’s neck.

“And…that’s what he’s for.”

The Adamantasi looked upward toward the masked being that was attempting to strangle it. Then, with a sudden burst, it reached its own hand upward and grabbed the King’s head. With a surge of magic that nearly knocked Rainbow Dash backward, the Adamantasus slammed the yellow-robed creature into the ground and threw him backward.

The King drifted silently backward, steadying himself. He then spread his arms slowly.

“Oop,” said Buttery Snake, picking up and reversing Brown. “Um, Rainbow, you might want to not look at this next part.”

“Why?”

The King in Yellow reached up toward the rusty metallic shackle that held his neck, and with one swift motion tore it away. As the pieces clattered to the ground, Rainbow Dash saw him change.

The next thing she remembered, she heard Brown’s voice calling to her distantly.

“Rainbow!” he cried, muted as though he was underwater.

“What…what?” Rainbow Dash looked around, and saw that she was facing away from the Tree of Harmony. “What just happened?”

Except she already knew. Although she could not remember exactly what she had seen, she recalled what the King had looked like, if only in the vaguest sense: a being whose strange and alien flesh was saturated with Chaos itself, distorting and spreading and merging with what was most certainly not cloth.

“You just looked straight at a Chaos god,” said Buttery Snake over the sounds of spells and explosions from behind Rainbow Dash. “I’m surprised your brain didn’t drip out your ears. Hmm.”

“But I want to see!” cried Rainbow Dash, knowing that she was missing an epic fight.

“No, Rainbow!” cried Brown, holding her in place.

“Actually, it’s probably okay now. No, wait, still ear leaking fun. Okay, try it now.”

Rainbow Dash turned around quickly. Although the King was no longer in the state he had been, he was most certainly not bothering to mimic whatever bipedal thing he had appeared as before. He still maintained his tattered, flapping robe, but now he reached out with several tentacles that emerged from his spine, holding several badly wounded Adamantasi in place.

Something was wrong, though. The situation felt strange: how the ones he was holding seemed to be only weakly resisting, but the many more just stood, their white eyes watching. Rainbow Dash felt her mane stand on end, and something inside her told her to fly as fast as she could, that she needed to escape, to run away.

“Subject identified,” she heard one of them say. “Target: Carcosan. Verdict: vector compatible.”

Somehow, the one that the King was holding directly before him appeared behind him. The creature’s arm extended into a blade, and it plunged it into the Yellow King’s back. A horrible whisper of a cry permeated the silence of the grove, and the King released several of his captives- -including the one who had stabbed him in the back, who promptly vanished, jumping backward in time several moments.

The wound was not fatal, but as Rainbow Dash watched, the blackness and metal of the Adamantasus’s armor expanded outward in sharp lines, reacting violently with the Yellow Chaos that made up the creature, infecting him with their disease.

A golden voice spoke to Rainbow Dash, and she understood. “Discord!” she cried. “You have to stop it! If he gets infected, he’ll become one of them!”

“Right,” gulped Discord. He teleported suddenly next to Adamantasus. “Inane plot contrivance!” he cried loudly. The Adamantasus was immediately thrown backward, tumbling into the dirt below.

“What are friends for,” said Discord, helping the King stand. The King’s form had returned to normal, and the blackness around the wound in his chest and back was already starting to recede under the pressure of his own magic.

“Discord!” cried Rainbow Dash. “Behind you!”

Discord turned too slowly. One of the formerly inactive Adamantasi stepped forward and gently placed its arm on Discord’s shoulder.

“Oh my,” said Discord. “That is indeed clammy.”

As he made the joke, his shoulder started to harden into stone. The Adamantasus was doing what Rainbow Dash and her friends had once done to him so long ago: it was turning him into a statue.

Suddenly, there was a flash of light, and Discord was replaced with Buttery Snake.

“Nopony gets stoned around here except me!” he cried. “All hail Taco Tuesday!”

The spell accelerated, and Buttery Snake dropped to the ground as a solid chunk of green granite. The Adamantasus released him and joined its brethren, who were now rapidly repairing themselves from their wounds. They seemed to communicate with each other, and then several of them began to release a kind of gas.

Rainbow Dash and Brown were immediately surrounded by the fog as it resolved into a complex fractal network of white, glowing thread.

“What the?” Rainbow Dash reached out with her robotic arm and touched one of the threads. It sparked with Order, and she felt her arm go numb.

“Don’t do that,” said Brown.

“Obviously.”

The Adamantasus nearest to Fluttershy suddenly moved as the others stood still. The thread surrounding it deconstructed and reconstructed as it walked, forming a continuous shell around itself. Fluttershy, who was also trapped in the web, squeaked and tried to back away. When she hit the threads, however, they burst, causing her to jump back into her allotted space.

“You keep your paws off her, you darn dirty ape!” cried Discord. He tried to throw his whole body against the Order network, but it exploded violently, producing shockwaves that further incapacitated both him and Hastur.

The Adamantus reached down slowly through the web and gently placed its claw around Fluttershy’s quivering neck- -and then tightened suddenly.

“Fluttershy!” cried Rainbow Dash, herself trying to throw herself against the Order field. It hurt, but mostly it just held her in place. She tried to slash at it with her wings, but her golden feathers passed through it pointlessly as though it were smoke. “Put her down!”

“No,” said the Adamantasus. “Not compatible. Subject cannot be repaired. Termination will be substituted.”

It narrowed one of its hands into a single spike and drew it back, targeting the center of Fluttershy’s chest.

“Look away, Rainbow Dash,” pleaded Fluttershy. “All of you, look away! I don’t want any of you to see this!”

Not one of them could as its hand jolted forward.