Chapter 31: Bedlam of the almighty

No being present and stealing breath on Earth, neither man nor monster, could ever attest to savvy the elysian, exalted kahuna of relief inundating the fiendish frame of Discord. The ignominious God of Chaos. An inglorious facultized maestro of the unequaled art of bona fide, unalloyed anarchy, spilling from the yawning conduits of his heart. Glorious and incendiary. The king of all perfervid passions and yearnings spilling from the yawning conduits of his heart. Spewing like callously slashed throat, an upchuck of volcanic jubilation disgorging from his toothy maw.

The Draconequus stood upon the smooth sinuate base of his baroque prison. Liberated from his coarse garb of infrangible venerable stone imposed upon the mangled beast bereft of sorrowful qualms or remorse. Not a diminutive modicum of ruth or clemency stamped upon the lavish ash-grey remnants of his former Kafkaesque dungeon. Discord’s former skin of mirror-finished rock lie haphazardly threshed upon the groomed sod. An uncouth, betumbled motley of jagged shrapnel riven into all shapes and sizes, not one parallel rooted in similitude extant, polka-dotted the pepful sod. The repulsive scabs blighting the groomed field, each truncated gobbet of his granitic garment plethoric with contrasts. Its borders both toothed and hooked, some erose and others hooked like an eagle’s acuate beak. Ranging from wider than a glutton’s dinner plate and small like bantam cake crumbs. 

Discord reared his turbid head. Galping elongated mandible stretched to their unnavigable apex, a singular opal-white spearheaded tooth obtruding from his jaw. Aglimmer with a dull shine like lavish veritable ivory, straight from the pilfered weather-worn tusk of an elephant and accorded to the magister of anarchy. Perhaps a constrained oblique endowment from a subservient, his cherished priceless liberty bashed to bits by his fiendish, unsagacious machinations. A gift presented upon a satin pillow confined in a cube of feckless gold-rimmed glass and placed upon his lap with shaky hands. Not a benevolent agency of their illustrious ceaseless gratitude or a redoubtable conduit for their charitable soul. Just a ploy to accrue even a half-sliver of a flake of clemency from their new unrelished king. A votive to a master of an art whose capabilities far breach the bounds of rationality and sane undiluted thought. 

A thunderous, brawny groan of unfathomable rhapsodic reprieve tore from his slender and rocketed into the toothy sky. His enraptured cry, venerating the mitigation of his infernal vessel, soaring through the boundless facets of their once placid setting. Bounding across the Lucullan champaign at the rear of the archaic building, its volume refusing to extenuate across its toilsome expedition. Nonuniform arms stretched high above his skull, not one extremity that preformed any readily cardinal function bent backwards to obey the agendas of any roster of norms. In fact, the broad and dizzying compendium of features encompassing his aberrant rangy chassis bewrayed the monolithic commandments of society’s ubiquitous normalcy. His differing limbs, each one stemming from eclectic provenances, harbored zero differences no matter how unabated the scrutinization.

His right limb, the Herculean broad paw of a lion. His left arm was the slender golden talons of an exalted eagle. His lithe frame stood upon the tan foreleg of a horse and the scaly appendage of a lime-green dragon with stark white claws rasping the concrete base. 

Black bat wing outstretched like spandex. Its lush cyan brethren almost identical to the fluttering apparatuses wielded by Levi’s comrade, hopefully stashed somewhere far afield from these unceasing upheavals. All he could was pray she was cached in a hidden cavity secreted from the incendiary chaos. Then again, if his inability to prevent this incalculable travesty is anything to base judgement upon, perhaps the last thing he deserved was an answer to his longful wishes and desires. 

Discord briskly executed all of the rudimentary motions and emotes that came in tow with his elysian, uber-blissful stretch. A blinding, elephantine flash of unparalleled euphoria of a paradisal echelon that trounced the comprehension of the average being, both man and equine. An imponderable cascade of succour that the boundless libraries of any language would fail to appropriately describe. Words flayed of all meaning. Bated and eroded into superfluous exhalations. Nothing more than meager gusts of oxygen and dancing lips.

Gary Demonio leered through broadened globes at the inimical deity. Bewitched by the flagitious totem of unremitting, unflagging malice. Sinking its barbed teeth into the pliant undulating pulp of his attention. Far too engrossed to forestall or trammel the blinding, walloping flash of nitid gleam seizing the aggregated entirety of his begrimed frame. Every sliver of sodden turquoise cloth, imbrued tanktop, rugose ash-gray pants, all comprised in the esurient gaping maw of the glow.  

When the cogent luster subsided, welcoming the terminus to its second-long sojourn with congenial panoramic arms, nothing beside remained. Each sensation and being present in the reality preceding the zealous salvo of radiance was an ephemeral memory, feeling further into the murk of obscurity with every passing moment. Now that he thought about it with a minute excess of time to spare, he could hardly remember the petrified visage of his emancipated inmate. Only the intoxicating elation. The electrifying, inimitable bliss of his skull-pounding shrieks and gutshot wails. His impotent piteous endeavors at an inefficacious resistance. A rebellion doomed to drown in acidic inexorable failure, inadequacy exaggerated with every sidesplitting punch and kick from the writhing prisoner. 

That wretched pegasus punched and kicked with fists like gauntlets of sheep wool. Screams and shouts, bellowing his sorrowful bootless prayers to an nugatory god failing to blanket the hapless soul in the impeccable salvation he wailed and pleaded for. His strident plights diluted to trifling whispers pouring into deaf, uncaring ears of a heartless deity. Now, he was utterly, in every conceivable deviation of the word, gone in the blink of an eye. Vanishing into some cloaked unseen cavity of the dimension in a flashbulb of khaki-colored radiance. Bygone in a quarter of an eye-blink, as though his existence, sodden in unutterable terror and petrification, was nothing more than an ephemeral mirage. 

His opaque felicity absconded the Tartarean riotous topography of his psyche and salted the earth as it marched to novel pastures.

Gary’s jaw tightened and a flaming bramble of lambent wrath trammeled his features. Irises entangled in a byzantine voracious mangrove of a blistering rage that was far from unanticipated by the outlaw and his throngs of allies, yet fully comprehending the elephantine scope of it was an arrantly different story. He snapped his crosshairs onto the brunete. 

“Who in Tartarus…” Mortimer murmured quieter than the rustling of a downy bedsheet. “Who the f**k do we aim at!?” He whispered-shouted.

“Let’s t-take it slow. We’ll make it out of this.” Levi tightened his wroth glower beneath the awning of his pursed eyebrows and comb-like bangs. Oscillating in a serene solaceful breeze soused in a catholic bath of ataraxis, falling prey to the elementary impulse to goggle and envy its placidity. A reality that clung to no stringent tethers to reality. Only the highest throne in the most unfettered and farcical of blissful imaginariums. 

“Follow my lead.”

“We sure that’s the best idea?! You seen what this m**********r’s done already?” Mortimer sneered in a gritty whisper. 

Levi adjusted his stance and spaded his boots further into the soil. His bearing brawnier than any earthbound metal or ore was ever able to trounce. Leather groaning with every slight motion of his limbs. Discord moaned in assuagement all the while. Flexing his static digits and waggling his frame as though his primeval timeworn skeleton was sculpted from bona fide rubber. Joggling like a wet noodle of spaghetti endlessly fiddled with by a mindless frolicky toddler. 

