Loose Ends

Disclaimer: In case you haven't figured it out yet, I don't own My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. All MLP-related characters, settings, etc. are the intellectual property of Lauren Faust and Hasbro.

[-]

Princess Celestia was pacing.

In-and-of-itself, this was not unusual – she had long since accepted that the price to pay for the constant cheeriness and serenity she wished to affect to her subjects was a certain brooding pensiveness that she would need to shift to in her private quarters, whensoever the pressures of overseeing a kingdom by herself for a full millennium grew overwhelming. She was the one who needed to make the hard choices, to bear the burdens she could not risk being foisted upon the rest of Equestria.

The sole exception she had ever made to that edict, across all the years of her long and solemn monarchy, had been those six; those wondrous, wondrous young mares whose nascent bonds of friendship had proven enough to do what she could not, and purify Luna from the corruptive influence of chaos and disharmony.

So it had been logical, had it not, to task them with the eradication of that influence's propagator, when he had so recently reared his misshapen head once again? After all, individually or in concert, each of those little ponies had worked miracles for their kingdom – placating the rampage of an Ursa Minor, ridding Ponyville of a full-scale Parasprite invasion, and even cowing an adult dragon into abandoning his roost for the good of the surrounding land. Discord was, admittedly, quite a bit more powerful and overtly malicious than any of these beings, but even so…

Celestia continued to pace.

"They should really have been back by now," she mused to herself worriedly. "Or at the very least, I should've heard something…"

Guilty conscience, eh Celestia? I don't blame you.

"Really, Discord, this is becoming quite tiresome," she snapped. "I never would have pegged you as the type to repeat a joke twice."

That did it. A loud snapping sound and a flash of bright light, and the Chaos God himself was floating in the middle of her throne room, leaning casually against a statue and polishing an apple against his beard.

"Trying to accuse me of being boring, my dear?" he asked, chuckling low. "Now isn't that just the pot calling the kettle black."

"Just cut to the chase, Discord," the Princess responded angrily. "What have you done to Twilight and the others?"

"What else? I played a game with them," he stated simply. "It's really all young Twilight Sparkle's fault, you know – I can hardly see why anypony would've jumped to the conclusion that I'd hidden the Elements in the labyrinth. 'Back where you began' indeed…she's never even been inside that hedge-maze before today!"

Discord took a moment here to indulge in a loud, throaty laugh, which only deepened Celestia's scowl. "She's a thousand times the mage you or I will ever be, Discord," she told him, standing high. "Whatever you've done, she and her friends will find a way to defeat it."

"Oh, I hardly think I can agree," said Discord, popping over to the stoic Princess and stroking her cheek. "Remember that nifty little spell I used on your sister? I find it hard to believe that you'd have forgotten."

"…What about it?" Celestia demanded tensely, her worst suspicions rising up.

"Think a low-key version…at least for now, anyway," he explained with a snicker. "Though I've got high hopes for that 'Fluttershy' girl – she's practically a miniature me already! Give her a few years and we may just have another Nightmare Moon after all. Or whatever the appropriate name would be…Nightmare Shy? No, that just sounds silly…"

A chill ran down the regal alicorn's spine, though she tried not to show it; nevertheless, this was not news she'd been anticipating. So far as she had been able to piece together in the intervening millennium, the spell in question was one of Discord's great exclusive powers: a curse that reversed a pony's most ascendant virtuous trait, turning them into their very own shattered reflection. Casting it upon Luna had been the Chaos God's last known act before his first imprisonment, and unbeknownst to either of them it had begun to twist her love for her older sister into bitter resentment and jealousy, festering under the surface for years until…

"You won't win!" she shouted, bringing down her hoof in denial over what she was now imagining. "The Elements of Harmony…"

"…Were useless," Discord cut in, his eyebrows raised in amusement. "I'm not sure why Twilight was so surprised, honestly. A liar, a grump, a hoarder, a brute, and a baby dragon subbing for a traitorous pegasus don't exactly fit the job description."

Celestia merely stared back with an expression of tranquil fury, momentarily struck dumb by the mad creature's words. Taking advantage of her silence, Discord began to rapidly teleport throughout the chamber, taking a bite out of his apple with each flash. Chewing noisily, he eventually sprawled himself across the Princess' haunches and added, "Oh, and as for your precious little apprentice herself? You might want to try and get in touch with her before she leaves Ponyville for good in…oh, an hour or so. Give or take; traffic's simply brutal right now."

