Chapter 13
It would no doubt surprise many of his enemies to learn that Sauron did not necessarily hate chaos. He was not by his truest nature a giver and keeper of law and order, though it was a role he was very often forced into by the negligence of others. Sauron was a smith, and for him chaos was simply a glut of raw materials. Chaos was a fallow field and a blank canvas, an opportunity to shape and refine, to create something whole and lasting and worthy.
No, what Sauron hated, truly hated in a way that more physical creatures could never begin to comprehend, was entropy. Rot, rust, decay, the diminishing of craft and knowledge through mischance, malefic vandalism, and negligence. Always negligence. Yes, it may have been Melkor who had introduced the taint with his bumbling vainglory, and Sauron himself may have failed time and time again to excise it, but it was the Incarnates that endlessly perpetuated it. Elves, Dwarves, Man-kind, Ponies, they were all part of the problem in their willfulness and ignorance, and it fell to him to make them part of the solution.
And now the problem had a face. A smug, disgusting, increasingly stabbable face.
Discord noisily slurped his tea across the table, and Sauron forced a smile and nodded to the pink and yellow pegasus pouring him a cup of his own.
"Um…I hope this helps a little. I always have some when I get an upset stomach," Fluttershy said quietly, seemingly unable to maintain eye contact with him for more than a split second. The last of Twilight's inner circle, the so-called Element of Kindness was unusually demure for her normally gregarious species, especially considering how casually she gamboled about with wild beasts that could kill her with a stray thought.
"Thank you kindly, Miss Fluttershy," Sauron replied mildly, smoothly matching her volume and body language to help put her at ease. He delicately sipped the tea and, savoring the gentle blend of ginger and peppermint, allowed its warmth to spread throughout his body, relaxing his muscles and honing his mental focus. The Maia sighed and favored her with a contented smile, which she returned with subdued but genuine cheer. Her demeanor, though inordinately timid by Equestrian standards, would be considered to height of grace and propriety by the more conservative cultures of Arda, and so Sauron could easily see how he might cultivate her as an asset-
"Yeah, you make the best hot leaf-juice, Flutters!"
Were it not for the canker of Un-making in the room, slowly unraveling the fabric of reality with its mere presence!
"Could maybe use a little something extra, though," Discord cackled as he began to pour an inordinate amount of white crystals into his tea from a crock labeled as 'sugar', but judging by the smell and granularity was most definitely salt. The creature gulped the ruined tea down with relish, drawing a pleased look from Fluttershy, before pushing the crock across the table towards him.
"…Thank you, but the tea is perfect the way it is," Sauron demurred before turning to Fluttershy. "Ah, this is exactly what I needed. I just had a little too much to eat with Pinkie Pie, you understand."
The pegasus giggled. "Yes, that would make sense. Well, ah, I need to go out and feed the animals, but please have as much as you like. Will you two be alright on your own?"
"Don't worry, gal pal, I'll take good care of our new friend!" Discord blurted out before Sauron could protest, and with a grateful nod Fluttershy walked out the back door, leaving the two spirits alone in her house.
Sighing internally, Sauron prepared to go through the social motions necessary for a smooth exit from this unpleasant situation. "I do not believe that we have been properly introduced. I am Iron Ember, a smith that recently-."
"C'mon now, Sour Ron, don't give yourself a stroke. You'd be even more of a stick in the mud if they had to bury you in it."
The Maia blinked. "…You know."
Discord rolled his mismatched eyes hard enough that they fell out of his sockets and onto the table like a set of slimy dice before scooping them up and shoving them into the opposite sockets from where they started. "Do I know- of course I know! Even if Loony hadn't blabbed to me about her little charity case, and damn if she isn't projecting hard enough to run a film festival, you just reek of order and control, like you want to chop me up into little pieces and sort them in a filing cabinet."
"I would never- filing cabinets are for things that need to be found again," Sauron growled. Honeyed words would be wasted here. "What are you supposed to be, then? Some derelict of Melkor's choir, gnawing at the edge of Creation, defiling the works of your betters like some spiteful, tumorous rat?"