“I’ll get us out of here. Follow my lead, Mister Surly.”

Mortimer retired from the fervid quibbling and trekked onward from the weathered pulpit of vehement, ardent objection. Relinquishing his stead and reverting back to the connate maneuvers forever laser-engraved deep in the atoms of his bones. Aiming the only entity, both inanimate and spirited, he ladeled his eternal unbridled trust into his. That golden Schofield and black crosshairs. The prestigeful, unflawed apples of his eye.

Levi skewed at the unabashed amalgamation through a salient gloss of galvanized trepidation. No filter or stalwart censor, notwithstanding its prodigious brawn or untold magnus, could’ve ever stood a concrete chance at deafening his irate vehemence. 

‘What the hell are you?’ Levi growled within the impregnable lily-white palisades of his skull. Amidst the flaring frenetic galaxy of harried thoughts and anxieties, febrile fears and angsts of Tartarean caliber, seizing the words to properly embody his wrath was drudgery. Hell, any rudimentary activity that involved configuring coherent sentences from the farcical pulp of words eddying around his skull. Bounding from every Babelic corner, not a singular diminutive square inch of his cranium went unpopulated from the all-encompassing siege. 

Levi leered at every exuberant, pompous phase of his piquing choreography. Exercising every rudimentary workaday motion that each and every conscious, breathing being on this plane of reality can wholeheartedly dwell upon the same wavelength as the reviviscent god. The daily gesticulations of an entity freshly wrested from the uncontentious realm of elysian slumber, where the Earth’s cyclical dogma and unending envenomed strifes bore no influence there. No stage to pridefully rear their noisome heads and augment the noisome mighteous notions encompassing their heart. No acoustics to ricochet their fiendish screams, bereft of an audience that would ever ponder the idea of entertaining the wanton madness. 

The ravelled array of emotions sprawling across the jumbled, inchoate countenance of the God of Chaos was far too convoluted for the brunete to delve and scrutinize. Amidst the aggregate of his badgersome cacophonous choreography, the Man in Blue did nothing but ogle with a rapierlike sneer. Crisp enough to slice the satiny skeleton of time and space into lithesome confetti. Lacing his claws and talons and cracking his gnarled knuckles in a gravely rumble. Rolling his tube-like neck in a full orbit and twisting his midsection, pressing his chassis through a law-defying gauntlet formerly unthought of by the male. At the end, he emerged with a nimiety of his laborious fruits. A beaming Cheshire grin, a fusillade of ameliorating pops and cracks rumbling from his joints, and last but certainly not least, that volcanic infernal glare from Levi Cronell. The focused spears of lucent assurgent fury beaming from his peridot orbs. 

Unwavering. 

Blistering.

Steadfast in their almighty mission to punch holes through the inchoate beast. 

Discord met his gaze. Those sickening penny-sized vermillion irises tacked in the center of an oversized oval of vivacious urine-yellow, awninged by scraggly, bushy lily-white eyebrows. 

The pair eyed one another for a fleeting second. In that minute modicum of an instant, a paltry petite grain amidst the beach of time, it appeared Discord had the indignant man arrantly sized up. The probabilities of victory and mortifying loss were weighed and judged. Presented before whatever loathsome, wicked council beavered away within his demented psyche. 

Discord snapped his talons and fulminated into an orb of black-and-yellow smog for a split-second, reemerging lazing in the open air. His figure shaped like a hammy pen-drawn smile as though reposing upon a hammock braided and strung from thin air. 

“Oh, my goodness!” Discord chirped with a chortle. “As much as I hate to admit it, it is wonderful to be back here! Only this place is far from how I remember it. So much blander now!”

Gary wrenched his undeviating stare from his adversaries and gazed upon his comrade. 

“Discord…? Holy s**t!” Gary had to rein his jaw from nosediving into the soil. “That’s you in the flesh? What the f**k…” He continued breathlessly, the wind burglarized from his lungs by the divulging of his harrowing shepherd. That vexatious amorphous voice, an excelled pundit in the art of tainting the chamber of his cranium with his verbose tangents, was finally dealt the justice he was chalked up to warranting.

The ostensible “great horror of Equestria” spoke off in those antediluvian books of yore. 

The unending passages splaying out his mind-spinning crimes bare across its pages. 

Lives he unmendably altered, all for the joy and elation his craft brought in tow. The worlds he rived with a scintillating smile. His noxious beatific guffaw as he molded Equus into the anarchic imaginarium that’d been explicated solely in the words of those articles. Perhaps far too nightmarish and hellacious for the hapless lens of a camera to properly accentuate. 

He shed the filters of his mind, the loose skeletons of what once were stringent censors, and razed the flood gates imprisoning the unabridged veracious honesty. The truth gushed freely…and Gary Demonio could only wish he never bore witness to the owner of that artifice of a voice. 

“Why, of course it is, my dear friend! Is it all you hoped for?”

The raven-haired sod stared blank for a few seconds. His aim never faltered. “I’m not sure. Not one f*****g bit.”

Discord swam through the air as brisk as a blood cell rushing down an artery and halted his illogical movements behind his partner, resting the heft of his Herculean lion’s paw upon his bold harrowed shoulder. They smiled grimly in unison. Discord’s spearhead opal-like tooth shooting from his broad mandible and obtruding between his rangy lips. 

Although, notwithstanding their consummate synchronization, both in malevolence and intention, there was a frothing hub of veracity that displayed the raging divergences separating their principal objectives. 

The eyes. Those gaping ducts to the soul. Open at all hours of the day every minute of their life, always open and raring to spill the clandestine verity into the chalice of the world. Ready to indulge and glory in a hearty swig of the undisputed truth. A scarce delicacy, even in the most golden and sinless regions of Equestria. Gary’s amber gems, framed in a ring of dampened flesh and budding eyebags sat nigh on sunk in his fatigued sockets. Those enervated dog-tired coves of bones serving as the malignant, vile home to the glowering vicious moonstones. The barbaric globes rife with a thirst he couldn’t quite fully comprehend or grasp the mastodonic scope of. Gary Demonio, in accordance with his behavior all those years ago as the exclusive sovereign of Roseville, Tuscaloosa, thirsted for blood. No matter how intense the battle or how arduous and fervent his skirmish was to attain it, the means were utterly balderdash. If his eminent ironclad objective stands fulfilled and content with the selected method of attainment, the noirette was accorded a reason to flash a bona fide smile. 

His fists coated in crimson? He wouldn’t mind. Knuckles bashed and fissured after a hell-roaring skirmish? Not preferred but certainly far from unwelcomed. 

Empty bullet casings polka-dotting whatever impeccant turf he blighted with a trivial breath of his presence? Cadavers perforated with the telltale dime-sized holes riddling every expanse of predisposed defenseless flesh? 

Gary had arrived at the blunt conclusion almost a decade prior that the illustrious, moreish tang of heaven’s palatable fruits and remunerations would ne’er grace his forked silver tongue. No matter how scrutinous the soul-searching or the countless hours he could spend trenchantly ameliorating the soot from his macabre heart. None of it would scrounge any Lilliputian modicum to stagger the tides of his net kismet. All there was to do now was accept his hellish muse, shamelessly bash objections with a frigid shoulder, and most importantly of all, have all the unbounded fun his battle-starved ticker could wrangle. 