"You…you can't! I refuse to believe it!" Celestia exclaimed, attempting to use her wings to buck off the malevolent trickster. He, however, merely snapped his fingers and reappeared in front of her, spearing his now-consumed apple core onto her horn and winking. Grunting angrily, she used her magical aura to vaporize the core, wishing oh-so-desperately that she was powerful enough to do the same to the figure before her.

"Oh come now, Celestia…your inability to accept simple statements of reality stopped being endearing an eon ago," Discord lectured, his lion-finger waggling as if scolding a small child. "But here, if you won't take my word for it…"

Then, grasping the alicorn around the neck, the Chaos God snapped again, and now they were looking over the road between Canterlot and Ponyville, the pandemonium running rampant all around the town rendered in a low-blue filter. But despite the discoloration, it was still impossible not to recognize that Twilight Sparkle's lavender coat had lost a good deal of its sheen as she shambled aimlessly down the street, her head hung low in abject defeat.

"Ooh, and here comes the best part!" Discord cried gleefully. "Enter moi, stage right!"

And indeed, Princess Celestia was forced to watch in stunned disbelief as the draconequus mirthfully demonstrated a few of his more recent "changes" to the despondent Twilight, leading to the following, heartbreaking exchange…

Come now, Twilight Sparkle. You've got to get into the spirit of things! After all, this is your new home!

…Not anymore.

Celestia blinked. Then her eyes began to quite literally flare up, her little-used temper rising to its boiling point. Ultimately, the responsibility for the abuse that this monster had been allowed to wreak upon those six young mares rested with her…and now was the time to live up to that responsibility.

"I've…I've been a foal," she murmured low, staring daggers at the simpering God. "But it's not too late, Discord. Elements or no Elements, this is our fight…and I'm going to finish it."

The Princess gave no more indication than this before she reared up onto her hind legs and began to release pony-sized bursts of solar flame from the tip of her horn. Within moments the chamber was overrun with the full fury of a Sun Goddess, the blazing inferno demonstrating its inherent magic as it deftly bent and curved around all other objects in the hall, following its target with pinpoint precision.

Discord, however, merely yawned at this display, making only a token effort to dodge the fireballs as they careened toward his position. The reason for his lack of concern became clear almost instantly – each blast seemed to veer off-course seconds before it would strike the casually hovering draconequus, flying instead into draperies or antique pottery and reducing them to cinders.

Unhindered, Celestia continued to let loose a continuous stream of gleaming white flames, but this second volley did no more good than the last, the volume of Discord's mirth only increasing as the entire throne room slowly became consumed by the redirected conflagrations. Eventually however the Chaos God ceased his laughter, arched his head backward at an impossibly sharp angle to survey the damage, and guffawed once more before snapping the chamber fully back to normal. The Princess wasn't naïve enough to take this as an act of fairness or pity, though; far more likely, Discord had done it solely for the purpose of performing the action least expected of him.

"Oh Celestia, Celestia, Celestia…" he whispered in her ear after yet another too-close-for-comfort teleportation. "When will you learn? I was controlling the sun and moon for centuries before you were even born." Then, as if to demonstrate, Discord snapped his fingers and made a grandiose motion toward the mid-afternoon sun, poking through one of the stained-glass windows…and then repeated the gesture several more times, until the orb finally set beneath the horizon.

Nonchalantly rolling his eyes, he admitted, "Okay, okay, so my connection to the cosmos may be a little out of practice. No doubt because of your oh-so-boring insistence that it move…" and here he stuck a finger down his throat and pretended to wretch, "…ugh, predictably in the interim. But I think I've made my point – without the Elements, any attempts to fight against me are dead on arrival, by you or your baby sister. Speaking of which, where is dear Luna exactly? I'd really like to stop by and say 'hello' once we're wrapped up here."

"Don't you dare go near her!" Celestia yelled, dispensing of the flames for the moment and instead charging the mad God, her horn pointed forward and bursting with energy. This, at least, forced Discord to take her a bit more seriously, as he could not so simply redirect her as he had her attacks…but with Discord, of course, "seriously" was a decidedly relative term.

As such, instead of fleeing for his life from the enraged alicorn, Discord merely teleported a sufficient distance away so that he was able to quite literally catch the approaching horn, pressing his way straight through her magical aura and tapping the Princess sharply on the head.

