Not the Hero Chp. 26 Pt. 1 (Patreon)

Oh my God I can't believe how long it's been that I've been working on this. Over three months and this is all I have. Mea culpa. Writing has been almost impossible lately.

Once I had recovered enough to do things, I decided to go check up on Anon's trial. According to Gilda, I'd only lost two days to that experience. (Two days?! It had felt like I was stuck in the last one, where they'd used a reforming spell on me, for years. But that's how dreams work, after all, and I shouldn't have been surprised.) And then I'd lost two days to my recovery and journaling. Thankfully the trial was still going on. She'd been monitoring it with the Panauricon, since Blueblood was wearing an ear on his ear. Apparently Anon had finally gotten a chance to speak in his own defense, and, no surprise, had blamed me. Apparently, because I hadn't told him she was a child, and I hadn't told him she was a slave, it was all my fault that he had hacked her to death. This is, even by my standards, ridiculously illogical. "I'm sorry, officer, I didn't realize she was underage" might fly when the infraction in question was a bit of dirty dancing, not a gruesome murder of a helpless opponent. And yet, not only did this argument seem to be swaying the ponies... it sounded from what little Blueblood could hear of their conversation with each other that Starflame and Ember were actually taking the argument somewhat seriously as well. 

I could understand ponies. Ponies are terrified of dragons and don't understand them very well. Tell a pony that someone killed a huge, winged dragon in combat, and moreover a huge, winged dragon that had been protecting an evil tyrant ruler of a nation of slavers and rapists, and I could well see how ponies could start from the assumption that this was probably a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and then fail to reality check their initial assumption after being told the dragon in question was a slave and a child. But how could dragons think this was an acceptable argument? This was Anon all the way. I knew I was going to have to drop in on Ember and Starflame, to reinforce their understanding that murdering enslaved children is bad against the press of Anon's mind control.

Much as I wanted to check up on Trixie, I had to deal with this or risk Anon being found innocent. I mean, that was probably going to happen anyway, but I wanted to put up as much of a fight as possible.

However, when I dropped in, Blueblood completely derailed me. The day's arguments weren't over, so instead of being able to go speak directly to Ember and Starflame, I had to meet up with Blueblood first... who immediately dragged me out of the trial. "There's somepony here to see you," he said.

"To see me?" I couldn't imagine why anyone would want to meet with Twister, unless they recognized me from the xenophiles' club and wanted some action, and that was certainly not a good enough reason to interrupt my plans to watch my enemy's humiliation. On the other hand, nopony knew I was Discord... presumably. "Why?"

"Someone who's identified certain problems with society, problems that you and I have already observed and are aware of the cause of, and who would like to be involved in ending those problems."

I raised an eyebrow. Blueblood was being very circumspect, presumably because we were still relatively in public. He led me out of the palace entirely. "Where are we going?"

"I have a safe house. Where I bring... friends when I don't want the paparazzi harassing them."

Ah. Where he brought the one-night stands he didn't want to be publicly linked to, then. "If you just told me where it was, I could teleport us there."

"Do you actually know the location of streets and street numbers in Canterlot? A thorough knowledge of the addresses in a city doesn't seem particularly chaotic."

"I tend to navigate by landmarks, as a general rule."

"Then it'll be easier for me to take you there than it would be to explain."

We were trotting at a good speed, so it didn't take very long to reach the townhome Blueblood apparently stashed his conquests in. A servant of Blueblood's family opened the door for us, and there was a mare sitting in the parlor. I did a doubletake. Aside from the large quantity of eyeshadow she was wearing, the dark grey mare was incredibly dull-looking, her straight purple mane cut in a precise, bland bowl cut with the back grown out, but even though she was so boring that looking at her made my brain want to shut down, I recognized her. It was Maud Pie, Pinkie's sister.

"Blueblood, what is Pinkie's sister doing here?"

"She has a story to tell you," Blueblood said. "It sounded to me as if the events she related to me could be the work of Anon." He nodded at her. "I'll go back to the trial while you discuss with her."