“Well, well, well, don’t you look familiar?” Discord spoke, stroking the thumb-sized tuft of bone-white sprouting from his chin. “Is this that ‘Man in Blue’ you were always griping about?”

“You bet your a*s it is. What do you think?”

Discord’s beam rammified. “Just as ridiculous as those prophecies always said! This might just be the biggest joke of today, my friend!”

Levi shifted his stance and aggrandized his soul-shattering grip on his hilt. It was nothing short of a miraculous shock to all that the prismatic sword hadn’t fragmented from the might of his grasp. One more turn of the wheel amplifying his clench and that blade was a fugacious memory.

He smothered his frightened stutter. Fashioning a fallible masquerade of the undaunted lionheart explicated in the foretells. “Who are you and what’re you doing here?” 

“Isn’t it obvious?” 

Discord snapped his fingers and, in a flare of that fulgent smoke, he materialized above Levi and Co, lounging on that familiar impalpable hammock. The uber-outré contours of his outlandish frame crimped and a jocund chortle rattled from his lungs and sailed between his flapping jaws. Browsy chest undulating like a bubbling, moiling cauldron of unadulterated terrific mirth. With a fleeting gaze and a nudge of his head, two proselytes forsook their initial target and shifted their uber-focused aim. Homing their diligent crosshairs on the antic beast above. The assiduous Tacitus toting his sawed-off at the olden god and Clear Sky, boastful with the drought of blemishes upon her rifle, honed her repeater. Stock troweling ever-deeper into the smooth bony plate of her shoulder. 

“The God of Chaos? You’re really the one?”

“As real as real can get!” Discord snickered and fidgeted with his beard, pinching and running his talons from the base to the wick-like end. “I can’t believe you’re the hero they spoke about all those years ago. I thought you’d be bigger, quite honestly. A little taller, too.”

Levi flicked his fretful stare between both prodigious adversaries every few words. “You don’t know the first thing about me! What’re you doing here!? What do you want from these people!”

“You have an affinity for questions you know the answers to, don’t you, ‘Man in Blue’?” Discord slithered through the spacious air and migrated his formless hammock. He planted his roots on the right of the brunete, gibingly tapping the end of his sword with the pad of his lion’s fingertip. The blade vacillated with the disharmonious rhythm of his quivering hand. “Seems nothing’s the way I expected. Thought this sword was a whole lot bigger the last time I saw it.”

“As a matter of fact, Levi,” The stalwart lionheart’s name was a moldering gobbet of undiluted cancer upon his tongue. That fateful squad of letters blighting the fragile fiber of the pastel muscle. Sneered with a caliber of septic venom previously unheard by the male in all of his lively years, arriving bereft of a herald or signal. “I believe I speak for all of us when I say it looked better on Platinum Wing. He’s the real hero after all.”

Levi balled his free fist. 

“You don’t know the danger you’ve stepped into, Discord. You won’t get off scot-free. Not again.”

Gary grinned at the man and suppressed a stentorian guffaw. His efforts of inhibition wavered, however, and all that seeped through his sealed lips was a nigh-silent snigger. Riding quiescent upon the crest of a hushed breath puffing through his clenched teeth. 

Discord snapped and assumed his mellow stead in the median between the two parties. Mortimer glowered at the abominable amalgamation. All it took is a trivial three seconds of that volcanic, torrid scowl to lug the tectonic plates of his attention far afield from the unfaltering noirette across the grass. Only two opponents challenged Gary now. The planet-struck Mortimer Junior and the deficient Man in Blue, the youthful Griffon’s aim growing more and more tenuous by the second. 

Discord lounged in the air with folded legs above the median between the disjunct factions with contrasting hands laced behind his head. 

Levi’s stance and grip waned. The Surly Gang’s bolstered. Discord’s immoderate gleeful jubilation stayed firm at the apex of any ubiquitous ranking or leaderboard, glorying in the comfort of his unprocurable throne at the pristine summit. 

The undismayed, resolute stalemate throttled their feeble hopes with Herculean hands. Binding its vigorous tungsten fingers around their infirm throats, callously wringing out the final lifeless crumbs of yearnings for a better tomorrow. Their aspirations for benevolence to stand alone on the battlefield dashed. That infantile pipe dream for valiance to briskly predominate the unending malignance grew ever-dimmer.

In the face of the endless strife he ushered in for a reason nobody was certain even existed, much less one that was anchored in intelligible motives, Discord chuckled to himself. Absent-mindedly regarding the tooth-speckled sky of his own loathsome creation. Lying in waiting with bated exultant breath? Simply reveling in the twistedly beautiful ungodly madness he haplessly wrought upon the earth? His intentions as lucid as mangrove-infested swamp water. Whatever was simmering in that demented mind, the lawless maelstrom of thoughts thankfully corralled by a cage of bone, it was far from pleasant. 

‘Is this…the way it’s supposed to be?’ Thought Levi. ‘Am I destined to do nothing? What am I supposed to do? Fight a god with a sword I can hardly use? Get shot in the head? Gosh, where’s Twilight when I need her. And Alan…’ Levi closed his eyes hard at the thought.

“Any more brilliant ideas, Mister Cronell?”

‘Our fearless leader. What a f****n’ joke.’ Mortimer chided in his head. Embittered excoriation befouling the palisades of his pounding skull.

“Shut it and focus, Mortimer.” Dread snapped.

A sonorous grumble of a teeming raft of dauntless hooves dawned upon the arid soundscape. To absolutely nobody’s surprise, the exact amount of sets and the punctilious pedigree of them was varnished in thoroughgoing ambiguity. Not a mite of that baritone growl accorded them a hint of leisure, not the slightest shaving of a clue or an adynamic nudge in the veritable direction. All they could discern, their judgement endowed with a deprivation of doubt, was the singular nigh-inconspicuous error in the invariant channel of sound. Out of the growl of cloven hooves brutishly battering the soil and stamping the feral unkempt grass in the Everfree’s organs, one sprinting set of extremities was a deviant.

No one was quite sure what it was or what gave it the identity of the black sheep out of that constant unvarying wave. All except Levi Cronell. Recognizing the harried footsteps of a human being’s five-toed feet anywhere. 

The grumbling heightened second by second. At the fourth beat, Discord’s floppy ears and their pastel-pink velvety lining erected as though governed by a mind removed from the central infrastructure of the god’s infernal brain. His two horns, one an ivory-white antler and the other an obscene tusk akin to an azure tree root bursting from his scalp, twitched like canty antennas. Abruptly sparking with a pulsific fervor arriving destitute of a discernable herald. For a split-second, he gazed out at the sprawling tenebrous immensity of the Everfree exceeding far behind the rear of the camel-hump-like verdant hill. The boundless caliginous expanse of stygian bark and naked rangy branches shooting high and wide in every direction, booming from the craggy crown of the trees. And from the broad mouth between two walls of those emaciated trees, stampeding down the tan path of soil like a silt tongue flattened against the earth, the possessors of the incessant bumble bolted into the gaping limelight. Not one aspect or feature of their courageous beings was secreted behind any inconspicuous curtain or enigmatic mantle. Every detail, from their temeritous hearts to the brassbound coat of impregnable mettle galvanizing them, stayed far afield from shadow, basked in the all-encompassing light of Discord’s usurped kingdom. 