Celestia wasn't really sure what to expect from this attack, so she steeled her mind and her body for the worst…but the one thing she hadn't prepared herself to feel was…

Nothing.

But by "nothing," it should not be misconstrued that Discord's spell had failed; indeed, nothing could be farther from the truth. Quite literally, the Princess was beginning to feel nothing across a good portion of her lower body, and a single glance downward gave her all the information she needed as to explaining why.

"Urgh…but…but you said…" she grunted, struggling valiantly – but unsuccessfully – against the paralysis rapidly spreading along her legs and torso.

"And you expected me to keep my word? You're smarter than that, Celestia," Discord countered smugly, now lounging about on a beach-chair he had conjured out of nowhere. "Although it should be noted that in this particular case, I most certainly did. The record stands: I have yet to ever turn a pony into stone…"

At this Princess Celestia glanced back down at her transforming body, and in the briefest of moments before the curse spread to her neck and face, she realized – from scent if nothing else – that what she had initially assumed to be marble was, in fact…

"White chocolate, my dear. Only the best prison for you, Princess," Discord announced to the now-frozen statue, before collapsing onto the floor, overcome by wild and raucous laughter.

[-]

The draconequus wasn't entirely sure how long he spent celebrating the oh-so-sweet karmic punishment of his treacherous usurper…not that it really mattered all that much, of course. True, he was missing some excellent chaos going on back in Ponyville, but it would still be there when he got back, and with the Elements and their bearers both neutralized it wasn't like anypony was left to stop him. Equestria was once again his playground, now and for all eternity.

Just as it should be.

But then, if he was going to go right back to wielding all that power…well, it was making him famished just to think about it. "You know…" he spoke idly, leaning up against the confectionary sculpture and licking his lips, "…ever since poor Monsieur Macintosh lost his marbles, Sweet Apple Acres' fare simply hasn't been living up to the name. Probably could use a nice dessert to remedy that…"

Before he could do more than look the petrified Princess over and grasp his eagle claw around her horn as a decent place to start, however, a concentrated burst of energy struck him directly in the stomach, and he flew backward into the opposite wall. Getting up a moment later, uninjured and only mildly bemused at the assault, he regarded his attacker and grinned wide.

"Thou shalt not touch her, thou devilish puck!" roared Princess Luna, her mane flowing and her eyes glowing with pure rage.

"Oh, Luna! Just the Princess of the Night I was hoping to see!" Discord called out cheerfully, teleporting over to her location and briefly embracing her around the neck.

Throwing off his arms immediately, Luna continued to bellow in the Royal Canterlot Voice, "What hast thou done to our sister? We demand that thou answer forthwith!"

"Now, now, Luna…you know what I always say. Pleasure before business and all that," he casually replied. "No need for all this excessive formality. How have you been, my dear? I very much like the new look…though if you ask me, dropping the armor and the dark magic was quite the mistake."

"Be silent, vile cur!" she shouted back, summoning bats from the dark corridor she had used to surreptitiously enter the throne room and flinging them at the Chaos God, though he dismissed them all into dust with a flick of the wrist. Her eyes widening in shock, the darkly hued alicorn started to fire beams and tendrils of glimmering shadow, the fullest expression of her powers as a Moon Goddess, but Discord continued to fling them away with the minutest of gestures.

"Really, let's not start that again," said the draconequus, absentmindedly twirling his beard around one finger. "Now listen closely, my little Luna – this is important."

His eyebrows rising suggestively, Discord cleared his throat and began to recite:

Gone is your power, your glory and fame

Stranded in a world that's forgotten your name

But nothing has changed in this dreary locale

They have never loved you, Princess…and they never shall.

Pausing for a moment to teleport to Luna's side yet again, Discord hooked his lion arm around her mane and, with a snap, conjured up an intricately constructed crown in his other hand. Based on its size, shape, and color, there was really little doubt as to who the piece was intended for, and the younger Princess shuddered violently as the Chaos God traced the area around her horn with a finger, subtly readjusting the crown's dimensions accordingly.

Against her better judgment, Luna soon found herself gazing upon and appraising the jeweled diadem, which, in the moonlight that had arrived rather abruptly only moments ago, actually was managing to shimmer rather magnificently. Vibrant greens and blues and yellows, swirling around each other in a pattern that was both alien and yet so, so familiar…

Sun outshines Moon, as millennia before

But the prospect of eclipse is offered once more

Now and forever, Chaos reigns supreme

But it offers Moon one last chance to become its Queen.

