It had been a long time since Discord had walked through the mortal plane across the world of his creation. Ruling an entire planet- -if Equestria was to be defined as a planet at all, or some kind of plane, or perhaps a disk moving rapidly in an upward direction- -was surprisingly tiring and busy work. For all Discord knew, though, there would not be much time left with the “planet” the way it was. It would survive, of course, and he would prevail as he always did, but things could be different. When Jyggalag marched, the world would be rebuilt but some pieces would go into different places, and others would be forgotten- -and in Discord’s mind, Celestia was awfully close to Jyggalag. She certainly had the jiggle correct.

As would be expected, Discord was moving at substantial speed. He was, after all, wearing Seven-League-Boots. They were the only pair that fit properly.

“After all,” said Discord, “you know what they say about big feet. Fluttershy knows.” He whispered to some unseen observer, “big shoes.”

It was at that point, though, where he heard the cries of his helpless and reasonably pointless subjects.

“Hark!” he cried. “Do I hear the sound of pain and distress that I’m not causing!”

He moved quickly, swooping into action. Within mere seconds he found himself elsewhere from where he had been. That is, he found himself standing in the center of his capital city, Discordalot.

The condition gave him pause and ruined his good mood. In fact, his mellow had perhaps been harshed nearly irreparably. His once beautiful city was in flames. Everywhere, ponies were running, some away from fires and some toward them simply because there was nowhere else to go. Some were quite badly burned, many to the point where they would surely not survive. Discord watched them pass, and felt nauseous despite the smell of delicious cooking meat in the air.

That was when he looked up and saw HER. She had taken a position over the city, her golden armor gleaming in the light of the fires she had produced. Celestia raised her horn, and a beam of solar energy shot forth, tearing through the city. One of the countless hundreds of Disocord’s statues- -one of his favorite, though, because it was of him- -was directly in her crosshairs. It seemed to glow and heat from within, and then it burst apart into fragments of stone that shattered several nearby populated buildings. More ponies screamed, and Celestia turned her attention toward yet another statue, tearing it apart with a single blast.

“Oh, come, now!” cried Discord. “Murder? Arson? I can tolerate those! But VANDALISM! How- -how uncouth! How dare she destroy my MEs!”

He lifted one of his asymmetrical hands and snapped his fingers. There was a flash of light, and Celestia appeared in front of him. She looked exactly as she had back then, and Discord felt his breath catch in his throat. She was the same pony, and now as she stood before him, she wore the exact same golden power armor that she had worn during the War. Even her eyes seemed to have the same hateful fire- -but there was something else. Something Discord did not know how to place.

“Huh,” he said, looking at his claw. “I meant to turn you into a wiener with that one. Ha! I guess you’re already too close to being one! I mean, looking at that armor, it really looks like the casing is just a teensy bit too small. Honestly, how did you gain weight when I haven’t fed you for a thousand years?”

A statement like that had, in the past, always been enough to get Celestia mildly flustered. Now, though, she gave no response except a smile. For some reason, that made Discord shiver. Something was wrong, but Discord did not know what yet.

She descended from the sky and landed in the ash below her. “Discord,” she said, her voice icy. “I was hoping you would live long enough to see your empire and every pony in it burn to nothingness. You just can’t resist ruining my plans, now can you?”

“It’s something of a specialty of mine. Hence why you spent a thousand years in the moon.”

“I suppose I don’t need to try to find you now.”

“Knowing you? You probably still couldn’t find me with both hooves and the glow from your horn.” He laughed and poked the tip of Celestia’s horn. Discord winced and pulled his paw away, finding that one of his fingers had been badly burned. That was not supposed to happen.

“You- -you hurt me,” he said. “How?”

Celestia just continued to smile, and then charged her horn. Discord felt the extreme heat coming from the appendage, as well as a substantial amount of radiation. He was glad draconequi were sterile, because at those levels his walnuts most certainly would have been toasted.

“So it’s a fight you want,” he said, drawing a shield and spear while also appearing nude and covered in blue paint. “Well, then, wee lassie, if a fight is what you be achin’ fer,, then a fight is what you’re gonna be havin’!”