The brunete crinked his neck and threw an inquisitive emerald over his heaving inundated shoulder. Brows furrowed, sweat-studded forehead wrinkled in inscrutable focus, mind feverishly sprinting through a soupy haze of fatigue and unutterable exhaustion. Notwithstanding the combatant wielding his pilfered Schofield across the isle, the Man in Blue couldn’t help but stare at the upcoming traffic of hoofsteps beating that pale soil path within an inch of its life. The grumbling of hooves drew nearer. Every blink beckoned an increase in volume. Each beat of his stammering heart ushered an augmentation. Discord altered his position, flipping his body on its axis and standing on some unseeable platform. Balling his fists giddily like a child with a glut of Christmas presents honed in his sight. 

“Ooooh! New visitors! This welcoming committee must be marvelous!” Discord chirped, his pestilent voice bordering on an elated squeal. “We can’t waste anymore time. The game is almost ready!”

“We?” Gary snapped, cocking a dark brow at his partner. “What the hell am I gon-”

Discord snapped. A flaunt of yellow-and-black smog devoured the two and the pair vanished. Their wake characterized by the sorrowful, egregious twain of cadavers and the molars and canines drifting without an aim or purpose steeped in grandeur. From the corner of his eye, the clouds peppered the cyan scape upchucked their pent-up…brown rainfall? Chocolate-scented petrichor fogged the soon-to-be battlefield. 

Marvelous. That word reminded the male of Rarity. In that moment, his psyche was besieged by a voracious hailstorm of sorrowful, bereaved prospects and titillations. The all-too-possible manifold of grim realities. Kismets conquered by untold, uncleansable misery. If that day was his last and he spent his final hours of living penned within the adamantine demarcations of that desolate assailed museum, the sheer myriad of grief-choked regrets and anguishes wouldn’t leave a crumb of his mind to spare. 

Before the patchworked gang was able to thoroughly dread the introduction of new fighters into this high-strung makeshift colosseum, the rush’s crescendo had risen. What poured forth from the path could be ascertained and examined beneath any color of lenses. Whether rose-tinted or blacker than the inkiest of nights. A celestial gift from the ethereal reaches of divinity or a curse sent to huck a wrench into the churning cogs of their standoff. 

The unperturbed Twilight Sparkle spearheaded the bold valiant vanguard that spilled from the stale mouth of the Everfree. Lavender forelegs beavering away and hammering the dirt. Somehow wrangling the unforetold exertion of bolting through the vortex of dark cadaverous timber and unseen horrors beyond the jagged skyline blighting every centimeter of the Forest. Head slanted and teeth gnashed with her amethyst horn pointed forward like a raring Spartan’s javelin. A few inches behind her, the remainder of her stouthearted battalion galloped vivaciously in undefiled unison. The hooked brim of Applejack’s well-worn heirloom atop her head flapped and jerked in the effluxing chilled gales. Rarity’s masterly groomed velvety mane soaring in the oncoming zephyrs. Cooling the glaze of sweat thincoating their frames with every slap of the careless winds, as though being rubbed by a glove of ice. At the tail end of the regime was the lanky Alan Sizemore. The sole proof to Levi that the existence of answered prayers was exponentially more than a sophomoric pipe dream. The raven-haired man was inarguably passed the worst hand by the unpitying hands of Fate. Blighted by a patent sickly veneer of glistening scintillation. Tattoos of dried dirt cemented onto the flesh of his jungly forearms and, hidden beneath the sleeve of his right arm, a laceration barely escaped his sight. Hovering above the ravel of ponies was the spry Rainbow Dash. Not wasting a sliver of a moment of that day to exercise her ironclad wings and robust aptitudes in the art of innate aviation.

Levi’s heart burst with an affable felicity he ne’er thought was conceivable amidst this plight.

Twilight and Co snapped their sights on the standoff atop the hill and revved the thrusters of their hooves once more. Darting with a force Levi didn’t think they were capable of merely dreaming about, much less roping it into the spacious limelight of reality. Breaking the chains of meager imagination with a beatific blessing of the universe’s most appraised treasure. 

Life. 

The very thing that Levi’s resurrected past sought to eliminate with skull-splitting bloodthirst. 

Twilight was the first to reach the hill’s bulbous crown. Graven onto her solemn unfaltering countenance was an ireful, contemptuous masquerade of the uttermost superlative of every emotion carved into her visage. Anger? Masterclass. Undeniable. A twisted species of grief? Conspicuous yet far from truant. Sorrow? It haunted every nook, crevasse, and soft curve of her skull. Sorrowful for what was the sole mystery about the lavender bookkeeper. Out of the verbose grimoire of implacable ghastly events that had transpired in the span of a scant few hours, bearing witness to Twilight Sparkle in the throes of a stentorian rage fought tooth-and-nail for the spot of number one. 

In the paltry handful of seconds he saw the Mane Six upon their seething advent, the glaring before-and-after images flashed before his strained globes. All minute morsels of equivalence dovetailing the two chromos together were unmendably dashed. In all flagrant reality, Levi wasn’t arrantly keen on whether or not that final amiable facsimile was a vestige of a character long lost. Slain in the vigorous upswarm of Discord’s Babelic machinations. Her congeniality sacrificed on the altar of undenotable brain-rattling chaos. He could only hope Twilight’s indefinable chagrin was a vestige ignited and spurred by the ongoing travesty and not an abiding lineament of her soul. Even if it was, even if that fleeting conversation that morning was a simulacrum of Twilight’s intoxicating benevolence, she wouldn’t be the sole victim of a precipitous alteration of their character.

It was facilely apparent to the Man in Blue he wasn’t the only one who had changed that day. Hell, if the mighty leaden hand of unstanchable change had cruelly visited all of his friends and family on that grisly day, surprise would be the absolute last contender to enter his buzzing coliseum of emotion. 

Levi and Alan bartered disquieted stares. A mutual acknowledgment of the satisfied pining for each other’s innocuous safety and the burning void of worry swallowing their irises. Their ineluctable, scathing anxiety for the near future not only for the world at large and the alarming azimuth Discord viciously steered Equestria into, but for the hapless civilians in the village just a few clicks behind them. Through the unending bushy palisades of dying trees and blackened beds of leaves, ignorant to the sensation of good fortune, Ponyville sat as a bumbling hub of the peril they’d all grown all-too-intimate with. 

The stalemate, as briskly as the malicious presence of the gorgonian duo seconds prior, ceased to exist. No remnant abandoned by their unforeseen departure was indicative of their present whereabouts. Not a breath of a clue nor the slimmest breadth of a declarative signal that ripped the veil off of anything. The baron of chaos had materialized into the ether and trawled Gary Demonio in tow. Much to the skyscraping, unpresaged luck of every bantam centimeter of Equestria, whether they were conscientious of the parlous agent of grievous detriment or not. 

The unicorn’s visage softened. Wroth ire of an supposed gauge decaying posthaste, matching the haggard dying heartbeat of Discord’s dour presence. The allies followed suit. Primed handguns fell into their holsters. A repeater was draped over Clear Sky’s back and fastened between her tout shoulder blades. The singularity among the variegated roster of weaponry, a crystalline gladius, was relinquished to its scabbard by palpitating hands. 