"I'm not entirely certain how Anon could be responsible for this," Maud said as Blueblood left. "But Prince Blueblood told me you could explain."

It is very difficult to describe Maud Pie's voice because there are not enough synonyms for "boring" in the Equestrian language, and I hate repeating myself. There is no emotion at all in her voice, or her face, or her ears, or her tail. None. Ninguno. Zip. It's hard for me to understand her, since I'm in danger of falling asleep every moment she's speaking. The verb "drone" doesn't begin to convey how monotone she is. I decided I needed to get a reaction out of her, so I transformed into my true shape and leaned my face into hers, extending my neck even farther than it normally extends. "Well, what seems to be the problem, little pony?"

I was deeply disappointed. Lately I've been meeting a lot of brave ponies who stand up to me despite being obviously terrified. But Maud didn't even blink. No reaction at all. "My sister forgot that I existed, and forgot our other sisters' names."

"Forgot you existed?" That one made me blink. Anon had done any number of terrible things, but making Pinkie forget her sister – who, unlike me, was not a villain, and had never done him any harm – seemed to be a new low. Amazing how every time I thought he'd sunk as low as possible, something like this happened.

"My sister is Pinkie Pie. I'm told you know her."

I couldn't tell if she was being sarcastic or not. "Oh, no, I've never heard of her," I said. Now me, I was definitely being sarcastic.

"She's one of the Bearers of the Elements of Harmony. They turned you into stone, which must have been an improvement."

"It really wasn't."

"Adding rocks to anything is an improvement. Aside from pastry products."

"Mm, we're going to have to agree to agree that you're stupid," I said. "Go on and tell me your story."

"Pinkie and I are very close," Maud said, showing no reaction to my insults. In fact, pretty much throughout this encounter she showed no reaction to anything. It's unnerving. "I'm at university studying for a doctorate in geology. Pinkie calls it my 'rocktorate'."

"She would."

"She used to send me a letter every week. In the last letter I received, she told me that she and her friends had met a new friend, named Anon, that he was a member of a previously undiscovered species, and that he was a lot of fun and she would tell me more about him next week but this week she and her friends had to attend Twilight Sparkle's brother's wedding and she would be working on the reception. The next week I didn't receive a letter."

"Anon has been known to erase memories, but I thought he only did it to his enemies."

"I thought perhaps she had forgotten, but I didn't receive a letter the next week either. Or the week after that. I assumed that for some reason she was sending them to our parents' home, but when I returned home for break, I found that she had not sent me any letters there, either. Also, she referred to my sisters Limestone and Marble as Inky and Blinky."

I was beginning to see a pattern here. Inky, Blinky and Pinky are the names of enemies in a famous human video game, and in the episodes I saw, the only time any relatives of Pinkie were shown, it was only two of her sisters. Maud wasn't present. Anon, therefore, didn't know Maud Pie existed... so Pinkie didn't either.

This both fascinated and horrified me. Fluttershy's brother wasn't shown in the series, nor was his existence even hinted at. Had she forgotten his existence? (He was a highly forgettable fellow, if you ask me. A complete loser with an utterly unwarranted sense of his own self-worth and an overblown sense of entitlement. Still, he was her brother.) Only Rarity, Twilight and Pinkie had had their parents appear on the show, but Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash both had both parents living and healthy; did Anon make them forget their parents because there was no evidence they had any in the episodes he'd seen? Celestia had remembered she had a father, and it was entirely reasonable for Anon to assume her father was dead, but he'd completely rewritten the manner of his death and the sisters' relationship to me, in their heads. Did Rainbow and Fluttershy think their parents were dead? Estranged? Or did the fact that logically, every living pony has had parents make him assume they had some, somewhere?

"What happened when you talked to Pinkie about it?" I asked, assuming that of course Maud would have talked to Pinkie about it.

