I usually have a summer-long fic that I work on, but I've been so busy and haven't really had any real inspiration. But you know, sometimes all you need for fic inspiration is the sudden desire to rewatch clips of your favorite My Little Pony villain and voila.

This story is going to be built out of oneshots of his inside thoughts while he is imprisoned in stone (the second time, after The Return of Harmony) concerning a variety of topics, such as boredom, color, Celestia, Twilight Sparkle…he's got plenty of time to think.

Black

Black is boring.

I hear that, for many creatures on this world, particularly the dull and uptight ones enslaved by concepts such as "harmony", "serenity", and "order," they see black when they close their eyes. So humdrum! So mundane! And those ponies pretend that they are beacons of creativity? Hah! HahaHAH I say to that, my little equine friends! You poor, docile creatures of simple thoughts and ideas. How I pity those who see black when they close their eyes.

Me? Never.

Want to know what I see when I close my eyes?

When I close my eyes, I see light. I see a kaleidoscope of colors and shapes, twisted and swirling, mangled and crooked, flashing this way and that with the images that make my immortal life worthwhile—pink skies, candy rain, burning ice and frozen fire, everything wrong, everything wonderful. Images that last a moment or less before the next bursts into sight, one after another, like firecrackers exploding with BAM BAM BAM, and words spill over…excitement, evil, confusion, pleasure, anarchy, chaos, beauty, in red, blue, yellow, and even colors no one has bothered to name yet, all mixing together until you can't tell one from the other. My mind spins. It can never stop. Why would I want it to? I see the desolation of raging fiery war. I hear the screams of the ponies that defy me, I feel the fear of the princesses that imprisoned me, I taste the humiliation of the friends that defeated me. When I close my eyes, I see my glory. I see power. I see discord.

Neat, eh?

Yes, as it turns out, being imprisoned in stone—my current state, as fate (or a couple of meddling ponies, one of which had such potential…) would have it—means my eyes are forever closed. The difference, of course, is that they can never open. Everything I see is just my mind. Those firecrackers explode and my thoughts run rampant, but a part of me—a part of me that another small part of me wishes would just shut up and choke on some poison purple polka-dot kumquats so I could at least pretend—knows that those thoughts can't come true as long as I'm in this state of solidity. I can't so much as wiggle my pinkie claw right now, and my pinkie claw is one of my most destructive of commodities.

But then, every so once in a while, there are…moments.

I don't like to think about them. I would never admit to them scaring me, nothing scares me. I'm Discord, I scare everything else! And yet those moments…they're brief, brief enough that at first I didn't even notice them, but as time went on and still I didn't have anything to entertain me except my own mind they began to eat at me. I don't know why. I haven't changed. The kaleidoscope twists on, relishing me with my deepest of hopes and dreams: Equestria under my unquestioned and absolute rule, consumed in mayhem and free for me to distort in any way that I desire. But in those moments, my power is gone. I've lost my control and everything falls away from me. The fear is all consuming. That void. That emptiness. I have no ideas and no tricks, not even a silly joke to defend myself. I am vulnerable. Never am I as vulnerable as I am in those moments. They're so short I want to slap myself for fearing them, despite the obvious difficulty. Nothing so small should bring somepony as powerful as me so low, but they do. They do, and they'll haunt me until I'm finally released.

For you see, in those moments…

I see black.