The Rise Of Chaos (Patreon)

Discord slithered along the ceiling. Re-pointering gravity had been one of the first things he’d ever learned to do with his magic, and he still liked to do it fairly often. Beneath him, Luna was questioning Celestia. “Do you really trust them? After what they did to Father?”

Celestia winced. “Nothing will ever change what they did to Father,” she said. “But we’ve been trying to get them to make peace for how long now? Sooner or later it had to happen.”

“But still. The dragons are proud. The idea that they are willing to make peace, now, after so many years of war—”

“Luna, I know about you and Discord and your Cry Havoc operation.” Luna went still. Discord’s ears perked, and he dangled his head, the better to hear and see, albeit upside down. “I don’t know why you wanted to hide it from me. I trust both of you to do what’s needed to help protect Equestria, and psychological warfare to break their wills so they no longer want to fight us will save not only countless ponies, but dragons as well. Why are you so sure it couldn’t have worked?”

“Because she’s actually been fighting the dragons, and has a better idea of where they really stand than you do?” Discord interjected, dropping from the ceiling. Sadly, he’d pulled this stunt often enough that neither sister was actually startled. “Yes, Luna and I have been trying to break their resistance by breaking their minds – her with nightmares, me with chaos – and it… doesn’t really seem to be working. They’re paranoid, they’re frightened, but they’ve shown no sign to me that they’re on the verge of surrender.”

“It’s a cease-fire, not a surrender,” Celestia said.

“You don’t think enough like dragons. They absolutely would consider it a surrender to declare a cease-fire with ponies.”

“That’s what I was trying to say,” Luna said. “They say they want to negotiate for peace, but how do we know it’s not a trap?”

“We don’t,” Celestia said, “but we don’t have much of a choice.” She reached up with one hoof to touch Discord’s cheek. “Discord, I’m doing this for you. I know what this war is doing to you.”

He flushed with shame, anger… and a tiny thrill that she cared, that she noticed. 

Discord was easily the most powerful mage in Equestria. Draconequui had had special talents, too, for all that they didn’t show them off on their flanks, and his was for chaos… which made him a master of chaos magic, the rawest, most powerful and most uncontrollable form of magic anypony had ever heard of. He was used to levels of power that could dwarf even Starswirl, generally considered to be the most powerful mage from the most powerfully magical species on the planet. But he was still a mortal draconequus; he had limits, and his sanity was fraying under the burden of the power he’d been wielding.

Celestia was most worried about the obvious psychotic fugues, the times he returned from battle raving that the world was a soap bubble or that reality was a shadow play that mysterious watchers from above were controlling or that all the angles were wrong and needed to bend a different way. Discord himself wasn’t worried about those episodes. The fact that he could come back from them told him they were more like the fainting spells ponies who overused their magic suffered from, not a thing that would permanently damage him.

No. It was the things he’d done, the things that haunted him – not just because they were so horrifying, but because of what he’d thought and felt when he’d done them. He remembered juggling dragon eggs to enrage them, a huge grin on his face, and when they hadn’t taken his bait, he’d made their eggs rain from the sky, unborn children exploding as they struck the ground, and he’d laughed at how silly they’d looked, covered in splattered egg. He remembered trying to negotiate the release of a city in Marelantis, and when the dragons refused to give ground, he’d sunk the whole thing beneath the waves… and he’d turned the ponies to seaponies, but he’d forgotten to do that for any other species. He who wasn’t a pony had forgotten that anything other than ponies was worth saving. Cats, dogs, bunny rabbits… donkeys, goats, cows… all drowned. He remembered the vindictive delight he’d felt, watching the dragons slamming all their strength against the transparent impassable wall he’d made out of the sky where it touched the sea, trying and failing to break free, and how he’d laughed at the expressions on their faces when they’d drowned.

He didn’t want to be that creature. Chaos was beauty, creativity, fun. It wasn’t supposed to be mirthful rage and delight in wanton destruction. That was part of chaos, but not his chaos. That wasn’t who he wanted to be. But when the power was raging through him and he was channeling it against enemies he wanted to kill – or even enemies whose minds he wanted to break, the plan he and Luna had devised – it happened more and more often that he couldn’t remember why he didn’t want to kill, why he didn’t want to take unholy joy in the dragons’ terror and madness. That was what scared him.

He didn’t want to have limits. He didn’t want to have to worry about his power eating away at his morality and compassion -- never his strongest traits to begin with. He wanted to protect Celestia and Luna, and to a somewhat lesser extent their country, without ever concerning himself with the amount of chaos he was wielding. But he couldn’t deny what was happening to him.

“I can manage,” he said, roughly, because he was lying.

“But this war needs to end. Even aside from what it’s doing to Discord, ponies are dying. If the dragons come and say ‘we want to end this, we want peace’, and I say no… what kind of monster would I be? I have to accept the meeting and try to negotiate a peace settlement.”

“And if it’s an ambush—”

“We’ll have Discord with us, and General Swift Strike, and an honor guard… and I am not weak with magic, myself.” In fact, Celestia was the second most powerful unicorn in Equestria. “Besides. I’ve had a dream.”

Luna perked up. Despite her being a pegasus, she’d manifested a powerful magical talent for dream magic, and a cutie mark of the moon and stars to match. “An Apollonian dream?”