Celestia fired a beam. Discord dodged, pretending to yawn- -but then was thrown forward as the beam struck the ground behind him with the force of a small atom bomb.

“Oof!” he said as he was thrown to the ground. “Hey! That’s cheating!” He lifted his claw. “But cheating is what I do! You can ask my wife!”

He snapped his fingers, intending to exchange the location of Celestia’s horn and wings. That one had always gotten him roaring with laughter back in the day, and he had missed the extreme level of pain it was capable of causing.

Celestia shuddered and took a step back, but her wings and horn did not move.

“What?” said Discord, looking at his fingers. “But I snapped!”

His confusion was interrupted by a golden-clad hoof to his face.

“My bread and butter!” he cried as he was thrown back with considerable force into a statue of himself. A version of himself cast in stone, suddenly looming over him so darkly. There were so many of them in this city: versions of him, trapped in strange poses for all eternity. He did not know why that made him so afraid.

Another beam sailed through the air toward him, and Discord just barely managed to part himself down the center to avoid it.

“Oop!” he said. “You almost got me! I even had to middle-part! What is this, the 90’s? If you go by Twilight’s bangs it certainly is!” He chuckled, only to take a sudden atomic beam to the chest. It threw him backward and against the ground with enough force to bury him in the rubble. Needless to say, it was quite painful.

Celestia had already taken to the air, stabilizing herself above the heat of the city with her enormous and beautiful alicorn wings. It did not take long for space to distort around her. She turned and fired a blast directly at the distortion, not even waiting for Discord to fully materialize. The beam went directly through, doing unspeakable damage to his internal organs as it phased past, and struck the city behind him. When it struck, it detonated with a flash as bright as the sun and consumed over fifty city blocks in an enormous mushroom cloud.

Discord choked back the pain and wiped the plaid blood that was dripping from his mouth. He was breathing hard and feeling rather unpleasant. More unpleasant than anypony had made him feel in a long time.

“How are you doing this?” he said, flapping his small but normally quite flightless wings to keep himself afloat. “You shouldn’t be able to do this to me…”

Celestia shrugged. “That’s a good question. But either answer is unpleasant. For you at least.”

“Do tell,” said Discord, sarcastically.

“Either you’re far less powerful than you were a thousand years ago, or I’m far MORE powerful.”

“HA!” laughed Discord. He then continued to laugh for quite some time until he wiped a tear from his eye. “What is funny- -what I’m laughing at- -is that you could even think such a thing! I already beat you once- -and not just you! Your little sister, your army, your entire government. All alone! It was ME!”

“No. You only won because of Sombra’s army, and because of Twilight Aurora’s betrayal.”

Discord’s eyes narrowed. “I took a blast from the Elements of Harmony to the chest, and it did NOTHING. I am invincible!”

“I was there, Discord,” said Celestia. “I can’t help but wonder. Who exactly is it that you are lying to?”

Discord felt his breath catch in his throat. That was unusual, because it was usually him catching his breath, not the other way around.

“You know,” he said, holding up his claw and reclining on the air itself, “I could summon a flamethrowing hurricane right now. It wouldn’t even be hard.”

“I don’t think you could, Discord.”

Discord Sighed. “Probably not. Because that would be terribly difficult to write. So how about I just turn you into a banana?” He snapped his claw, and absolutely nothing happened. “Wh…what?”

Celestia smiled with surprisingly pointed teeth. Discord did not remember her having so many. “You’re spread thin, Discord. You can’t control this entire planet AND fight me.” She lifted her head and charged her horn. The heat was even more intense than before. “Meanwhile, I’m in quite the opposite situation. This time around, I don’t need to worry about collateral damage!”

Discord glared at her, and then appeared in a full suit of armor complete with a buckler and sword. “Bring it on!”

The beam shot out with the full force of the sun. Discord raised his shield and blocked it, but quickly realizing that a full suit of metal armor had been a terrible idea. He was cooking inside it like a potato that had been wrapped in aluminum foil. Or even one that had been wrapped in foil and placed in the microwave, even though the magnetron had not yet been invented in Equestria.