Luna wasn't nearly as sure of herself as she had been mere minutes ago. Much as she hated to admit it, much of what Discord was saying (and even moreso, what he wasn't saying, as the near-infinite depths of the dazzling crown were proving every bit as "informative" as the poetic draconequus) seemed to make a whole lot of sense.

Despite a thousand years of shifting social mores and technological advances, so very little of her role seemed to have changed – she still gave every ounce of her own sweat and toil into producing astounding nighttime vistas, and she still received not one iota of gratitude in response. Indeed, the only real change she had managed to come across was an atrociously insulting annual celebration now dubbed "Nightmare Night," wherein her subjects apparently used her image as a literal boogeypony, and frightened their foals accordingly!

…Alright, true, she had been intending to visit Ponyville personally this year and use the occasion to finally improve her image amongst the citizenry, but why should she have to? Celestia had ruled alone for a thousand years, and not once had she done a single thing to allay this egregious affront! Perhaps because she…simply didn't care…

"She banished you to the moon, my dear!" Discord whispered sultrily, softly stroking her star-strewn mane. "Left you there, cold and alone, for virtually an eternity! And now that that horrid tyrant is out of the way…well, isn't it about time that the Princess of the Night take back what is rightfully hers?"

Without consciously realizing that she was doing so, Luna began to reach for the crown with her telekinesis, Discord smiling in self-satisfaction as the familiar wavy-blue glow slowly dragged the mesmerizing ornament out of his eager claw.

Then she stopped.

"Err…what's the matter, my dear?" Discord asked, trying to sound casual and disinterested but inwardly starting to sweat a bit. This was mostly because Luna was no longer staring intently at the bundle of weeds he had magicked to appear like a sparkling tiara, but rather at the frozen expression of righteous fury etched across her sister's countenance. The swirling pattern in her eyes was rapidly beginning to fade away as well, yielding instead to the blinding white glow that signified the most intense of her powers.

"Thou may have tricked us once with thy malefic powers, Discord…but we are not so easily trifled with a second time!" the alicorn exploded, bucking him firmly off of her personage and blasting the "crown" into cinders.

"My, my, and here I was thinking that one of you had finally managed to stop being such a ridiculous dullard," Discord groaned. His trademark smirk returned in less than a second, however, as he then appended, "But I suppose all that means is that I'll have to do this one the old-fashioned way."

Teleporting back to her position before she could properly react to these words, the Chaos God struck his opponent hard on the head with his pointer finger, just as he had with that disgustingly goody two-shoes pegasus back in the maze. Overriding Luna's base morality manually was hardly as much fun as "persuading" her to do it herself – and used up a fair bit more of his own energy to boot – but he supposed it couldn't be helped at this stage.

And yet, looking downward at the younger Princess, Discord found to his dismay that the swirling eyes that indicated a successful spell had not returned – indeed, her eyes appeared to be glowing even brighter now, a sign that the draconequus regarded with more than the slightest foreboding.

Frustrated, Discord jabbed at her forehead again, more insistently, but for whatever reason his curse was no longer having any effect. "Why…won't…you…!" he grunted, finally beginning to lose some of his composure.

"As we declared, thou hast cursed us similarly on a previous occasion. Surely, thou should not expect it to work now that we are prepared for it," Luna informed him, her eyes narrowed.

Discord stared back at her for several long moments, his eyes bulging angrily, before murmuring without a trace of humor in his voice, "You understand, Princess, what you are refusing? With my last 'gift,' your powers were nearly as limitless as my own. You were a Goddess."

"We already are," Luna pointed out.

"Well…yes, I suppose! But…but you were alone!" he sputtered, suddenly on the defensive. "You…you were better than her, finally out of her shadow!"

"We see no pressing dilemma in that," said Luna as she walked back over to her paralyzed sister, extending her wings to shield her from the increasingly enraged draconequus. "Celestia hast never held her station above us in any way. She hast always desired that the two of us share power evenly, and I do not intend to betray the trust she extends us. Try elsewhere, wicked creature…for we shalt be your puppet no longer."

Both of Discord's fists clenched tight at these words, his temper drawing dangerously close to its upper limit, before he exhaled deeply and let the spell he had been preparing die down. "You have…disappointed me, my little pony," he breathed, his brow furrowed with a mixture of confusion and annoyance. "And you are sorely tempting me to complete my set, with a nice dark chocolate Princess to match the white. But…" and here, the Chaos God's infuriating grin finally curled back up, "…but, that would seem so wasteful, wouldn't you agree? And where's the fun in that?"

Popping back over to a far end of the hall and making a big show of turning his back, Discord called out, "Let me know if you change your mind, little Luna! Accept back the power you deserve and serve me, and I might consider freeing your sister from her oh-so-delicious tomb. It's more of a chance than she ever afforded me. But you'd better act quickly – I feel a rather sunny afternoon coming on. And the melting point of white chocolate's actually rather low."

And with those parting words and another fit of raucous laughter, the draconequus was gone, off to enjoy some of the abundant chaos in the neighboring townships and thus forget his catastrophic failure here.

[-]

Princess Luna had just scored an unqualified victory over Discord, and while she knew that Celestia would've been incredibly proud of her for it, that didn't exactly make her current predicament any more manageable.

True to his word, the Chaos God had been flooding Canterlot with a sweltering heatwave since the moment of his departure, forcing Luna to swiftly but carefully levitate her sister into a cooler storage room, where she could work on attempting to free her from her prison. But though she poured everything she had – every single spell she had ever learned for an occasion such as this, from the most elementary to ones whose practice had been taboo even in her day – nothing was working. A living Goddess though she was, it was evident that whatever Discord had done to Celestia was a fair distance out of her league.

So instead, Luna soon found herself pacing. The halls of the palace were staid and quiet; either because the ambient magic here made it more difficult for Discord to affect it or else simply because he was too distracted spreading his chaos elsewhere, but the madness that seemed to have consumed the entire remainder of Equestria had thus far avoided this castle.

…Not that Luna needed to look far out of any given window to know that it was only a matter of time, of course.

"Dreadfully pathetic, wouldst thou not agree?" she asked of her sister's statue, stopping by the storage room for the third time amidst her circulation of the palace. "We won the battle, but without thou or young Twilight Sparkle, the war is lost. We – I – am lost without you, sister."

Kicking around a broken quill lying on the ground, she continued to muse, "I could attempt to fight him again, I suppose…but I doubt anything would change. He grows more powerful by the minute. Without the Elements…"

Luna bit her lip. The simultaneous advantage and burden of being attuned to the Moon was the power of clairvoyance – with great shifts and upheavals in the fate of Equestria she would often receive brief flashes of visions, and the last to come to her had been the tragic sight of the Elements' current bearers parting from each other with words of heartbreaking disharmony. As a former victim of such an affliction herself, she recognized instantly the signs of Discord's taint on each of the six, but there was little she could do for them from here…

In frustration Luna kicked the quill hard into a nearby closet, unintentionally dislodging a neat pile of mail-scrolls. One rolled directly toward her feet, and without really thinking about doing so the Princess used her telekinesis to unseal it. Reading something, even some boring administrative correspondence, might as least get her mind off her own despondency and helplessness, she supposed.

Dear Princess Celestia,

I am writing to you from the most delightful party. I'm not only having a great time with my friends, but also was given the opportunity to learn a valuable lesson about friendship. Always expect the best from your friends, and never assume the worst. Rest assured that a good friend always has your best interests at heart.

Your faithful student,

Twilight Sparkle

The alicorn's eyes widened considerably as she read these touching words, and within the next instant she was tearing through the storage closet, extracting a dozen or so further scrolls of similar length and content. Though the lessons recorded in each of the reports varied widely, the sentiment behind them remained constant, and as she perused each of them in turn she found herself inextricably moved. Despite everything, her spirits had just been lifted – if, perhaps, by only a few inches – and she had dear Twilight Sparkle to thank for that.

The realization about what she had to do did not dawn on Luna in one great, instantaneous epiphany…but gradually, as she meticulously pored across each letter, glancing regularly over the tops of the scrolls at her transformed sister, and then at the dormant fireplace, and then at the reports once more.

When she finished the final letter, Luna closed her eyes and breathed deeply. Then she embraced Celestia around the leg, picked up the scrolls with her magic, and proceeded to rummage through the nearby drawers for the materials necessary to enact correspondence.

After all, Discord had managed to leave at least one loose end untied this day…and Luna would be doing a disservice to her subjects if she didn't do her utmost to take advantage of it.