"Melkor…that's your old sugar daddy, right?" Discord needled, the exact meaning of which was lost on Sauron but the tone and context of which he liked not at all.
The creature cackled at his expression. "You'd like that, wouldn't you? To put me in a neat little box and pretend that I fit into your order of things? Well sorry buckaroo, but I'm Discord, and Discord means me! Not even I know what I am or where I came from, but you wanna know a secret?"
Discord cupped a claw around his muzzle as if to whisper and Sauron, against his better judgement, found himself leaning forward across the table only for the thing to shout at him! Shout! The insane, unforgivable gall!
"IT DOESN'T MATTER! Sorry not sorry, Ronnie, you're just gonna have to deal with that. Actually, how about you don't deal with it? You're much more entertaining when you're upset!"
"I am not here to entertain you, wretch," Sauron hissed as he clutched his ears.
"Yeah, you're here to drown in wholesomeness and get love-bombed until you stop being the wrong kind of crazy. Still, when Loony told me to spy on a demonic tyrant from another dimension to earn my good boy points, I thought I'd hit the jackpot! Cut-throat conspiracies, edgy cults, a military-industrial complex, I was HYPED, gosh darn it!" Discord paused in his ranting, and had the ridiculous temerity to look offended. "Little did I know you'd turn out to be one of the most boring people I've ever met!"
"You're the spy?!" Sauron exclaimed in mounting dread. It had been annoying enough to work around the changeling! How was he supposed to deal with-
Wait…The changeling.
"Oh no, oh dear. You weren't supposed to find out about that. Luna's gonna be mad," Discord deadpanned.
"But- but why did you file your reports in crayon?!" Sauron demanded. Just what kind of situation was this?!
"Because I thought it would be funny and it was," Discord replied, as if explaining something incredibly obvious to a simpleton. "Not nearly as funny as you tip-toeing around a little girl thinking she was a shapeshifting body-snatcher, though. Even then it eventually got to the point where I just started feeling kinda bad for her."
"You have been stalking me this entire time, then? How have I not seen you, felt your vile aura save for with Fluttershy in the marketplace?" Sauron demanded.
The Spirit of Disharmony tsked. "Bold of you to assume I have limitations, my dude." He snapped his clawed fingers and the sickening miasma of cosmic decay vanished.
Sauron felt his rage build until his cup of tea began to boil over. The bastard was doing it on PURPOSE!
"Yeah, so remember that vase in Rarity's guestroom?" Discord vanished and was replaced by the vase in question, but with his face crudely scratched onto its surface. "That was me! And that spider outside your workshop's window? Also me!"
"I feel violated," Sauron muttered despondently. He should have crushed the skittering thing, nostalgia for Shelob be damned.
"Hey now, don't make it weird. That's my shtick!" Discord groused in annoyance. "It's not like there was anything to see, anyway. All you ever do is work, work, talk to ponies about nothing, and then work some more!" He glanced around and stage-whispered, "Ya know, if you wanted to be, like, a little bit evil I could maybe forget to tell anybody about it. Come on, spice things up a bit, you know you want to!"
Sauron began to feel the last shreds of his patience begin to fray, and could not find it in himself to care. "You have not even the slightest idea of what I want, you meaningless abomination, you stain, you literal cancer! This world is objectively and undeniably lesser for having you in it, so feel bad about yourself!"
The erstwhile Lord of the Rings had expected anger, perhaps surprise at his outburst, but certainly not uproarious, wheezing laughter.
"Finally, I get to play with someone that has teeth! Do you know what it's like trying to get a rise out of these ponies? Even if you really go overboard and get them absolutely spitting mad, the worst they'll do is just scream at you." Discord wiped a tear from his eye and stuck the claw in his mouth. "But you, my little time-bomb, you're gonna be fun!"
"I will not! I refuse to be fun!" Sauron spat, which only sent Discord into another fit of manic cackling.
The back door opened and Fluttershy came in holding a small white rabbit that glared at the two of them with a surprising amount of antipathy. "Oh, I'm glad to see you two are having fun," she commented guilelessly as Discord's laughter petered out and Sauron forced a placid smile onto his face.