Alan and Levi embraced. Incomprehensible relief and assuagement that forever trounced the measly exploit of English description pulsed from their heaving glittering frames. All were bereft of their arms sans Mortimer Surly. Standing tall and leery amidst the hive of ponies swimming voluptuously in the golden sea of succor. Gazing down at the beauty of reunion from the crowns of their ivory towers. Talons roped around the grip of his Schofield, fastidiously scanning the champaign beneath the shade of his pork pie. 

“You okay, brother?”

“I…I think I’m fine.” Levi spluttered. “Please tell me you all got the Elements.”

Twilight stepped toward the duo. The Surly Gang seemed to mimic and gravitated towards the Man in Blue. Two worlds collided. The Mane Six and the roughshod outlaws. Mortimer, as he often did, stayed excluded. 

“We got to Canterlot as fast as we could but they were gone. Celestia had no idea where they could’ve gone…until he showed up.” Spoke the unicorn. 

“Discord?”

She nodded glumly. “Yes. Celestia told us to play along with his games and meet him here. She assumed you would’ve found him by now.”

“I certainly did. What the hell do we now?”

“The only option we have is to wait. See what he has in store for us.” Twilight looked around. “Without those Elements, we might as well hand him the keys to Canterlot.”

“Is Ponyville okay? How about the farm?” 

“Everythin’s fine, Levi,” Applejack chimed. “We were more worried about you than anythin’.”

“I’ll be fine. It’s just the ones back home that I’m worried about. They’re not so gifted.”

“We wouldn’t have left if we thought they were in danger, Levi.”

Levi massaged his crinkled forehead with sweat-drenched fingers. Kneading the flesh’s wrinkles with the sodden pads of his aching digits. 

“Who are they anyway?” Rainbow Dash inquired with an inquisitive hoof jabbed towards the gang. 

Levi hunched forward with hands seized by a quagmire of fearful sweat entrenched to his knees. He sporadically heaved like a hopeless asthma victim, each colossal breath a shotgun blast of oxygen. Lungs scorching. His ribcage metamorphosed into a rattling basket of sweltering, red-hot glowing coals. “We got a lot of irons in the fire, Rainbow, that’s the least important.”

“I’ll tell you what, Mister, standin’ around with our thumbs in our asses ain’t much more important neither. Are y’all seein’ the same s**t I did?” Mortimer exclaimed.

“Of course we have!”

“Then, the f**k are we sittin’ around for?” Mortimer hissed. “You folks waitin’ to die?”

Notwithstanding the callous detraction of his reaction time, perpetually derogate by the barbaric asphyxiating hands by the indiscriminate twin evils, time and age, Mortimer was the principal observer of the following events. The first being amidst the bounteous party to notice the panoptic heart-punching extent of Discord’s grandiose contrivance. 

Foremost, the hedge maze and the battered remnants of the old museum fell prey to the spacious stomach of that yellow-black fog. Esuriently devoured bereft of a minute crumb of mercy or relent. In a blink, faster than the beat of a hummingbird’s blurred wings, the monolithic edifices were nothing exceeding ephemeral images stamped upon the gang’s cortexes. A fugitive evanescent denizen of the dimming short-term memory shared between every flummoxed member of the calculated ramshackle strike team. To believe their absurd circumstances was to accept the all-too-veridical existence of farcical, once implausible entities and hideous conglomerations. Giving credence to dreadful unremitting continuance of chthonic creatures that thirsted for nought sans the blameless malleable placidity and serendipity perforated on a bushel of iron spikes. Crucified to a frigid steel wall and forsook by the callous barbaric perpetrators, their stomachs packed to the gills with all the septic anarchy martyrdom. Exceeding the broad flanges of their most uncorraled dreams by leaps and bounds. 

Secondly, an ungodly roar like two galaxies stringently bound by velcro were haphazardly divorced drilled the ears of all who attended that terrifical, profligate pageant. Seconds stretched to years. Time succumbed to the mastodonic might strangling every phantasm-like ghost of life from the shaft of its throat. Denuded of all previous meaning. Tactlessly subjugated to drudge through a fresh existence novel in all the wrong ways the human mind could conjure and subsequently dread. Doomed to be one of Discord’s eternal playthings beset within an inventory of his countless dragooned trinkets. Among them was, seemingly, the very pliant substance of reality. One he employed to omit the hill they all stood upon and flatten the humped grass. Not an abrupt materialization into vacant crystal clear air, moreso adopting the nature of a posthaste deflation. The element of its steep absence anchored in filterless, denotative reality, the hill departing like a flattened whoopie cushion. Dragging in tow the derisive ludicrous clamor of faux flatulence.

As though betwixt a colony of fortissimo thunderheads during an ear-rupturing symphony of garish storms, the tonitruous yowl sounded deep in the canals of Discord’s grudging audience. Blighting the newly formed smooth field was a sprawling menagerie of prodigious hedge walls booming from the soil and rocketing out of the calm sea of groomed grass at head-splitting velocities. All rectangular and bearing the same identical articles of features and characteristics. Round square corners, effortlessly pluperfect surfaces, no loose branches or ramifying buds shooting from the verdant palisades of foliage. Not an imperfection to be seen by even the most Argus-eyed of beings. Unless the slightest errors were extant upon its face, clandestine and privy to the stunned paladins, then the rancid title of erroneous would ne’er fall upon the mantle of Discord’s…whatever its name was.

Kingdom? His citadel? A labyrinth with a secreted Minotaur chained and beating at the walls inside its spacious heart?

The group were penned by stately walls immune to the eye’s puny abilities at unequipped measurements. A startled Levi, somehow, by the auspicious interposition of divinity beyond his premature understandings, tamed his chilled skeleton from bounding out of the garments of his flesh. Teeth clattering. Jaws clapping together. Soaked skin struck icy by the gellid frothing gales. Incisors banging against his bottom teeth like the clashing of shields. He jumped back from the onset and scaled the monolith, noting the ease in its undertaking of arrantly blocking the sun. They all stretched nearly forty feet in the air. The only one out of the unplumbed immensity of the leafdom creation that bore any discernible contrasts to its brethren was the entrance to the metropolis. An arched hedge gateway with a scarlet flag atop its crest waving with a coveted hint of hospitality. Yet, if the day’s tumultuous events were an indication of anything, seemingly every facet of every inanimate object holstered the capabilities of unforetold evil and austere ruination.

Every weapon-bearing combatant headlong brandished their opted weapon. Shooting irons gripped with a newfound vitality. Hammers draw and raring to clobber the rear of a blood-parched bullet. Circumspect fighters surveyed their pistols for any formerly unobserved discreet blemishes or deviations to its pristine ironwood and metal. A prudent Tacitus examined his sawed-off and emerged bootless. Not the smallest variety of a vexatious tincture defaced its body. 

“Ain’t this gettin’ better and better, huh, Mister?” Mortimer chided. His unwarranted glower charred the shadow beneath his hat’s brim. A turbid curtain of shade, respite from the unabashed flare of the sun, sorely faltered in its exertions to dull his ire. 

“You think I knew this was bound to happen!?” The male exclaimed. “What was I supposed to do? Consult an oracle for you?”

“Find us a way to get outta this bullshit! I expected the ‘Man in Blue’ to have an inkling of knowledge in his head!” A glinting bead of saliva jetted from the sickle-end of his sickly yellow beak.