The force of the impact was far greater than Discord had thought possible, and to his horror, he realized that she really was right. There was a time when he could easily have tormented Celestia and Luna without so much as batting an eye- -but now it had become different. He was weaker, and she was stronger. Being bound to two separate planets had changed both of them: Equestria had drawn Discord’s power away from his body, while being trapped in the moon had somehow made Celestia so much stronger.

“Give up, Discord!” shouted Celestia over the sound of her beam. “I am the One True Princess of Equestria! I’m going to take my throne back, and the SUN WILL NEVER SET OVER EQUESTRIA!”

With that, the beam tripled in intensity. Discord could no longer maintain his flight, and was forced to put his entire supply of magical energy into his shield. He was immediately thrown backward and into the rubble of his ruined capital city, where he landed with tremendous force.

Being immortal- -or so he hoped- -this did not kill him. It did, however, hurt quite substantially.

“Ohhh,” he groaned. “I guess we know who really is the banana is. Based on bruises alone, it’s me.”

“Discord!” cried a soft voice from nearby. Discord sat up suddenly.

“Fluttershy?” he said, looking around. Indeed, somehow she was there, hiding at the base of a Discord statue in a the remnants of what had once been a wooden-framed building. “What- -what are you doing here?!”

“I came to help!” she called. “I know I can do something to- -EEP!”

Celestia had descended from the sky, and her yellow eyes had locked on Fluttershy. She slowly began to smile.

“Don’t you dare!” said Discord, standing up and raising his melted sword.

“If Harmony is to be restored,” she said, “then all heretics must be REMOVED.”

A small beam shot from her horn, striking the nearby Discord statue in the ankle. It lost balance and tipped, shattering as it went. Fluttershy looked up in time only to squeal in panic- -and then to be crushed by the falling stone.

It all happened so fast that Discord could not do anything to save her. All the power in the world, and he had failed to use it- -and now he watched as red fluid seeped out from beneath a stone rendition of his own smiling face.

“I don’t know what she expected to accomplish,” sighed Celestia. “But she certainly was useless, wasn’t she?”

Discord turned slowly to Celestia. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

“No, no,” she said. “I’m pretty sure I should have.”

Discord reached out to the reality around him. This time, the Chaos flowed easily, drawn out not by the pain of others but by his own. When he closed his hands, the matter he grasped ceased to become cohesive. The Chaos saturation moved it into a state of plasmatic flux, causing the four basic alchemical elements- -wood, cheese, soap and vanilla- -to merge into a single unified substance.

“What are you doing?” said Celestia. She did not sound afraid. She sounded infuriatingly pleased with herself, as if this were her goal the entire time.

“I’d say I’m about kill you,” said Discord.

He pushed his magic forward. The altered matter around him rushed forward, winding and solidifying into great tendrils of pure Chaos. Celestia raised a shield against them, but it cracked apart easily. She cried out as the matter condensed into long spikes that penetrated her body, spearing her from every direction. Dark metallic fluid flowed out of every wound, spraying down on the land and onto Discord.

Discord closed his fist and changed the shape of the spears of nameless material. He drew Celestia toward him, pulling her transfixed body to within feet of him as he stepped toward her.

“I may be a god,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t LOVE! You have no idea what I’m going to do to you. I’ve already proven that you can bleed, but tell me. How much pain can an alicorn survive before she becomes one of MY Priestesses?”

Celestia did not answer. She only released a low, pained sound. Her head was down, and her long plrismatic mane covered it. Discord was furious that she did not respond, and grabbed her chin, forcing her head upward. He suddenly found himself staring into a pair of large, turquoise eyes, and to his horror realized that the sound was not weeping but in fact low laughter.

He jumped back. “You’re not Celestia,” he said, calmly.

“And you are a fool if you think gods can ever love or be loved,” she replied in a voice that was distinctly different from Celestia’s, but equally familiar.

Discord looked to where Fluttershy had fallen, and then burst out into laughter. “This is a dream! I’m asleep!” He laughed even harder and then turned back to Luna, who still wore her sister’s skin. “So, what, is this your fantasy? To be a REAL Princess instead of, well, you?”

