From the darkness the lights began to flicker, illuminating the vast system of hallways with a cold and dim glow. Exactly where the illumination came from had never been established; there were no obvious lamps or anything that could be conceived of as generating light. Rather, the endless corridors and enormous empty room seemed to glow from within.

It was through these newly lit hallways that Discord slowly walked, moving at a leisurely pace and humming a jaunty tune as he took his time. Although normally completely and entirely nude- -a fact that he was well aware of and secretly found hilarious- -today he had elected to wear a soft and fluffy sweater. After all, the moon was a terribly cold place.

As he walked, he took a moment to consider the objects that he had placed long ago in the alcoves of the enormously wide hallways of the moon’s inner systems. Superficially, they resembled statues: they were made of gray, granite-like stones, and formed into the image of ponies. Had any other being walked through these halls- -a difficult task, considering the atmosphere was not really breathable- -they might have thought that their odd poses and grimacing faces were a result of Discord’s eccentric taste in decoration. This, of course, was not the case; Discord much preferred statues of himself, and usually favored the kind that danced.

These statues were, in reality, ponies. Each one was frozen in a number of horribly uncomfortable positions, usually with a look of fear or utter defeat on their faces. They had been here since the Old War, when they had picked the wrong side. Discord ruminated on that fact while he ruminated on rumen, and realized that a thousand years had passed surprisingly quickly.

The ponies were, of course, still fully conscious. They had been for the last thousand years. Each one had been trapped unable to move or to close- -or open in some cases- -their eyes for the entire duration. They had seen nothing but the dark moon-hallways, except for a few that Discord had determined to have excellent looking flanks. They had been put to face a wall.

Discord, having re-swallowed his rumen, slithered to one of the ponies, a stallion who had held the same look of shock as he had possessed the day he had been frozen. His tears were even still attached, although they would never finish falling.

“Tsk tsk tsk!” said Discord. “Oh my, oh dear! Getting stoned on the job! What would your superiors say? Why, I should tell your mother! Or I would, if she hadn’t died, oh, about ten centuries ago.” He laughed, and then moved to another area. In a wider alcove, he had placed a pair of ponies. They were a pair of lovers, and the stallion was reaching for his beloved. She, meanwhile, was attempting to step toward him, even though as stone the two would never be able to reach again.

“Hmm,” said Discord, stroking his beard- -or, rather, a disembodied floating version of his beard. “It looks like your relationship is a little…rocky.” A rim-shot went off from somewhere in hallway went off, and a number of tiny Discords poked their heads from around the hallways and audibly groaned.

“Oh please,” said the large Discord. “I’ve done worse!” He laughed at himself, and then approached the mare of the pair. “My, such a hard body,” he said, poking her outstretched foreleg. He tapped the leg rather hard, and then to his surprise it snapped off, falling to the ground and shattering. A thin trickle of deep-red blood dripped from the stump where it had been attached.

“Oh my! Your body is about as fragile as my ego!” Discord chuckled and snapped his fingers. A small dustpan and broom began to sweep up what had formerly been a pony’s leg. “Well, I don’t mean to gravel you. You’re all surprisingly unimportant, and I really do need to get on with my work. Running a planet is so very hard. And I’m sure you all know what it’s like to be hard.”

There was no sound from the group apart from silence and the hum of the ancient moon-machinery. Discord actually caught himself sighing. He was not the biggest fan of the moon. In fact, he was not a fan at all, despite how much hot air he tended to move just by virtue of being Discord. Something about the silence and solitude of the moon, though, frightened him. Not overtly, of course- -he was, after all, a living god- -but on a deeper and somehow more terrible level.

He continued on, trying not to focus on the flat floor of polished material and the walls that were made of neither metal nor stone. This was always the part that made his skin crawl- -one time, in fact, to the extent that it had crawled off his body entirely and he had been forced to hunt it down. It was the fact that this was one of the few pieces of Equestria that he had not built. He was not sure who had built it, exactly, or when, or even why. Those were questions Discord very rarely asked- -especially ‘why’, as it always had the most boring of responses- -but he could not help but feel the spark of them burning dimly within him.

“Curse all this excessive contemplation,” he said. “I mean, could it get more self-important? It’s really ruining the mood. This is a happy time, after all! There’s nothing happier than visiting old friends!”

In time, Discord finally reached what he considered the main room of the facility. All he had to do was follow the low sobs. The sound was almost rhythmic, and it made Discord giddy with excitement.

The room was enormous, but populated almost entirely by two vast machines. What they had originally been intended for had been lost to time long before Discord had even thought of creating himself, but now they served one of the most important purposes in all of Equestria. At the center of each one, their bodies entombed by claws and clasps of unbreakable material and penetrated with the wires and tubes that integrated them to the celestial sphere, were a pair of ponies. The one who was sobbing was a light blue color, while the other, who remained silent despite the eternal pain of her abdomen being mostly filled with agonizing machinery, was white in color.