The two faced each other fully. Visages separated by two inches of vacuous space. Selected armaments tightened in bone-grinding grips. Levi’s countenance mutated to a smoldering cauldron of churning volcanic rock. The valleys of wrinkles upon Mortimer’s features threatened to emanate embers.  

The Man in Blue’s voice plummeted to a bassy grumble. Lip crimped into a snarl. “You think now is a good time to talk about this? I thought you were smarter than that.”

“Don’t test me, boy. I’ve been in this s**t longer than you’ve been alive.”

“You wanna put it to the test?”

He enriched his grip on the pearlescent bespoken grip with a weathery avid talon ne’er straying far from the icy scintillating gold of his Schofield. Hammer primed and embattled, digits gagging on the ponderous resistless desire he habitually fed for decades. The yearning to snap the slender barrel at a red-hot pace towards an unsuspecting visage. Ramming a blistering bullet smack-dab in the center of the temerarious Man in Blue. The very same who dared to gratify himself and imbibe from the hearty profligate chalice of acidic sin. Reveling in the cardinal iniquity of vehement unabashed demurral. 

Mortimer leaned oh-so-close, threatening to singe his antediluvian flesh on the ardent flames of fury quilling beneath his opposition’s countenance. Levi could discern the nettling clack of his beak’s keen hooked ends with every word. “If you knew who’s crossed me and ain’t able to tell the tale, you’d be shittin’ your briches, boy.”

Levi’s indignant leer wavered and caved beneath the insurmountable bulk of his convergent haranguing. Eye contact utterly ephemeral. Stare dragged to the grass and maroon boots parked before the Griffon’s claws, curled and skewering the unsinning ground. 

“D****t, Mort!” Dread strode and harpooned a hoof into his acolyte’s shoulder. The elder stumbled a couple strides backwards, uprooting a minute handful of dice-sized gizzards of dirt, yet it was uber-inferior in comparison to the gluttonous flames of wrath dining upon his heart. That inferno he’d become all-too-intimate with for decades. A friend of the most unconstructive breed. One he, in spite of his Herculean efforts, refused to forsake him. “What’s wrong with you!? You really think now’s a good time for that?”

Mortimer’s taut face and fastened beak bellowed volumes to his partner. A charade he had been on the receiving end of countless times, besting any number cogitable by any entity. The Griffon’s huff vociferated the simulated disingenuous catharsis he had prayed for. 

“Guys, guys, relax. I got this.” Rainbow exclaimed. She gave her cyan wings a laborious boastful flap, siccing a palliating kahuna of undiluted crisp air from her satiny feathers. “Discord must’ve forgotten I got these! I’ll get us out of here in no time.”

Twilight grinned, flaunting her bona fide unfiltered apparatus of assuagement upon her twinkling features. A genuine rendition of the glistening hope swarming and tin-plating her heart that maybe, just by the hair of the slim chance resurrected by Rainbow’s innate talent, they’d all live to see tomorrow. At the very least, emancipate the poor souls from Discord’s hellish contrivances and provide them with the opportunity to live and love for another day. 

All it took was a paltry wing beat for the mad conductor of this meretricious circus ring to bat an eye. And the ire that was caught catapulted thousands of wrenches in the brittle gears of the operation. Rainbow Dash hardly moved a singular foot in the air before that vexing voice thundered and rolled across the crests of the maze walls. 

“Oh, poor Rainbow Dash. I thought you had more morals than that. No cheating allowed!”

A snap reverberated. In a fraction of a second, her wings were devoured by the black-yellow smoke.

Fluttershy’s wings weren’t spared. Neither were Twilight and Rarity’s horns. 

A clod of smoke dawned at the hooves of the outlaws. Weapons rakishly pilfered in the blink of an eye. Left with nothing more than empty holsters and a brassbound grip on meager air. Mortimer balled his talons and rocketed an incensed fist into the soil, barking a tawdry jetstream of caustic expletives. 

Lastly, there was Levi. The last of the champions to fall prey. That dastardly orb of smog arrived, swallowed his sword whole from between his robust fingers, and departed with no window for reprisal. His hands swung to his side and clutched his empty scabbard with widened flummoxed irises pendulating to every corner of their encampment.

“How the…How…What!?”

“There we go! All better.” Discord chirped. “Appears this camaraderie won’t be very fun after all.” He furtively sniggered. “Why don’t we fix that.” 

Another snap. 

Fog enveloped each centimeter of flesh and bone belonging to the cohort in a trice. Psyches indescribably battered by a twain of fulgent flashes. The darkest umbrageous variation of stygian and nauseating neon yellow. Discord’s infamous docile goons. His rapacious lackeys equipped with nothing more grandiose than stomachs bigger than the most spacious of tornado shelters and an abject deprivation of morals. No lucid understanding of the behemothic scope of Discord’s diabolic pastimes. Not a hint of an intuition to how broad their role truly was in the inception of his desire’s manifestations.

Levi jolted. Wrenched from the garish ephemeral slideshow of ungraspable colors and sensations the male couldn’t possibly identify, even if he bore a million years to spare and beaver away. He startled to a wobbly stance. Balancing himself on his begrimed boots, blinking hard and innumerable, grimacing at the whetted spearheads of the sun’s enfilade of lambent javelins. Volleying down from the scorching golden cradle with no heed to the piteous man’s righteous plight for clemency. 

The reality was clear to him now. No vivid enough beseechment existed across the countless plains and valleys of a disarray-ravished Equestria that could ever beckon the illustrious, allaying hand of mercy. Requisite elysian assuagement subsisted on a separate plane, segregated from the bastardized desecrated translation of the world. One that bumbled against the unsympathetic might of the clysmian, puissant adversity. Struggling to levy an infirm half-hearted imposition in the face of the barnstorming asperity. 

Irrespective of the panoptic pandemonium’s extensity, there was an inherent quality about the word that invariably gratified the Man in Blue. 

Struggle. He always favored that word over the vast laundry list of converses with bleaker connotations. The superlative among his likes of the term being the glaring indisputable possibility, a high one at that, of an unwonted contingent rearing its head. 

And if there was one quality about the male punctuated in that frenetic epoch of crisis, when even the most gracile of likelihoods assumed centerstage, Hell would be bathed in ice before he turned a deaf ear to it. The prospect of propitious fortune slathering them in undiluted benevolence was lissom, no doubts arose to duel that sentiment. All he had to do was act. 

The fog chewed the brunete in its formless maw, an insurgent to reality’s grassroots laws and basic principles, and spat him from its blackening maw. Levi stood at a miscellaneous corner of the maze. Seized by a merciless daze, dizzied by the unfettered immensity of his stupefaction. His world spun. He flexed his hands and winced at the incommode buzzing of soft static in his bones, as though each facet of his anatomy fell asleep. Despair perforated his core. A panicked palm rocketed to his scabbard and patted the scabrous, hard-weathered leather. Delivering countless prayers to the heavens that the robbery of his blade was merely a trick of the light. An otiose mirage with no roots in reality. His sword was gone. 

“F**k!”

“This is more like it!” Discord chuckled with a battery of elated golf claps. Voice washing over the entirety of the maze, not one negligible centimeter of foliage spared from his odious dialogue. Every word chiseled a virulent grimace into the Man in Blue’s indignant countenance. 

“Let’s have some fun, shall we?”