"Yes, we were just getting to know each other a bit more," the Maia replied blithely, being careful not to crush his teacup despite the death-grip he had on it.
"Aw, that's great! I'm happy that you're-," Fluttershy paused and sniffed the air curiously. "Do you smell smoke?"
Sauron glanced down and found that, to his dismay, his hooves had started to burn black marks into the wooden floor under the table. Before he could say anything, however, he heard the muted sound of fingers snapping and the burn marks, as well as the smell of smoke, vanished.
"Eh, I don't smell anything," said Discord off-handedly. "Maybe someone's having a campfire in the forest." He glanced at Sauron and almost unperceptively shook his head.
Sensing an opportunity, Sauron got out of his chair and stretched a little. "Ah, that was some lovely tea, Fluttershy. I thank you for your hospitality, but I really must be going now."
"R-right, well, thanks for the delivery! I'll, um, see you around, then?" The pegasus trailed off awkwardly as he moved toward the door.
Sauron gave her an encouraging smile. "Of course! Any friend of Rarity and Twilight is a friend of mine!" He began turning the doorknob. Almost there…
"I'll walk him down the road. Be right back, Flutters!" Discord butted in, to Fluttershy's thanks and Sauron's immense irritation. Damnit, damnit, damnit!
A few seconds of tense silence followed them out the door, Sauron trudging along while Discord slithered through the air a few feet above him and to the side.
"So the girl-," Sauron began, rather than let his foe take the initiative.
"Don't," Discord snapped with unexpected seriousness. Having caught Sauron off-guard he continued, "Play with my toys all you like, carry on with whatever crazy scheme you've got going, overthrow the Princesses or whatever, but Fluttershy is off-limits, alright? You keep her out of it, or I'll quit screwing around."
The Maia's snappish reply died in his throat as he turned and saw the look in Discord's eyes, like the veil of juvenile whimsy was drawn back just enough to glimpse the vast and writhing otherness beyond. He felt a sudden and unwelcome revelation that, should that veil be torn away, there was no way for him to predict what would happen next.
Carefully schooling his expression, Sauron scoffed. "Fear not for your pet, graceless one. I expect her usefulness to me will be circumstantial at best, and I would hardly profit from endangering her."
Discord grinned, his demeanor of smug amusement returning. "No. You really wouldn't."
As the two of them parted ways, Sauron felt his anger, his disgust, his horror subside, only to be replaced with a cold and implacable determination. Perhaps the time for caution, for slow but reliable progress was coming to an end. He had money, he had connections, he had information, and while those things would grow further over time, the world around him would not remain still in the interim. Now was the time for leaps of daring, of risk, for the new task before him allowed far less room for self-limitation.
If he was going to save this world, Discord would have to die.
Iron Ember barged through the doors of the library. "TWILIGHT!"
"BWAAH!" The Princess yelped in surprise, nearly dropping the mountain of books she was holding aloft with her horn, and still having to leap forward to physically catch several that had fallen loose. "Ember?! What in Equestria's gotten into you?"
"I apologize for the sudden disturbance. Do you know where to find these things?" he asked breathlessly, handing her a piece of paper with a number of items written down on it.
Setting down her books, Twilight scanned the list with increasing confusion. "Two hendecagonal rhomboid quartz crystals not exceeding five centimeters in diameter, seventeen milligrams of powdered electrum, a liter of spring water less than six hours removed from the source with exactly one ninth the average salt of sea water, a white rooster's feather soaked in beeswax for eleven seconds- what could you possibly use any of this for?"
"I want to try something. We need to get all of this- actually, what is the moon phase tonight?"
Twilight blinked. "Um, it's waning gibbous, but what does that have to do with-?"
"We need to get all of this by a quarter past two o'clock tonight."
"Tonight?!" she exclaimed in exasperation. "Ember, there's like a dozen bizarrely specific pieces of random junk on this list. Maybe if you actually told me what's so important I could help you?"
Ember took a deep breath and nodded. "Right," he said, his usual calm seeming to return. "You recall, I am certain, the anomalous results of our experiments with my innate magic?"