I wasn't disappointed. "She was obviously very surprised to see me," Maud said. "At first she still didn't seem to recognize me. When I pointed out that I am her sister Maud, she behaved as if she had known this all along and was joking with me... but Pinkie doesn't make jokes that make ponies feel hurt and neglected. Additionally, she claimed that her nicknames for Limestone and Marble were jokes, but our sisters are very sensitive and Pinkie knows this. She wouldn't make a joke that implies she cannot remember their real names, and she wouldn't give them random nicknames with nothing to do with their personalities or appearances." Maud paused. From her, with her total lack of emotion, it seemed as if she was applying great weight to her next statement. "I am not convinced Pinkie recognized me even then," she said. "She attempted to cover it, but I detected that she was still confused."

"You don't seem like the kind of pony who's exactly an expert on the mental state of other ponies."

"I prefer rocks. They're easier to understand. But Pinkie is my sister. I know her moods very well."

So. Pinkie hadn't remembered her own sister because Anon hadn't known she had a sister, and even after it had been explained to her that she had a sister, she might possibly not have remembered. This seemed less some semi-deliberate act on Anon's part and more a side effect of how his powers worked. "So you met her and she seemed confused about who you were. Is she writing you now?"

"Yes, but all she talks about is her partner, Anon. Occasionally some details about one of her herdmates slips through, but mostly it's Anon."

"Were you surprised to hear Pinkie was herding with her friends?"

Maud paused. From her, the seconds of silence seemed like high drama. "Pinkie has always been polyamorous," she said. "But I am afraid she'll get hurt. She seems to think this new fad for herding will last forever, but it arose so quickly, I believe it will disappear equally quickly when ponies get tired of it, and then Pinkie's partners will leave her for monogamous relationships. She will be heartbroken."

I nodded. Maud's fears seemed realistic. And then I realized something. "Wait. You know herding is new?"

"My family follow traditional ways, but I go to university. I'm exposed to other lifestyles. It isn't our way to judge those who live by different traditions. But I didn't know any ponies in a herd, and then suddenly everypony I knew was in one. I'm not sure when this new fad started, but it's obviously one of those things that suddenly becomes popular overnight... and those things usually don't stay popular."

I blinked. "You know," I said, and I meant it to sound normal but it came out in almost a reverential whisper. "You know it wasn't always like this! You remember!" I couldn't stop myself from coiling in circles around her in excitement – not touching her, just spinning in circles around her head. "Anon's mind control didn't alter your memories! But how?"

"I don't know. I didn't know Anon had mind control powers. Pinkie doesn't seem to know that."

"Tell her! If you can, please tell her!" Had I found a way in? Could Maud break through Anon's information wall and reach Pinkie? "Right now!" I conjured her a scroll and a pencil – earth ponies tend to prefer them to quills, they're thicker and easier to pick up with a mouth or tactile telekinesis.

"All right." Maud started writing, reciting as she wrote. "Dear Pinkie, I'm concerned about your herdmate Anon. I've heard that he killed a dragon and is now on trial..." Her expression actually changed, turning just very slightly more scowly. "That was not what I meant to write."

My heart sank. "Try again," I said, but I already knew it wouldn't work.

"Dear Pinkie, Anon seems like a very attractive... no. No, that isn't what I'm trying to say. Dear Pinkie, I've heard that Anon might be facing extradition to... No. Dear Pinkie, mind control abilities are held by many unicorns, so be careful when... What's happening?" She looked up at me. "I know what I want to say, but when I write it, I write something else."

I sighed dramatically. "And I had such high hopes, too. It's part of Anon's powers. You can't tell anyone he considers close to him that he even has powers." My fists clenched. "And you can't tell him anything he'd rather not hear. That's why that dragon died. I tried to tell him, and Luna, that she was a child, and a slave. But Anon wouldn't have wanted to know he was attacking a little girl, so I couldn't tell him. Or Luna. Every time I tried to say it, it came out as something completely different."

"That seems as if it would have to be a very powerful spell."

"It doesn't seem to be a spell at all. I can detect magic. I can't detect any from Anon. The only thing I've noticed is magic is – hey. Hey, I didn't think of this! Do you know any mares that used to be stallions?"