---

Far above the shaggy yet adeptly curried monoliths of spirited vernation, radiating with an intoxicating vibrance that stood as a rarefied delicacy amidst the hellscape of insuperable anarchy, two thrones sat upon a static molar-shaped cloud. The incessant, exorbitant deluges of cocoa-scented droplets eclipsed by cessation, yet the bewitching fragrance persisted long after its surcease. 

The saccharine torrents lived bereft of an indicator of when the perpetual monotony of its intrinsic purported trod into surfeit territory. However, when pitted against the stagnant odor of the Everfree’s fey vastidity, an arrant triumph was plain sailing. That workaday malador effusing from the manifold of umbrageous nooks and enigmatic pockets bespattering the arid scape. Desolate like the craterous topography of an undiscovered moon, ambiguous provenance nestled far out of a perceivable orbit. Untouched by accursed beings sedulously molded with untiring hands in a pluperfect image. Manufactured to operate beneath the mantle of a stringent synchronous assemblage of morals and obligations. Untainted by earthly virtues and the countless species of sin blighting that plane of existence, formerly spared by the rigorous vices bedeviling its crust. The two entities residing in the open air, flagrant deviants to physics' elementary laws, were cardinal examples of that sect of mankind. 

Immoral. 

Noisome.

Unabashed pinnacles of the utter incomprehensible malevolence ramifying in the flawless matrix of their hearts. The consummate cesspool fashioned into a jerry-built breeding ground. The inscrutable malignance’s influence spreading farther than the nerveless bulwarks of their rib cages could efficaciously stifle. Even the mere thought was enough to stir their bones into a lethargic stupor. 

But now, the impeccable window for opportunity went unutilized to the nth degree. In the stead of fiery opposition towards the brutish annexation of chaos and its hellacious disciples, all that stood was otiose inertness. Was it an act of God? Was it merely nature that this burgeoning cradle of peril, a blooming skirmish that placed Equestria and its civilians at the gallows of inexorable doom, wasn’t pinged on their radars? Little to no disobservance cropping its egregious head amongst their lens of perception. Perhaps an errorless universe existed in the ungraspable vastidity of the cosmos where its authoritarian denizens were strangers to the alien prospect of ignorance. Immune to the wool buckled around their eyes. Blinded not by a conspicuous drought of diligence towards the aegis of the enervated and tenuous, but their inaction spurred by the cracked lenses of their perception. 

Maybe, if given the slightest inkling that this calamity hid in the covert shadows at the forefront of possibility, the ones who vowed allegiance to the assailable citizens would’ve sharpened their senses. Regardless of the lamentation coloring the potential deplores, ruminating over a bounty of miserable what-ifs was a recipe with no beneficial byproducts. If anyone would be left breathing to brood, that is.

Upon two thrones resting on rigid blocks of open air reveling in their shameless insurrection against all rulings of common sense sat the two unbowed conductors. Swaggering mutineers to the basic, predominant constitution of logic followed with the utmost scruple by the aggregate of Equestria. Sitting abreast and facing the effervescing maze humming with a sinister flavor of despair were the architects of that harrowing day. 

Gary Demonio lounged in the chair crafted to the specifications of his vision and granted on a silver platter. All it took was the paltry snap of his fingers for his staunch amorphous minion to stand at attention. Rushing posthaste with an untold fervor to serve his hard-and-fast superior, darting even brisker to allocate beatific succor to his master’s avid apostle. Gary fell prey to the vassal’s quotidian process, not the slightest margin of time apportioned for a proper reaction or comprehension of the event. Swallowed down the broad chasm of its throat and fettered in its voracious gut, swiftly ejected almost twelve-feet above the crawling, loathsome menagerie. Looking down their noses at the teeming vivarium and sniggered at its beetling occupants, zipping back and forth down the Kafkaesque aisles of Lincoln green foliage like witless rats shepherded by the aroma of cheese. Dashing with a harried, outré haphazard around the sharpest of corners and nettling dead ends as though the alien prospect of treasured emancipation from peril hung in the teetering balance. In the most veritable manner, nothing shorter than the truth passing the rigorous screening of Discord’s psyche, not a modicum of that yearned-for salvation withstood his machinations.

The raven-haired sod lounged deep in the snug endowment bespoke ad-hoc for his solace, remitted to the Draconooqus’ vindictive collaborator on a satin pillow. A vast ostentatious throne forged from the indisputable superlative of the earth’s boundless troves of shimmering gold. It's cobalt pepful cushion embroidered with a baroque diamond-patterned stitch ornamented with the ravishing inlay of a vivid gilt thread. How that nomadic firmless clod of gaudy smoke upchucked a byproduct molded with the utmost of hairsplitting detail was a limitless enigma to the male. Perfectly forged to the punctilious specifications of his broad frame and panoptic shoulders, adhering to the myriad of succinct facets. A string of scintillating iridescent rubies shaped like diamonds snaked around the circumference of each back post and coalesced into the apple of his eye. Two gilded skulls rested atop both posts with a twain of penny-sized opalescent jewels stationed in the center of those stygian cavernous sockets. Wrenchful legs extended far into the spacious air. Rills of the nippy zephyr flowing through the holes in his tatterdemalion pants and cooling the dense coat of sweat. Beneath his grass-stained boots was another soldier of the enfilade of grotesque, baleful requests beseeched by the noirette. A wide footrest fashioned from veritable bone. Four bleached femurs for legs with bar-like slats of slender fibulas forming the grisly perch. Last but certainly not least, the pinnacle of his desires deprived of an equivalent rival dangled from the bottom of the throne. A pale chandelier given life by the dismantled dregs of a legion of skeletons. Swaying in the tranquil agile gale and conducting a sickly harmonious jingle with each collision like Lucifer’s wind chimes. That indubious breeze enslaved to be a mere conduit for that haunting tune bestowed a singular objective in its ephemeral existence. To gallop down every channel with an urgency to beguile the minds of all with a twain of ears to listen. 

His right hand lolled off the brink of the golden arm rest and his black-metal Beretta lolled in his insuperable grasp, twitching sporadically with the every thoughtless jerk of his index. Slummock barrel jabbed indolently towards the immensity of the straggly maze. Craggy digit gingerly caressing the sleek gelid steel of the trigger, reveling in the fleeting needles of cold breaching the grumose callous annealing his finger. Hand jittering in macabre increments of jubilation born and germinated in the furthest reaches of Hell’s spotted lakes of slow-churning iniquity. He leered down at the muddling, mind-splitting lattice of monolithic bushes and eminent obelisks of vivacious foliage, stifling a sordid chortle at the pathetic lot scurrying within its lofty demarcations. Grinning wickedly with a smile maleficent enough to chill the ashen heart of the king of Hell himself. 

He situated the tip of his tongue between twin sets of incisors, gently grinding their edges against the seared flab of salmon-pink. Drying ever-fasted with the passing of felicitous seconds. Becoming more and more redolent of a sun-baked strip of arid muscle flicking the posteriors of his teeth, raked against the sweltering coals of an unforgiving thirst. A bounteous manifold of dour comorbidities ran along every ravaged nook and alcove sculpted into his threadbare frame. The genesis of a monstrous hunger blooming in the raucous void of his stomach. Swatting its budding razorlike claws across its fleshy demarcations. An atrocious drought lashing his throat, every word and stray breath scoring the dessicated walls like obsidian knives. Wizardly, irrespective of the innumerable infernal comorbidities walloping every square inch of his timeworn chassis, a stringent Cheshire beam remained soldered to his mirthful countenance. Irises persisting in its tireless, unflagging crusade of roaring with a lambent stomach-wringing exhilaration. A horrific amplitude of joy that most beings wielding a sane mind and untainted heart failed to fathom experiencing amidst that unfurling caricature of madness. His heart, oh that dastardly instrument that kept his veins buzzing and his morals sauntering down the road of irreparable debauchery, thrummed. Rhythmic. Heartily. Booming. A blessing to the airborne duo, a curse in every tangible way to the aggregate of the population. 