“Celestia, Luna,” said a highly serious version of Discord dressed in an anachronistic prison guard outfit. “You have a visitor.”

As soon as he stated it, a red carpet rolled out of the door and Discord emerged to a plume of pyrotechnic sparks.

“Yay Discord!” cried a number of tiny discords that appeared on the sides of the Carpet.

“Can I have your autograph?”

“Sign me! SIGN ME NOW!”

“Oh dear me,” said Discord. “Look at all my biggest fans!”

Celestia did not seem amused, and glared at him. Luna, though, seemed more terrified and attempted to retreat. Doing so was impossible, though. Her body was trapped by the metal that surrounded her, merging her to the moon itself.

“Oh,” said Discord, darkly. He snapped his fingers and all his carefully planned fanfare disappeared. “You two never were any fun, were you?”

Celestia did not respond. She just continued to glare. Had her horn not been cut off, she likely would have attempted to summon a spell against Discord. Doing so would have been useless even it if was possible, though. The same machines that bound her biology to the lunar prison would have absorbed it all, likely with horrifically painful results.

“Such a killjoy,” muttered Discord as he approached Luna. “You always liked spoiling fun. Not an ounce of creativity. Why, if you had just a gram of madness for every inch of your thick, juicy- -”

“Is there a reason you came here, Discord?”

“Of course not! When have I ever done anything with REASON? Down on Equestria, that’s the word we used for dried grapes.” He sighed. “But, I do like dried grapes sometimes. Never prunes, of course. But dried grapes are good. How long has it been, Celestia?”

“Since what? Since you put me in here?”

“Since I put both of you in there,” said Discord, lifting Luna’s chin. She tried to pull away, and to mask the fact that she had been crying. “We’re approaching the thousandth anniversary now. Which means that last week was your one thousandth and sixteenth birthday, doesn’t it Little Luna?”

Luna did not answer, attempting to be defiant.

“Sad that you spent your entire life in this prison. But I do have something for you.” Luna looked to Discord hesitantly, and Discord smiled. “Now, listen carefully. ‘I scream. You scream. We all scream…’”

Luna’s eyes lit up just slightly with hope. “For…for iced cream?”

“Nope!” laughed discord, manifesting a spray can next to him. He grabbed it out of the air and sprayed it in Luna’s eyes, immediately causing her to release a scream so shrill and horrible that even Celestia shivered. “Because I maced you!”

At this punch line, Discord howled with laughter in equal proportion to Luna’s screams of agony. He found it so funny that he quite literally rolled on the floor laughing. When he was finished, he stood up and wiped a tear from his eye. “Ah,” he said. “That was funny. It’s an ‘unjoke’, see? Because the ending is ironic and challenges the expectation of the original rhyme while still being a logical conclusion to its structure! And her face! Luna, you actually looked like you thought I’d give you ice cream!”

At this point, Luna was not listening. She was crying again.

“Shut up Luna,” demanded Celestia. “You’re embarrassing yourself!”

“Sister! It- -it hurts!”

“And I don’t care,” said Celestia. “Stop being a disgrace and mare up!”

“Well, you would know about ‘maring up’,” said Discord, crossing to where Celestia was trapped. He stood extra close to her and gently caressed the side of her face. Celestia glared at him with disgust, and then suddenly bit off his hand.

“Hmm,” said Discord, looking down at the bloodless stump where his eagle-like claw had been. It immediately started to grow back. “Well, that’s not polite at all. Uncouth, even.”

Celestia spit the severed limb onto the floor, and it stood up on its fingers and ran away. “I’d be careful about that,” said Discord, watching Luna recoil in terror as it approached her. “That happened a few days ago. Accident with the toaster I’m afraid. That will probably try to touch you in your sleep.” He paused. “Or would, if you slept. But we can’t really have Little Luna reaching out through dreams, now, can we?”

“So you came here to mace Luna on her birthday?”

“Why? Does she not deserve it?”

“No. She does. And she knows what she did. If she had wielded the Elements of Harmony properly, it would be you in this machine. Not me.”

“Psh,” said Discord, waving his hand dismissively. “I dodged the attack fair and square! I won the Old War, and you lost.” He leaned back in a comfortable armchair. “That said, if I had a dried grape, it would be concerning that very reason!”

“Forgive me if I don’t understand.”

“No. But, since you’re just a bit thick, I’ll explain. I’m here to give you a royal report on just how great Equestria is doing!”

“You mean since you flooded it with chaos and disharmony?”

“I mean since I improved it! After all, what kind of a place was it a thousand years ago? Boring. Dull. Ordered. Stagnant.”

“We had peace. And happiness.”

“And Equestria still has those things too, just without the, you know, tyranny. Without rules and laws and such.” Discord summoned some hot vanilla- -in honor of Celestia, most likely, and because hot chocolate was too mainstream- -and sipped it. “Under my rule, technological development has been, well, possible. The economy is thousands of times greater than it ever was when Canterlot was a thing. Medicine, science, robotics- -”

“Weapons?”

“Well, yes. That too.”

“Just because I’m trapped here doesn’t mean I can’t perceive your world, Discord. What I see is a world trapped in eternal conflict. Every pony is constantly struggling, often with fatal results. Their lives are shallow and pointless. Do you really think anypony could be happy with that?”

“But that was the fundamental flaw of YOUR Equestria. It was too boring!”

“It was safe.”

“That’s exactly the problem! When ponies have everything they want- -when there’s no war, or upheaval, or disasters, or downheaval- -they don’t ever advance!” He leaned forward. “That’s the secret! Just enough chaos to make sure the world is never in order, to keep ponies striving toward the kind of society you had- -but to never let them have it!”

“But what is the point of a society like that? What purpose does the advancement serve if it’s goal can never be reached?”

Discord sighed and rolled his eyes. They clicked across the floor and, as always, came up with a pair of ones- -snake eyes. “There’s no reason why chaos can’t be both the mean and the ends! Although I do hate calculating the mean. The mean is nowhere near as interesting as the median! But I digress. And regress, just slightly. The point is, I’ve created a world ruled by chaos- -and created a world better than any you could ever create.”

“So you’re here to brag?” Celestia laughed humorlessly. “Brag about a world I consider an abomination?”

Discord frowned, and then snapped his fingers, dispelling the lawn chair he had been sitting in. “Well, there’s no reason to be rude about it. I was even going to let Luna out for a walk. But for that, well, now I don’t even want to.”

“W…what?” said Luna, looking up with her eyes swollen and her face covered in tears and snots and still in a great deal of pain.

“He’s lying, Luna,” sighed Celestia, rolling her eyes. “What have I told you about hope? You cannot ever allow yourself to feel it. It will destroy you.”

“Then what exactly keeps you from giving up?” asked Discord, somewhat disturbed that this sentiment was coming from Celestia herself.

Celestia smiled. There was no humor in that smile, but something else that made Discords shiver. Celestia’s teeth seemed strangely sharp. “Eternal, undying hatred,” she replied.

“Well, yes, that sound healthy,” said Discord. “Clearly.”

He checked his watch. “Ah, look at the time,” he said. “The chapter’s about up. And my wife is making dinner tonight. She has a knack for…well, not much. But she looks so darn cute in an apron.” He turned and began to walk toward the exit. Before he left, though, he stopped.

“Oh yes!” he said, turning back around. “For your information, I’m not an idiot.” He stretched out his hand, and there was a powerful flash of chaos energy. Three bright lights appeared floating over it. “I know an escape attempt when I see it. And I never was a big fan of prophesies.”

Discord closed his fist, and the three stars detonated in his grip. He then opened his palm and allowed their dust- -now quickly fading from pure white to black and ashy- -to fall to the floor. “You’re never leaving here,” he said. “Stop trying. Equestria is mine. It always has been, and it always will be.”

With that, he gave a salute and vanished into a plume of plaid light.

Luna stared wide-eyed at the small pile of ash on the floor. Her face contorted, and she felt a pain far worse than Discord’s terrible joke as she saw the bodies of her three most loyal and beloved stars. After their centuries of painstaking dedication, they had been murdered, her most beautiful creations slain before her very eyes.

Celestia looked on with a similar emotion, but not at the loss of the stars. She cared little for their extinguished lives, and instead lamented at the loss of over eight hundred years of planning and careful work.

“Sister,” said Luna, turning to Celestia. “My stars…without my stars, I- -I cannot release us from this prison.”

“I can see that,” said Celestia, darkly. She turned away from Luna and looked up to where she knew Equestria was below them.

“Then- -then we are trapped here. Forever…”

“No,” said Celestia. “We will find a way out.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. And I don’t know how long it will take. But we will break free of this prison. And when we do, we will correct the world. We will end the reighn of chaos and disharmony, and bring unity and peace. And his Equestria and all of the corrupted ponies within it will burn in Solar Fire until nothing remains…”

Luna had begun to despair, but allowed herself to feel a glimmer of hope. She trusted her sister, and knew that she would do everything in her power and never stop until Equestria was once again under the eternal dominion of the Goddess of the Sun.