“No,” said Luna. When she spoke, her nearly black blood began to drip form her mouth. “I assure you. This dream is yours, and yours alone.”

“So, what? Are we playing by Freddy Kruger rules? If we get hurt in the dream, we get hurt in real life?”

“If you mean these injuries,” said Luna, gesturing with her face toward the numerous spikes that held her in place. “No. I’m not injured in the waking world. But I still feel the pain.”

“I see. I bet that hurts.”

Luna smiled. “This is trivial to me. I’ve felt so much worse for so long.”

“Oooh, angst!”

“Perhaps,” said Luna, unable to shrug against the spears. “But I think you understand. I saw it on your face when I ‘killed’ that…thing.”

Discord frowned, and then turned around, throwing one hand up in the air nonchalantly. “Maybe a little. But I knew it was a dream the whole time. I mean, there’s no way Celestia could EVER have taken me on like that. And I’m probably sleeping next to Fluttershy right now. I bet her soft, fuzzy wings are poking into my chest this very instant.”

“You would be surprised,” said Luna. “But unfortunately, entering the dreams of her kind is invariably fatal. Not that I care. I came here for YOU.”

“Yes. And you failed to off me. I win.”

Luna chuckled, and Discord froze. He felt cold, suddenly. “Discord,” said Luna. “I already explained it to you. Or can you not listen? No one can be hurt in a dream. Not physically, anyway.”

Discord slowly turned toward her. “Then why are you here?”

Luna smiled, and more black fluid began to drip from her mouth. There seemed to be so much of it, and somehow it seemed darker than before. “I came to show you the TRUTH.”

The black fluid suddenly changed. It ceased to be liquid, and instead became something else entirely. It was dark, but seemed far deeper than any liquid. The inside of it seemed to be filled with stars, and to glow with a terrible indigo light.

“What is that?” said Discord, unsure why he suddenly felt so afraid.

“I had so, so much time in the moon,” said Luna. “Time to think. Time to make THIS.”

“Answer the question!” cried Discord as the substance suddenly lifted into the air and began to drift toward him. “WHAT IS IT?!”

“It is called the Tantabus,” said Luna. “I forged it in the world of my own mind from my hatred and sorrow.”

“Hatred…hatred of me?”

Luna smiled. “No. For myself.”

The object suddenly expanded to hundreds of times its normal size. Discord covered his face and let out the most girlish squeal that he had ever squelt. The entire world went black.

Then, just as quickly as it had left, the world returned. Discord was still standing an awkward position, and he quickly felt over his entire body. He did not feel any holes or lumps, and he had certainly not been turned to stone. In fact, he was wearing a strange kind of uniform. The design of it was not scary at all, though. In fact, the fabric was excellent and the shape was that of the exact kind of uniform he had always wanted to have made for himself for public appearances.

The area around him was equally non-unpleasant. He was standing on what appeared to be a high stage, looking out over a large and dimly lit court. Walls were in the distance, and beyond them a harsh red glow that illuminated the entire sky a dull scarlet.

This confused him greatly. He had been expecting some strange and painful fate. Instead, though, he found himself exactly where he enjoyed himself the most: on a well-decorated vantage, its surface made of polished black granite and its edges decorated by perfectly symmetrical banners decorated with the symbol of Chaos, the eight-arrowed star. He was the center of attention- -and yet somehow he felt so very sick.

That was when he realized that he was not alone. Something in his mind clicked, and he knew that the ponies that stood with him were his Watchers.

On his right stood Sunset Shimmer, her body made entirely of golden and orange metal. No part of her skin was organic, and her face barely even resembled that of an equine. She had no semblance of a mouth or nose, and instead four luminescent robotic eyes that sat under a bladed, golden horn. Behind that face, the only part of her that was still pony was visible: sitting in a thick, translucent case of carved diamond and floating in a thick, bubbling fluid sat what was left of her brain.

All four of her eyes turned to Discord. “Overlord Discord?” she asked, her voice coming from some unknown part of her body without a hint of mechanical distortion. “Is something the matter?”

“What…what’s going on?” asked Discord, utterly confused.

“Why, it’s your victory celebration!” said a different voice. Discord turned to the Watcher on his right. This watcher stood before him dressed in ornate black mithril that sat over perfectly white clothing. What little skin she had visible was white, but it was not really skin. Instead, it had been mutated into thick bony plates, all of which were assembled perfectly symmetrically like the skin of some ancient and primitive creature. She turned toward Discord, and he saw that although her long blue mane was perfectly maintained, her eyes were hideous. They had sickly pink irises with goat-like, horizontal pupils.

“R…Rarity?”

“Of course, my Overlord! And might I say, it an honor to stand at your side on this momentous occasion!”

“Momentous occasion?”

“Why of course! You defeated the Heretical Sisters, after all!”

“I did?”

“Come on, Discord,” sighed Sunset. “Modesty doesn’t suit you.” She raised a mechanical hoof, and two sets of electrical lights illuminated on either side of the stage, although at an angle where Discord could see the pair of crucified, headless bodies attached to hem. Discord immediately felt sick. “And this time,” added Sunset, “you didn’t waste time imprisoning them. To be honest, I was having doubts about you before, but with this, well…for the first time, I’m truly proud to serve you, my Overlord.”

“I don’t…I don’t remember…” Except he did. The battle, the victory, how he had been forced to kill them. They were immortals like he was, but there had been no other way to preserve Chaos in Equestria. They had forced him. He had had to do it.

“Of course,” sighed Rarity. “There was the cost.”

“What cost?”

“Well, I would hardly say what you did was easy. They put up a terrible fight. And it is a shame we lost the others. But ideas are harder to kill.”

“The population did not react well,” said Sunset.

“What do you mean?” asked Discord, feeling his voice shaking because on some level he already knew the answer.

“They began to defy the orthodoxy,” said Rarity. She smiled, revealing perfect teeth. “A sad situation, really. They refused to accept the doctrine of Chaos. They thought different thoughts, not the ones that they were supposed to. New ideas. Old ideas. Dangerous ideas.”

“What did you do?” whispered Discord.

Rarity turned to Discord, her goat-like eyes morphing to a pair of deep pink ones with vertical slit-pupils. “We were forced to restore the Faith. While you killed the source of the heresy, we killed the heretics. All of them. Every last one.”

“How many was that?”

“Discord,” laughed Sunset. “Come on. You signed off on the order. ‘Every last one’. Every pony. Those that survived the Second Final War were contaminated with diverse thought. So we killed them all. Every. Last. One.”

Discord gaped. “You- -you didn’t- -”

“They refused to accept the will of Chaos,” said Rarity. “Chaos cannot be maintained when ponies resist its enforcement.” She looked out at the open but dark courtyard in front of them, and her hair shifted color to shimmering silver as her eyes reverted to their horizontal-pupiled form. “Of course, we took steps to repair the situation. And I think we did quite well.”

Sunset raised her right hoof to the darkness. “All unites!” she boomed. “Salute the Divine Overlord!”

There were several sequential thuds as relays clicked into position, causing a system of harsh argon lights to illuminate the open area. Discord watched as piece after piece was illuminated, each revealing a perfect square of ponies aligned into perfect formation. In each group, the ponies represented were all identical: the same type, the same color, the same eyes, the same faces. Not one among them possessed a cutie mark. The only deviation came from the frontmost group, a legion of identical gray mares who all stared back with luminescent cybernetic eyes identical to Sunset’s.

There was a sound like thunder as every pony in the group moved in unison. All raised their right front hooves toward Discord, and all called in unison.

“Hail the Divine Overlord!”

“They’re noncans,” said Discord. “All of them…”

“Well of course!” said Rarity, gleefully. “Sunset and I are the last canon ponies in existence! The others simply became too bothersome. So we had new ponies made. Ones that won’t deviate from the orthodoxy. They all think the same thoughts in the same way, with no deviation. No unpredictability. No randomness. No ability to resist the will of Chaos.”

Discord took a step back in horror. He felt as though he was going to be sick.

“No- -NO!” he cried. “You can’t- -that’s not Chaos! It isn’t! It can’t be!”

Sunset and Rarity looked to Discord, confused. “Of course it is, Discord,” said Sunset. “This is what you wanted. It’s exactly what you ordered us to do.”

“It’s exactly what you wanted,” said the final living Watcher. Discord jumped and turned around as she emerged from the darkness behind him. Her blue coat was clad in black Unlaw armor, and her blue hair tied back into a tight blue bun away from her long horn. She bore a pair of pistols and a long, straight sword that was only partially obscured by her wings.

“No! NO! This isn’t Chaos! This- -it’s a bad dream! It’s just a bad dream- -”

“It is a dream. But it is also the truth. It’s what I came here to show you. What you needed to see.”

“You came here to put these images in my head- -”

She stamped her hoof. “No. I did not create this world. YOU created it.” She took a step forward. The world around Discord seemed to be frozen, and Rarity and Sunset just watched, smiling and refusing to intervene. “Look into your heart, Discord. You’ve always been able to perceive the outcome, the result. To see how chaotic lines of causality lead to a single pure result. It’s the only reason you have not yet gone insane.”

“But- -but- -”

She looked out at the army of noncans, a sample of the population of this entire world. “You did not see it. Perhaps you could not. We’ve both lived for one thousand years, but you lived it slowly. Changes were subtle, slow, difficult to detect. You were not able to see the world changing.”

“I chanced it for the better,” argued Discord. “I used Chaos to advance the world in a way that Celestia never could.”

“Chaos? Is that what you call it? When you have an Unlaw organization with targets and metrics that ensures exactly the correct number of crimes are committed every fiscal quarter? Or a group of secret police who spend time carefully cultivating the word, snipping away pieces…or dissidents.”

Discord looked at her in horror, and then at the army before him- -and he knew that she was correct. This was his dream, after all. It was his greatest fear, but also the events that he knew the world had been moving toward for some time. He had ignored the changes, or justified them when he could, always telling himself that Chaos had to be maintained by whatever means necessary. This was the inevitable conclusion to the world he had created.

“But why?” he said, tears dripping from his eyes. “I tried…I tried so hard…”

“Chaos is like a flower made of glass, Discord. If you strive to hold it tightly, it will be crushed.” She sighed. “It is such a fragile thing, anarchy. The only way for it to survive is to force it to.” She looked Discord in the eye. “You cannot be a king and a Lord of Chaos. You know that. You’ve known that for a long time. Discord, it’s not that your power has been diluted. It’s not that you’re spread thin. It’s that it’s gone. You’ve been dead for a long, long time, Discord. You just haven’t accepted it yet.”

Discord looked at her, and then out at the future. The future he knew would come to pass if he did not intervene. Then he chuckled softly.

“You’re right,” he said. “All that time I was worried about fighting Celestia.” He shrugged. “Well, I guess I don’t have to worry about it now. I’ve already lost. Probably for the better. If I’m not the Spirit of Chaos, then what am I even for? But there is a bright side!”

“Oh?”

Discord smiled. “Only Discord got to defeat Discord.”

In the real world, Discord lay in his bed, asleep and alone. The same smile as in the dream crossed his face in real life as it did in the dream, a knowing smile about the fate that had already been decided. Asleep, he did not notice the flash of violet light that appeared in the darkness of his doorway.

A white unicorn stepped through, and then stepped aside, allowing a far larger white pony to enter the room. He stood by as Celestia approached Discord and looked down at him for a moment. He looked so peaceful, and it was maddening that this was the way it had to be- -and even more maddening that despite possessing all the power of the sun, this victory had gone to the inferior moon-sister.

The hesitation was only momentary. Celestia lowered her horn and pushed it into Discord’s chest, piercing his heart. Discord did not resist; there was no need to. He did not even stop smiling, although Celestia had the strangest feeling that he knew that he had been killed, and that he was laughing at her for having been forced to give him a peaceful death in his sleep.

His body charged with solar energy, and Discord began to disintegrate. His body pulled apart into gleaming flecks that rose away from him like streamers, and then became dust. Very little Chaos escaped him, as Luna had been correct. There was almost none left. He was little more than a shell.

In only a few seconds, he had collapsed into nothingness. Discord had been defeated. bow�~��(