Discord snapped from beside him. In two flickers of fog, a twain of stemmed wine glasses materialized from beyond the world’s substrate of everyday sense and reasoning. Filling the brim of each glass bowl was a soupy vinous liquid brandishing a high-octane pungent aroma of grapes. One that somehow vaulted over the stirring canal of rushing wind and besieged the aspirating nostrils of Gary Demonio. 

Discord pressed his back deep into the prodigious back of his throne. An imposing, gallant opus with a deep ash-gray metal base and arrant armrests. Upon the faces of the seat’s sides, viscerally inscribed into the poignant hue of the steel, were imperceptible lines and patterns. Baroque? Without a fleeting ghost of a doubt. Unbeknownst? Absolutely. Redolent of the fleur-de-lis one would anticipate seeing carved into the hilt of a queen’s gilded sword. Notched into the corners of each panel were small diamond-shaped rubies, the largest one implanted in the center and bulging out nearly two inches. Corners knife-sharp and contours acerb. The throne’s spine stretched eight feet in the sky and a thin burgundy cushion ran almost the full-scale breath. At the back’s crown was an upside-down prominent crescent of that ashen iron inwrought with that novel pattern. Two rubies as faux eyes planted in the steel and gunmetal grey antlers branching out of the corners, shooting and ramifying into the atmosphere like unchecked mangrove roots. The face of the top appeared fanged with a triangle of metal overlaying the top of the bordeaux cushion.

“Do tell me if this is all to your liking?” Discord chimed, extending a glass to his comrade.

Gary graciously accepted the gesture. He gave Discord no more than a millisecond of his eye contact before the maze reigned in his unbitted focus. “F**k does it matter? I thought this was your thing?”

The scent of fermented grape staunched him and he grimaced as the brim kissed his bone-dry lips. It was heavenly salvation to the adust, withered cove of his mouth. The interiors of his cheeks like sandstone now awash with the savor of red wine. Tasting as though it was plucked directly from a teeming colony of aging barrels in the cobweb-infested belly of an Italian castle. 

“Well, if it wasn’t for you, I wouldn't be here, my friend. I owe you at least some of the spoils.”

“You’re damn right you do.” Gary perched his elbow on the armrest and roosted his chin upon his knuckles. Gaze never swerving, his spectation eternal. In spite of the onpour of whistling frigid winds, he never blinked. 

“Any requests? I’m all ears.” He took a swig from his glass and the liquid’s behavior baffled. The volume drained bottom first, yet Gary couldn’t bother to notice. “Whatever you desire. The world is your oyster right now!”

Gary corded his eyebrows. Not a bantam morsel of his centralized attention permitted to the chatting Draconequus. His almighty focus laser-sighted on the inchoate maze, twittering with the frenzied, nonplussed cries and shouts of its denizens. If one were to stumble upon the airborne duo, they’d be forgiven for assuming that depraved punishment for fictitious wrongdoings was steeped by a malevolent hex. One that pillaged the indivisible and impregnable concentration of all who gazed upon its loathsome contents. 

“Anything I-”

Discord interjected and pointed a lion’s finger at his side profile. “Within reason.”

Gary breathed deep and, for the first time since they departed the betrodden vibrant ground, wrested his globes from the hedge maze. Staring unwinking deep into the all-encompassing cerulean vista, looking beyond the spangled patchwork of torrential teeth-modeled clouds. The unceasing emesis of a decade’s worth of saccharine rain bashing the unwitting earth beneath. Ignorant and unforewarned to the wanton assault of the chocolate deluge sweeping across the graceless lands they cherished to a degree nigh-unfathomable to most. 

The breeze was laden with the substantial scent of cocoa, a fragrance he aspirated and gloried in. His already jovial countenance painted with a panoramic beam extending from one ear to the other, augmenting the robust, incorruptible merriment. His exhale trembled with an upheaval of glee. Bones vibrating and singing with a jubilation bred in the chthonic chambers of Tartarus, never designed to be wrenched from its infernal home and witnessed by the unaccustomed eyes of the human race. Any sapient race for that matter. 

Something twinkled deep in his agog stare. The singular eyes of unplumbed, ceaseless voids. Pinpricked by that enigmatic singularity. An unabased paradigm of arcana that manifestly outstripped Discord’s capabilities of intricate deciphering. It was a skull-twisting riddle with an inky solution he couldn’t wreathe his covetous digits around, notwithstanding his mountainous exertions towards the contrary.

“I’ve got a few ideas.” The schema of his words went unblushing.

“I don’t know if I like that look, Gary. What does your mind desire, my friend?”

Finally, a feat Discord seldom reckoned as assertable in neither this lifetime nor the following was delivered unto fruition. He consummated the daunting quandary of reaching prehension over his comrade’s sight. The peccable lineaments of his diabolical visage exasperated and washed in the limelight. Appearing as though the raven-haired man flaunted his haunting rejoice with a lurid magnitude of swank never-before-seen by the God of Chaos. 

“Get me inside.”

Discord cocked a brow. “Have you lost your marbles?”

“It’s not that big of a request. Get me in there for a few minutes and I’ll show what real chaos is.”

“I thought we understood where we stood on this.” Discord rejoindered, relishing in another petite sip of full-blooded wine. The liquid diverged from physics's intolerant rules once more yet no concern was allocated. “You can’t have good-ol’ fashioned chaos with a party of corpses. Whose to say you won’t spoil this the instant you step in there.”

“All I’ve wanted since the moment you met me was that shithead! You really think any of those horses mean a damn thing to me?” Gary exclaimed. 

He harpooned a wayworn finger at the maze, the head of his digit falling upon the scurrying Man in Blue. His features were a hazy paradox mobled in arrant mystique, although one austere immoderate sensation pullulated across the expanse of his rangy chassis. Radiating from the rattling architecture of his skeleton, undeniable and stentorian, demonstrably superseding any conceivable bandwidth it could utilize to moderate itself. 

Fear.

Discord was swiftly encapsulated in the throes of an eerily similar sensation. His own twisted contortion of fright engineered with pin-point ironclad precision to decimate his ambitions and grails. Any diminutive splinter of muscle ladled into his aspiration hucked into the yawning mouth of eddying fire and scarlet coals. A gaping cauldron of smoldering ruination expropriated by his partner. The selfsame that buzzed like jars chock-full of bottled lightning and glowing with saplessly encapsulated mirth. Irises glowing in the enervated owl light of his salient jubilation. Not entirely divulged to the baron of anarchy et far afield from discreet. To say it was anything bearing even the slenderest of semblances to inobtrusive would be a sidesplitting jape worth its livelong weight in gold. 

Discord took another sip. Another thin rill of velvet wine slithered down the rangy column of his throat. At least one manner of thirst that day would be arrantly satiated. His torrid, