The Elements of Magic Chp. 2 partial (Patreon)

“Thank you for coming so quickly,” Queen Twilight said. Her long, flowing mane, usually smooth and fluid, had frazzled parts sticking out of it, particularly on top of her head. Celestia hadn’t even known Queen Twilight’s mane could do that.

Discord bowed, holding a rose that hadn’t been there a moment ago. “We are at your service, Your Majesty,” he said, practically purring it.

“It’s no problem, Your Majesty, we wanna stop this craziness with the plants as much as you do!” Greenie declared.

“King Thorax wanted me to tell you that the Badlands are being affected as well; there’s a huge hurricane-like storm system above our hive, and massive overgrowth of plants everywhere,” Chrysalis said.

Queen Twilight nodded. “I thought that might be the case. I’m expecting that everywhere in Equestria will be affected, but the closer to the Everfree, the more intense the effects become. At least, the nature effects. I strongly expect that the storms will appear over places where storms of that type almost never appear, because she’ll be showing off her power and seeking out challenges.”

“She?” Sombra and Tirek said at the same time, while Celestia herself said, “Queen Twilight, you know who’s doing this?”

“Sadly, yes, I do,” she said. “There are two of them, actually. Nowadays they call themselves Sylvan, the Spirit of Nature, and the Storm Queen, alicorn of weather.”

“Two of them?” Greenie scowled. “That’s darn surprising.”

“Yes,” Luna said. “We’re learning in Ancient History that most opponents of Equestria have typically not known the magic of friendship. Even Queen Rarity as the Diamond Queen had a consort, and she was mind-controlling him to make him obey her… not exactly friendly.”

“I know,” Twilight said. “One of the reasons Sylvan and the Storm Queen are so very dangerous is that they are best friends. They’re not evil, either of them. Not even to the degree of the Diamond Queen; the Diamond Queen was Rarity’s greatest desires, corrupted and turned cruel. Sylvan doesn’t want to harm ponies, but she wants us to exist in harmony with nature—”

“But don’t we exist in harmony with nature already?” Celestia asked, puzzled.

“Yeah, last I checked, farmers like my family are all about nature,” Greenie said.

“No,” Tirek said. “You only know nature as it appears in Equestria and its nearest environs. Outside the range of pony influence… in my homeland, and many other places, storms rage wild, and it’s all we can do to predict them. Controlling them? Out of the question. Fierce animals who prey on any creature they can find roam everywhere, not just one single forest. Prey animals will just as soon gore or trample or bite you, for they consider every creature that’s not one of their own kind to be a potential danger.”

Sombra nodded. “And the Umbrum come from the lands around the Crystal Empire, outside the range of their magic. Up there, it’s cold and vicious. Every animal is for itself. I was surprised when I came down to Equestria that you ponies have to manage nature itself – help birds find food in the springtime, wake animals from hibernation, that sort of thing. Nothing like that happens in my homeland.”

“Just like the Everfree,” Discord said. “Somehow I always suspected that Equestria’s harmony was an aberration and the natural state of the world is chaos.” He stuck his tongue out at Sombra. 

Sombra rolled his eyes. “Yes, of course the natural state of the world is chaos. The natural state of everything is chaos. Order is all about imposing structures that allow people to survive and thrive, eliminating the natural chaos to create law and civilization.”

“And Sylvan’s belief is that we ponies have gone far too far in the direction of order,” Queen Twilight said. “That what we have is not harmony, but rigid control. She was banished to the Everfree a few hundred years ago—”

“Oh!” Starswirl practically bounced in place, his favorite floppy hat flopping over his eyes. “I get it! So that’s why the Everfree is always wild and you can’t control it!”

“Right,” Queen Twilight said, smiling down at him. “The Everfree storms are under the control of the Storm Queen, and while she delights in creating terrifying weather systems that only she can control, she generally follows Sylvan’s lead and lets nature create the weather. Ordinary pegasi don’t have nearly enough magic to push back against her.”

“The Everfree seems a strange place to banish someone, though,” Luna said. “Because we can just walk into the Everfree when we want, so why couldn’t they just walk out? And why has no one seen them?”

”I used to live there,” Discord said. “I never saw a couple of alicorns running around.”

“Sylvan is not… exactly… an alicorn. Nature magic is chaotic. She’s not quite as unusual in appearance as a draconequus, but she definitely shows aspects of being a chaos mage.”

“Hmm,” Discord said, rubbing his hands together. “That sounds very interesting.”

“She is an enemy of Equestria. Not a potential girlfriend,” Tirek sneered. 

“I’ll bet she’s better looking than you,” Discord retorted.

“That’s not what you used to say.”

“Before you betrayed me, you mean?”

Celestia magicked both their snouts closed with her telekinesis. It didn’t last – Tirek consumed the magic and Discord used chaos to dispel it – but it lasted long enough for her to say, “Enough, both of you. Queen Twilight is briefing us.”

“How did they get out of their banishment, then?” Sombra asked.

“I banished them originally with… different tools. Not the Elements of Magic. At one point we had a different set of magical tools, the Elements of Harmony. But… for reasons… banishing them with the Elements of Harmony broke the Elements of Harmony. Possibly forever.” Queen Twilight sighed. “So I have been working for a very long time on creating the Elements of Magic, because I knew we would need something when the Diamond Queen reappeared. And as soon as you purged the corruption and turned her into Queen Rarity again… the bindings holding Sylvan and the Storm Queen in the Everfree began to fail.”

“So this was inevitable,” Luna said somberly.

“If it was inevitable, how come you’re just telling us about it now? No offense, Your Majesty, but it’d have been durned helpful for my family to know this might happen,” Greenie said.

“I was hoping that they would come to me first, to negotiate,” Queen Twilight said. “They knew I never wanted to banish them; they knew I wanted to try to negotiate with them, to find some compromise where we can all get some of what we want.” She sighed. “We were friends once,” she said, and it was almost a whisper. “I thought maybe that would mean something.”

“You were friends?” Celestia asked, gently. She knew what it was like to lose friends. It was terrible.

Queen Twilight drew a deep breath. “That was a long time ago. Let’s focus on right now.” She strode over to a vault door, and placed her horn in the lock. “I’m sorry to say that we may have to banish them again, if they insist on destroying Equestria as it is without any regard for the lives and livelihoods of ponies.” The door slid open. “I’d rather not, if we can talk to them, but it if comes to it, I’m sure you can use these to banish them back—”

She stared into her vault. An absurdly large number of rats stared back.

Greenie shrieked, and Luna took to the air. Celestia shielded herself instinctively, and Starswirl jumped onto her back with a cry of his own. Tirek backed up frantically. The rats squeaked in equal fear, and streamed out of the vault, some of them stuffing themselves rapidly through a hole in the wall at the bottom of the vault, the others racing forward and escaping into Queen Twilight’s audience room.

Discord snapped his fingers, and turned one rat into a balloon, but before he could do it to any others, Queen Twilight shook her head. “No. We won’t harm them. They’re innocent animals.” Sombra pulled back his own attack, where he’d been about to fire crystals into them. The Queen lifted rats in her telekinesis. There must have been dozens of them. She strode out of the audience room, dozens of rats squeaking around her head, including the one who had been a balloon until Discord undid his spell. She put them all back in the vault and closed the door.

“What happened to the Elements?” Chryssy demanded.

“Sylvan has them, almost certainly,” Queen Twilight said grimly. “She can control animals to do her bidding, as easily as she can force plants to grow.”

“I prefer to think of it as ‘persuading’ them,” a beautiful soft voice said.

Queen Twilight took a step back. “How – we were teleport-shielded!”

“You always relied too much on magic to solve your problems, Twilight,” the… being… in the doorway said. “I came in on your stargazing and sun-raising balcony. None of your pegasus guards are currently airborne, and the ones in the hallway were… persuadable.” 

She wasn’t, exactly, an alicorn. It was honestly impossible to tell what she was. In face and in the front, she was clearly an alicorn pony, of similar age and strength to Queen Twilight – she was taller, but also thinner and more delicate-seeming. She had a golden, shimmering coat and a mane like Queen Twilight, that flowed and moved of its own accord. It was pink, but greenery grew in it – occasional vines, some flowers, sometimes a branch covered with leaves. As she walked forward and the rest of her body came out of the doorway’s shadow, though, her strangeness became apparent.

To begin with, she had three pairs of wings – delicate butterfly wings in many colors, pink pegasus wings, and bat wings in a dark pink that was almost purple. Her body was much longer than a pony’s, to accommodate the extra wings; her barrel was as thick as the Queen’s, relatively speaking and accounting for the fact that she was overall thinner, but somewhat snaky and reminiscent of Discord’s. Like any other pony, she had four hooves. Unlike any other pony, she had a lion tail.

She should have looked freakish, but despite her strange body, she was incredibly graceful. Her steps were soft, as if her hooves were sinking into forest loam instead of clopping against the polished stone floor. Air flowed around her as her butterfly wings beat gently, even as the other two pairs lay still on her back.

“Whoa,” Discord whispered, maybe just a little too loudly. Hearts glittered in his eyes, and his pupils were suddenly ridiculously large, like a Neighponese artistic depiction of a teenage filly seeing a handsome stallion.

Celestia stepped on his foot. The dragon foot – it was more resistant to pain and also bigger and easier to step on. “Discord! This is our opponent!” she hissed. “Be professional!”

Queen Twilight started to say, “Fl—”

“Sylvan,” the strange pony-like mare corrected her. “No other name. Not anymore.”

“Sylvan,” the Queen repeated. “Why did you attack out of nowhere? Why not come to me and discuss things first?”

Sylvan wound her way around Queen Twilight, pacing in circles. Her lion tail swished, making her look like a predator. “Discuss what? Didn’t we discuss everything there was to discuss the last time? Before you locked Storm and me into the trees and the winds of the forest?” She tilted her head, looking into the Queen’s eyes with her own large, sad pools of blue. “I didn’t like not having a body anymore,” she said softly. “Not to eat, to breathe, to touch my animals unless they choose to climb me…”

“You used to say a long time ago that you’d like to be a tree,” the Queen said. “I never wanted to banish you and seal you away in the first place, but if I had to do it, I thought sealing you into the trees would be the most… kind thing to do.”

As the Queen spoke, Sombra and Tirek looked at each other, and nodded solemnly. Celestia caught it, and nudged Luna, who tapped Greenie with a wing, and Discord, who was not paying attention, his eyes fixated on the Spirit of Nature. Chrysalis met Celestia’s eyes and did a slow blink, a trick she’d picked up from impersonating cats, to the best of Celestia’s knowledge.

Without any further warning, Sombra and Celestia both fired at the Spirit of Nature, Sombra’s horn emitting a beam of darkness that solidified into black crystals when it struck a target, and Celestia’s firing a beam of raw solar energy.