“I think so.” The Gift of Apollo, named for a legendary and probably fictional alicorn who’d borne the sun all on his own, was a prophetic gift that appeared in sun-affiliated unicorns, once every hundred years or so. Celestia had dreamed of Luna’s birth, her mother’s death, her first time meeting Discord, her father’s death, and many more trivial events. She couldn’t see everything – the dreams came at random, and they were often hard to interpret, full of strange symbolism. But when they occurred, Celestia put great faith in them. “I saw us at the meeting, and the dragons gave Discord a gift. I didn’t see what it was, but I saw his face – enraptured. Whatever the gift was, it was something he thought beautiful. And then the sun rose, and filled the world with beautiful white light.”

“I saw that,” Luna said, sounding troubled. “Are you sure that was an Apollonian dream?”

“I had it before the dragons sued for peace, so yes, I’m sure.”

“Oh, a gift?” Discord said. “Hmm. Well, I still don’t trust the dragons, but now I’m eager to see what they want to give me.”

Luna gave him a look, before turning to Celestia again. “Sister… light isn’t always a good thing. I saw that dream in your mind, but… to me it felt foreboding.”

“I don’t think my mind would use beautiful bright light as a symbol of anything bad, Luna,” Celestia said lightly. “Now, if it had been your dream… we all know how much you fear the Daystar.” She said the last in an overly pompous and formal tone as if they were watching a melodramatic play.

Luna snorted. “Just because I don’t like my eyeballs baked from the inside out,” she said. “But… I suppose you’re right… you have very different associations with light than I do.” Celestia’s cutie mark was a sun symbol, because her special talent had to do with raising the sun. Obviously she couldn’t do it by herself, no unicorn could, but she could do it with as few as 6 other unicorns backing her up if she strained herself, and with 9 it was effortless for her. Since it normally had taken 12 unicorns to raise the sun before Celestia had been born, and it had been a terrible strain on them that could burn them out within a year, her talent was enormously helpful. It also meant that Celestia always had a sense of where the sun was, and a perfect sense of time, and seemed to be immune to sunburn and the blinding effects of bright light. So of course for her, light had no downsides.

Discord didn’t have an opinion about light one way or the other, except to find it irritating that ponies in general kept forgetting that light could signify terrible things. “You know, fire is also very bright,” he pointed out.

“It was a white light. Pure, like the sun. Maybe even purer, considering that the sun is yellow.”

He turned to Luna. “But when you saw her dream, you thought it was something bad?”

Luna hesitated, and then said, “I saw the same dream through the sleep of a dragon, only a few nights ago.”

“Dragons have the gift of Apollo?” Celestia asked, startled.

“Maybe. I just… dragons are proud, and as Discord said, they’d think of a cease-fire as a surrender. Why would they perceive the light as something good? But they did. The dreamer saw the light and was satisfied and… happy, I suppose, inasmuch as dragons are happy. Ferociously happy.”

“Well, then I have a solution.” Discord began petting Luna’s mane, like she was a cat, knowing perfectly well that she found that irritating.

She pulled away from him with a somewhat hostile snort. “Stop that. If you have an idea, tell us!”

“You stay home.”

Luna glared at Discord. “I will not!”

“It… might be best, Luna,” Celestia said. “If it is a trap… they’re less likely to spring it if they know you’d live to avenge me. The missive they sent made it clear that it’s you and Discord they respect, not me or the army.”

“No!” Luna snapped. “I won’t be left behind, like a child!”

“It wouldn’t be like a child, it would be like my heir!” Celestia snapped back. “If you turn out to be right and it is a trap, do you really want Golden Blood taking the throne?”

Discord winced at that. Golden Blood was their uncle on their father’s side, and next in the line of succession since neither Celestia or Luna had children, and he was an idiot. The kind of noble who was more concerned with getting his due respect than getting results. But Luna shook her head. “If you are certain the dragons are sincere in suing for peace, you know well that they asked for Discord and me to be there for a reason, and the reason is, we are the ones who brought them to it. Your peace talks will fail if I’m not there.”

“I’ll be there,” Discord said.

“Yes, and they respect you for your power and because you are part dragon.” This wasn’t technically true; dragons had initially treated him with almost as much contempt as they did ponies, and didn’t seem to consider draconequui to be sufficiently draconic by their standards. They respected him now, because he’d killed as many of them as the entire Equestrian army put together, and drove many others to madness with Luna’s help. “But I am a pony, and a Crown Princess.” This wasn’t technically true either, since Celestia had refused to be coronated with the rank of Queen, meaning she was still the Crown Princess. But it was true that she ruled Equestria and that Luna was her heir, which… sort of made Luna the Crown Princess anyway. Royal ranks were complicated and absurd anyway, and not in a good way. “You can’t negotiate a peace treaty for Equestria. I can.”

“I can also,” Celestia said in a measured voice that, to those who knew her well, indicated she was irritated.

“Nah, they think you’re chopped liver,” Discord said. He sighed. “Hate to say it, but I think Luna’s right. If you want to take this peace offer seriously, we do all have to go.”

And he would spend the next two nights before the summit meeting creating magical weapons that he could summon into place the moment it looked like anything was going wrong, and he’d make a door he could teleport Celestia, Luna, the general and the honor guard through at the slightest wrong move by the dragons, so he’d be free to go all out against them. 

He’d vowed to King Starfire, who’d been the closest thing he’d had to a father, that he would protect Celestia and Luna. Starfire had been devoured by the dragons. Discord would give his life – or his sanity – to keep the same fate from befalling his beloved Celestia and his sister-of-heart Luna.