"About half the stallions in my class are now mares," Maud said. "I don't judge."

"And it didn't occur to you that that was strange? That that's a really high number? That it was odd that they never made reference to their old lives?"

"I don't judge," Maud repeated. "I didn't know it had any relation to Pinkie, so I didn't care. Ponies' gender aren't my concern."

"No, all you care about is rocks."

"No. All I care about are rocks and my family."

I slumped back in one of Blueblood's fancy chairs, the back of my lion paw to my forehead. "The only other sapient being I've met who was resistant to Anon's changes, and she's stunningly unobservant and incurious about anything other than rocks."

"Why is Anon mind-controlling Pinkie to forget me?" Maud asked.

"He's not... exactly. He... how to explain this." I summoned a copy of a television – those crystal screens that show the little films, in the human world. "This is from Anon's world, and this—" The show, which is called My Little Pony, started playing its inane theme music. "This is like a movie, about your sister and her friends, and their adventures."

Maud was staring at the screen. I'd never seen her show that much interest in anything. "Is that a liquid crystal?"

I glanced at it to check what it was made of. "Yes," I admitted, "but what does that have to do with anything?"

"I prefer rocks with more varied structures than simply crystalline, but crystalline rock is interesting also. And liquid crystal is unusual. I don't usually see it outside of complex magical applications."

"Fine. Now pay attention." The theme song was over and an episode was starting. I'd grabbed a Pinkie episode, the one where she made extra copies of herself. "Anon saw these episodes in his world, so he had preconceptions about what our world was like. When he came here... somehow, he has the power to alter reality so that it makes him appear to be a big hero, makes mares fall in love with him, stallions respect him, and more to our point, reshapes Equestria into what he thinks it is. So the herding fad, as you describe it, came about because Anon thought there were fewer stallions than there actually are – the show is aimed at fillies in the human world, and they think boys are icky, so they just don't show as many stallions. And so Anon had this idea that ponies herd, because on his world they have horses, and horses herd. A shortage of males, experience with what unintelligent animals that bear some resemblance to ponies do, and the desire to have your sister and all of her friends fall in love with him, and voila, suddenly ponies herd a lot. And a lot of stallions wake up as mares."

"Pinkie wouldn't approve of someone who changes stallions into mares without their permission. Ponies are unhappy when they're the wrong gender, and Pinkie most wants ponies to be happy."

"She doesn't know he's doing it. He doesn't know he's doing it, as nearly as I can tell, and his magic won't allow us to tell him, or anyone close to him. That's why you couldn't write Pinkie and tell her Anon is mind-controlling her."

"Why would he make her forget me, though?"

"Because you aren't in the show." I pointed at the screen. "In the episodes I've seen – which I think are the ones Anon has seen, I don't know if there are any more but I think these are all the ones that came out before Anon came here – you don't appear. Pinkie's family life appears briefly in the episode about how she got her cutie mark, and you weren't there."

"But I was there."

"When Pinkie first showed your parents and sisters her party?"

"Oh. No, that's correct. I was investigating a vein of feldspar at the far end of our acreage. I heard Pinkie call us – she was very loud – but I wanted to finish my observations first. When I reached our home, Pinkie had already started her first party." Maud blinked. Really, I cannot overstate how boring this pony's body language was, and how shocking it was every time she showed any sort of expression. "I didn't like it. It was too loud and the colors were garish, but I endured for Pinkie's sake. But then all she wanted to do was throw parties and I couldn't endure that even for her. I told Mother – I only wanted her to explain to Pinkie why I couldn't attend all of her parties, but Mother and Father told Pinkie to stop having them, and then she left home. I blamed myself, but luckily, we were able to reconcile our relationship as sisters after I followed her to Ponyville and found that she had become a bakers' apprentice."

"That's a touching story," I said, dabbing my eyes with a convenient handkerchief. "But completely irrelevant to the situation with Anon."

"But I don't understand why a film about Pinkie's life wouldn't show any of that."