That got her attention. "Of course I do! It's been driving me crazy for weeks trying to find some sort of recorded precedent or obscure mechanism that we may have overlooked." Ember's strange affinity with heat lacked any physiological or chemical explanation, and was clearly magical in nature, but seemed to have no observable link to his innate Earth Pony magic. Its sheer inexplicability intrigued her even more than it frustrated her, if only barely.
Ember grinned with visible excitement, and she began to feel the same feeling well up inside of her. "I've been doing some of the exercises we talked about, trying to deliberately draw on it, and I had… a sudden inspiration, I suppose you could say." He paused, though whether it was to consider his words or to deliberately build suspense she couldn't tell. "I believe that I, or rather, we can draw upon it."
Twilight lifted half of the text off of the list with a spell and onto a spare sheet of paper that she all but threw at him. "It'll be faster if we split up."
If somepony had told Twilight that she would be alone with a dark and mysterious stallion on her balcony in the middle of the night, she would have assumed that the scenario would be at least marginally romantic. Instead, the only feelings she could conjure in this situation were bemusement and annoyance.
The Alicorn sighed in exasperation at the collection of objects and materials on the crystal table before her, the light of the moon and stars reflecting off of them. "Ember, when you told me that you had some ideas of how to access your magic, I didn't think they'd be so…"
"Inspired? Revolutionary?"
"Occult. Ember, I can understand how you might have certain misconceptions given your background, but magic, however wondrous, is still a science. Even 'soft' aspects of it like emotion and virtues can be replicated through experimentation and the mechanisms behind them can be qualified and even quantified with the right tools. Magic can be mysterious, even marvelous, but it is not mystical."
Twilight waved around the piece of paper Ember had given to her, the instructions written on it as detailed and bizarrely specific as they were nonsensical. "And what your 'procedure' is, Ember, is mysticism."
The Earth Pony merely nodded along with her explanation, appearing neither offended nor embarrassed. "An interesting and doubtless accurate explanation, Twilight. Of the magic you know, that is." He smiled at her, and against all sense she couldn't help but feel like an overly precocious student back at the academy again, questioning the material because she'd skipped ahead and didn't have the context for it. "But we are dealing with unknowns here, Twilight, seeking to explain that which more conventional thought has found inexplicable. Does it not make sense to try a more unorthodox means of investigation?"
"Not if it means disregarding millennia of peer-reviewed and rigorously tested precedent!" Twilight retorted. "Don't think I'm some hidebound zealot, Ember; magical theory isn't some ancient dogma passed on by blind acceptance and cultural inertia. It's been constantly challenged and refined by many of the smartest ponies in history, and its core principles have proven robust. I have a lot of respect for you, Ember, but I'm just sincerely confused about why you put so much stock in this ritual you've put together based purely on intuition and gut feeling!"
"I have a very strong trust in my instincts," replied Ember seriously. "And we are not disregarding anything, Twilight. Nothing that we discover here tonight invalidates your hard-won knowledge and understanding of magic. What we are dealing with may not even be magic as Equestria understands it. As I said before, we are stumbling around in the dark. What can we depend on but our instincts?"
Something must have shown on her face, because Ember sighed and said, "Just humor me, alright? If this doesn't work, I'll…hmm…I'll build you a new telescope."
"…Better than the one I have?" Twilight knew he was good, unreasonably good, but could he even do that?
"Better than the one you have," Ember confirmed in an amused tone. "Now, let us begin."
"Alright, alright," Twilight grumbled. "So, it says to throw the electrum dust into the air at a thirty-eight and-a-half degree angle arc perpendicular to the moon's projected path, then to drink exactly five and three-eights ounces of the brackish spring water while walking six paces counter-clockwise. Once you've done that, take the feather and trace a sixteen-by-eight centimeter vertical ellipse…"
The things I do for friendship…
Seventeen minutes later….
"Why."
Had she ever looked as unbearably smug as Ember did now? Had she actually deserved some of those nasty remarks back in school?
"WHY?!" she shouted into the night, pointing both front hooves furiously at the piece of common quartz sitting on the table, which had moments ago began to inexplicably glow with a very soft silver-white light, not unlike the moon and stars above, but with a brightness comparable to that of an electric floodlight.
"Worry not, Twilight. Perhaps I can make you that telescope for your birthday," Ember quipped in good cheer, the light of the…the thing somehow not blinding them despite its intensity.
"You can't just do that!" she protested weakly. The thing wasn't even magical as far as she could tell. It just glowed like that as if it was the most natural thing in the world!
"I mean, anecdotal evidence would suggest otherwise."
"Ugh!" Twilight shook her head and took a deep breath to collect herself. "Okay. So it works. Somehow. Perhaps this…pseudo-magic of yours manifests through psychosomatic means, which may explain why this ritual of yours was able to access it, acting as a sort of placebo…"
"An interesting theory, Twilight," Ember commented with a cheerfulness that she found surprisingly irritating. He gestured towards the remaining material on the table. "Let's put it to the test."
Twilight blinked. "You want me to do it? But I-."
Ember sighed. "Come now, I had us collect enough material for two attempts for a reason. If I can do it and you cannot, then we might suspect that this is something native to myself, or perhaps a non-replicable fluke." An eager glimmer appeared in his yellow eyes. "But if we can both do it independently, following the exact same procedure, then that opens up many interesting possibilities, does it not?"
She could hardly deny that, especially now that the potential magnitude of significance involved in what they were doing had started to sink in. "Okay, but read me the instructions slowly," Twilight said, her growing excitement creeping into her voice. "I don't want to get bad data because I didn't do it perfectly."
Seventeen minutes later, there were two of what Ember had begun referring to as 'crystal lamps' sitting on her table, and Twilight couldn't quite tell if she was more excited about the vast world of strange and novel possibilities opening up before her, or intimidated by the daunting task of making even the slightest sense of this phenomenon. Excitement won out.
"This is CRAZY!" Twilight howled, grabbing Ember in a tight hug, which he accepted stiffly and without comment. Releasing him, she started galloping around the balcony, pouring over all of the materials and instruments and the artifacts themselves, half-hoping to stumble over some new insight out of the blue. "This is INSANE!" She whirled back toward Ember and scowled at him. "This is RIDICULOUS!"
Ember drew back from her and burst out into a surprised chuckle, and Twilight was startled by how different it was from his normal laugh. "Why are you pouting like that?" he wheezed. "You look like you have a stomachache."
"I'm not pouting, I'm scowling!" she groused. "I don't even know where to begin making sense of what we just did!"
"Hmm, well I think I might have a theory of my own this time," said Ember, rubbing his chin pensively.
Twilight sniffed and adopted a mock-haughty tone belied by the smile she couldn't quite contain. "By all means, Mister Instinct."
"A thought exercise for you, Twilight. Why does fire burn?" the stallion asked.
The Princess blinked at the seeming tangent. "Uh, because heat causes the fuel to react with oxygen and combust?"
Ember nodded. "Yes, but why does it do that?"
She furrowed her brow. "Because heat causes the atoms in the fuel to vibrate until their bonds break and they become incendiary gasses?"
"Indeed, and why does it do that?" he repeated innocently.
Her eye twitched. "…Because the kinetic energy contained within a molecule is inverse to its stability. This is basic stuff, Ember."
"But why is it like that?"
Twilight glared at him. Why is he acting like an annoying little kid? "Because that's how thermodynamics work! Where are you going with this?"
"Exactly, Twilight!" Ember exclaimed. "Break down any aspect of the natural order into its constituent mechanisms, and eventually you get to the point of 'because that's how the universe works'." He gestured towards the lamps on the table. "Perhaps there is no mechanism at work here, and the ritual is just…skipping to the last part?"
Twilight felt her eyebrows rise despite trying to maintain a neutral expression. "You're proposing that this extremely specific ritual producing these crystal lamps is a fundamental law of the universe on par with the laws of thermodynamics? That's….interesting."
She really didn't have the heart to tell her friend that it was probably the dumbest thing she'd ever heard in her life.