"It's not about Pinkie's life. It's about her adventures with her friends as a Bearer of Harmony. There are some flashbacks showing the childhoods of the Bearers, but each flashback is less than five minutes. You weren't in the one bit of Pinkie's childhood Anon has seen... so he didn't know you existed. And my guess is, he actively thought you didn't exist – that is, he had his own interpretation of what he'd seen that led to strong beliefs about what Pinkie's home life was like. And in that interpretation, your sisters' names were Inky and Blinkie, and you didn't exist."

"Why would a stranger have such strong opinions about something he knows nothing about?"

"To him, it was just a story. No one in the human world knows our world is real. You can have ideas about fictional stories, that's not – usually – a thing that hurts anyone or anything."

"I don't," Maud said.

"Don't what?"

"Have ideas about fictional stories. I am not very interested in fiction, personally. Pinkie loves it. She used to make up stories and play pretend all the time when we were fillies."

"Well, Anon may be the most boring human on his entire planet, but he manages to have more imagination than you, somehow. Unfortunately that imagination has led to some horrifying things, since he can impose his imagined ideas about what our world is like on our world, and no one knows he's doing it, even him." I scowled. "You got off easy. He thinks I'm some sort of irredeemable horrible villain, so he made the ponies I spent my childhood with think I'm a monster who ate their father."

"Why was I immune to this mind control? You seem to be saying that you and I are the only ones, but my parents and sisters are also aware that herding is a fad. You're a very powerful magical entity; we're only rock farmers. Explain this."

I ran a paw over my forehead. "I can't," I admitted. "Not exactly. I have hypotheses, though. Your family lives on a rock farm, right?"

"We are rock farmers. It should go without saying that we live on a rock farm."

Rock farming is not quite as ridiculous as it sounds. On our world, the magic that permeates the entire planet is found in rocks as well as in everything else, and in fact because of the ley lines that pull magic down under ground at the poles, where it then travels through the magma layer and spews out in volcanos, rock is generally thoroughly saturated with magic... which is held in a static form, because it's rock. Crystal releases the magic more easily, which is why it's the preferred food of dragons – they can't extract magic from regular rock through digestion nearly as easily – and why ponies and other magical sapients prefer to use crystals as a battery. Rock farmers have a talent for accessing the magic in the rock, though.

The process of rock farming adds dirt, which earth ponies in general can infuse with the life force needed to support plant life, to the rock, solidifies it into more rock, and at the same time draws magic out from the rock to bring it to the surface, making it easier to release. The result is a rock that radiates life force into the land it's deposited on. Unicorns who want to start a settlement somewhere without a substantial number of earth ponies, and earth ponies who want to have a settlement in an area where nothing should grow, such as a desert, buy rocks like this to support their farms and make sure there's enough circulating earth magic in the dirt that they can get good crops. Pegasi buy smaller ones for their cloud homes to make their houseplants and their aquaculture plants grow well.

The process is insanely boring, though. It involves a lot of digging for rocks and then rolling them around on the dirt, every day. Because all the life energy in the dirt is being redirected into the rocks, rock farms don't have anything green growing on them most of the time – a tree or two, maybe, but even grass dies on rock farms. So they're monotonous beyond belief to look at. Trixie, not being an earth pony, was probably employed either digging the rocks or breaking them, as especially large rocks need to be broken to make the magic at their centers more accessible. When earth ponies roll the rocks over the dirt, their natural earth magic draws life force out of the dirt and into the rock, but you need to have specialized talents and actual magical ability with your earth pony magic to be able to solidify the dirt and mud that the rocks collect into more rock. Pinkie didn't have this specific talent, which made her fairly incompetent at rock farming. Maud and the rest of her family, obviously, did.

Because rock stores and absorbs magic, it's a stabilizing force. The kind of pony that farms rocks now would have been the kind of pony, back in the days when the tribes warred with each other, who would have built cairns and fortresses that absorbed magic from the air, significantly weakening any unicorns in the area. I'd already guessed that the reason I had been immune to Anon's changes was that I'd been trapped as rock at the time, the same reason that I hadn't been able to wield any of my own magic – magic is absorbed by rock, and it can flow through rock but only in its purified form, absent of the intentional elements that make magic actually do things. Could being earth pony rock farmers, standing on the land of a rock farm, have surrounded the Pies with enough magic stabilization and protection that it had shielded them from Anon? "Were you on the rock farm at the time?"

"At what time?"

I sighed. "Were you aware of the royal wedding?"

"Pinkie wrote to say she would be part of it. That was her last letter to me before I confronted her and re-introduced myself."

"So, during the time period that she said she would be in a wedding, were you on the rock farm?"

"No." I know I'm getting repetitive here, but I'm falling asleep just trying to record what Maud said, because she didn't do anything but talk. No facial expressions. No change of tone. No body language. She could have been disembodied words on a typewriter and she would have conveyed just as much emotion. "I was inside the Canterhorn doing geologic assays on the cave system." Her voice perked up very, very slightly. "Did you know that the Canterhorn is one of the only places in Equestria where you can find all three major geologic categories together in significant quantities? There's igneous rock, which establishes the Canterhorn as an inactive volcano – either dormant or extinct, we're attempting to determine that by assaying enough rock to establish a time frame for the last eruption – and of course there's sedimentary rock, as you would find in any cave system, but there's also—"

"That's fascinating," I interrupted, yawning ostentatiously, "but let's stick to the subject, please. Were any of your classmates in the cave system with you?"

"No," Maud said, frowning very slightly. Or maybe I was imagining it. You know how if you stare at a blank wall for long enough you start seeing things on it? Actually, I don't, because I've never stared at a blank wall for more than a few seconds, tops, but I did spend a thousand years staring at literally nothing because I didn't have working eyes. Maud's face was almost more boring than having eyeballs made out of rock. Almost. "They were supposed to, but my partners decided that there was an event happening in Canterlot that was more interesting to them than our project, and they asked me to postpone and come with them. Technically speaking I was not supposed to be in the cave system by myself without backup, but I had Boulder, so I felt that I was safe to continue the project on my own."

"An event happening in Canterlot like a royal wedding?"

"I didn't pay sufficient attention when they told me. An event with ponies that doesn't involve my family can't possibly be more interesting than a cave exploration expedition."

"You do know that your sister was at that event, right?"

"Mmm." Maud's expression didn't change. "That hadn't occurred to me until you pointed it out just now."

And if she had attended, Anon would have known of her existence and Pinkie wouldn't have forgotten her, but if my theory was correct, she'd have been in complete approval of Pinkie's romantic life. It sounded as if she didn't have any strong disapproval of Anon anyway, just misgivings based on the fact that she thought herding was a fad rather than a permanent change to Equestrian society imposed by a reality warper. If Pinkie was genuinely polyamorous, she was quite possibly the only one of Anon's "herd" who wouldn't have needed to be mentally altered to accept and enjoy such a relationship. And if all she knew of Anon was Pinkie's glowing reports, of course she'd have no real reason to hate the guy. I aimed to change that.

The caves under the Canterhorn and the catacombs under Canterlot Palace might actually be the same thing; I don't care enough about caves to have ever bothered to explore either one. Catacombs are typically pony-made and caves are natural, but if I could trust the cartoon, the catacombs I'd seen in the show didn't look like they were made with any particular purpose... which meant they could be natural caves, or caves expanded by pony power.

Anon's magic sword had been in the catacombs within the Canterhorn. Maud had been immune to the changes he made, only a trot or so below him within the same mountain. This meant something, I felt sure, but I didn't know what. Was it a coincidence? Was it Maud's rock farming magic that had protected her, as it had protected her family? Or had her family been protected by the rocks on their property, and Maud by the Canterhorn, somehow?

Trixie had been on the rock farm at some point. I decided I needed to ask her exactly when. If she'd been on the rock farm when Anon's changes had happened, she might have been immune to them too... a hypothesis I'd have rejected out of hand before I'd seen the rest of the cartoon and realized that Trixie really was that narcissistic and ridiculous that she'd been obsessed with revenge on Twilight without Anon's influence. The trouble would be getting a straight answer out of her about what she thought and felt in the past. Trixie was now protected by the Element of Deception, and would remember the way Equestria used to be, but could I trust her to remember what she thought before I gave her the Element, or would she just make things up to match what she now knew to be true to make herself look less fallible?

Reluctantly, I decided the latter was probably true. I could question Trixie but I probably wouldn't get a useful answer. If she did, miraculously, confirm that she was affected by Anon in the past, then I'd know it was rock farmer magic and the Canterhorn was irrelevant. If she claimed that she'd always known that herding was a new thing and that mares she knew used to be stallions... that wouldn't prove anything because she could be making it up to make herself look better.

Lest you think this sounds like I was succumbing to analysis paralysis, chasing my own tail with little Twilight Sparkles dancing around in my eyes, I didn't carefully think any of this through; it just all came to me as Maud told her story. I don't know whether it's my affinity for chaos or natural superior intelligence, but generally speaking, I don't need to analyze anything because the implications and ramifications just appear obvious to me. (The disadvantage, of course, is that when they don't just pop into my head, I have difficulty getting to them by thinking things through long-ways.)

Sooner or later I was going to have to explore those catacombs, maybe the entire cave system. I made a face. I wasn't looking forward to that. I haven't been too thrilled with caves ever since Tia, Luna and I went exploring some in the area that is now the Everfree and found it full of draconequus skeletons, who'd died huddling together for warmth as the world froze. There are no more random draconequus skeletons in caves anymore, thanks to moi, but that is the kind of experience that leaves a mark on an impressionable young mind.

I decided it was time to wind this up. Maud was entirely too boring for me to spend very much time with. "So. Does this answer all your questions?"

"Not entirely. How do I make Pinkie remember me again?"

I had to shrug at that. "I have no idea. You say she can identify you now as her sister, and she writes to you, but you think she may have lost the memories of the two of you as foals?"

"I don't know which memories she's lost, but she has forgotten things. Our tradition of exchanging rock candy, for example. Any time that I tell her about a thing she shouldn't have forgotten, she claims either that she just forgot, that she knew but she was testing me, or that it's a joke and she was pretending to forget, but I know that all of these behaviors are abnormal."

"The only way I can think of to make sure Pinkie gets her memories back is to defeat Anon," I said. "We need to show Pinkie and the others what he truly is."

"Which is what, exactly?"

"A person who alters reality to meet his whims. A person who can make a pony forget their beloved sister because he has strong opinions about what her family is like." I shook my head. "He's not good, or kind, or loving. He's an utterly selfish idiot and the last I checked, he was making Pinkie miserable because she was convinced that he didn't really love her." I wasn't going to tell Maud that it was actually my minion Diamond Tiara who set off that bomb.

"If he were to cease to exist, would Pinkie get her memories back?"

I entertained a brief, lovely fantasy of earth pony strength pummeling Anon into bone jelly, but reluctantly dismissed it. "Most likely, but unfortunately, it'll be more difficult than you might think to make that happen. His powers protect him. If you attempt to kill him, his powers will probably brainwash you into thinking you're brainwashed into hating him, so he can be a big hero and free Pinkie's sister from some magical malign influence, and then you'll end up one of his best friends."

"All of that seems implausible."

I shrugged. "I'm not telling you not to try it. Go ahead, see how far you get. If I'm wrong, I'd be delighted."

"If he dies, and it does not immediately make the mind control go away, Pinkie would be heartbroken. So that isn't a good solution regardless of whether it can be accomplished or not."

"There is that." I coiled up into an upright position. "Well, this has been loads of fun, but I'm afraid I must take my leave of you now."

"You intend to kill Anon, don't you?" I think that had a question mark after it.

"If that's what it takes to free the world from what he's done."

"You can do what you want with Anon. But if you do anything that causes any harm or even distress to my sister, I will hunt you down, tear off your antlers and poke out your eyeballs with them."

This hyperbolic threat was said in the same even, flat tone that Maud had said everything else in, and despite myself, I shivered. An earth pony was no serious threat to me, but the fact that Maud said it so calmly... that was terrifying, no matter how well I understood that Maud was no match for me. I felt like she genuinely meant it.

But I couldn't let her think she'd genuinely gotten me, so I said, "You mean like this?", removed my own antler and horn, and poked them into my eyes, removing the eyes and then toasting them like marshmallows over a small flame.

"Yes," Maud said, "but with less chaos magic involved."

Having regenerated my eyes, I summoned up graham crackers and chocolate. "Smores?" I asked, offering her one of my toasted eyeballs.

"No thank you. I am not fond of sweets."

I popped the impromptu Smore into my mouth. "You're missing out," I said, and teleported.

***

I wanted to go check up on Trixie, both because what she was doing was hilarious, and because I wanted to ask her about what she'd believed about the world before I gave her the Element of Deception, but I knew I had to go have a conversation with Starflame and Ember first.

They were staying in the palace; Celestia actually had rooms that could accommodate a dragon Starflame's size, though Torch would be out of the question. Starflame hissed at me, and Ember snarled, "Chaos Lord! I noticed you conveniently left out that you could have told Anon that Faith was a child, and you never did!"

I tried to say that I tried, but of course it came out wrong. "Why did Anon need to be told not to murder an intelligent being?"

"He thought he was defending slaves from a tyrant, and he thought that Faith was a free dragon who chose to help that tyrant. What would you expect a warrior to have done?"

"Excuse me?" I goggled at her. "You're making excuses for a dragonslayer? What kind of dragon are you?"

Ember scowled. "I can be fair and evaluate the evidence," she said.

"Well." I landed in front of her. "I was there, Ember. She was down. Injured. Out of the fight. He didn't need to keep going."

"He was raised in a society where dragons are seen as monsters—"

This was serious. A dragon, of all creatures, empathizing. With a dragonslayer, no less. I leaned into her face. "Do you want me to show you?"

I couldn't travel in time right now – Anon's powers locking down dimensional travel applies to the fourth dimension as well. But I could still summon up images from the past. So I did.

Ember and Starflame both watched, fire literally rising in their eyes, as Anon brought Faith down and then kept hacking at her when she could no longer fly, and then when she could no longer walk, and finally he put his sword through her scales and ribs into her heart.

All the empathy for Anon had fled the room.

"We should present this as evidence," Ember said coldly. "This human needs to be brought to dragon justice. Even if he didn't know she was a child, there is no possible reason why he should be allowed to live."

"Yes, but how would we do that?" Starflame asked. "We can't present evidence that was shown to us by Discord; they'll just claim it was made up to discredit Anon."

"Which is a good point." Ember glared at me. "We know Anon is your enemy and you want to destroy him. How do I know you didn't make up this horrible incident just to make us want to kill him?"

"I suppose you don't," I said, "but do I look like the kind of creature with a sufficiently horrid and yet mundane enough imagination to construct a scenario like that?" It's not as if I haven't dreamed up some absolutely awful things; I spent a significant portion of my time in stone imagining various apocalypses to wipe out all of ponykind. But they were things like killer tomatoes rolling over them and eating them, sentient shower curtains rising up to tangle around ponies and suffocate them, giant spiders spinning webs of fire, gravity spontaneously ceasing to work and all the ponies falling into space... nothing as mundane as anyone hacking at anyone else with a sword.

"I mean, you look like a ridiculous goofball that nodrake should take seriously," Ember said, "but you wiped out the dragons of Neighropa two thousand years ago. So I don't think what you look like is important here."

"The pattern of her injuries was consistent with what Discord has shown us," Starflame said. "While he may have motive to lie, I don't see any evidence that contradicts what we just saw."

"Huh. Well, then, that's what we can say. You did a forensic analysis of Faith's body and then we present what Discord showed us the human did to her as something we figured out from her injuries."

"That sounds like a marvelous plan," I said. "You ladies go to it!"

And now I was going to get to go check up on Trixie.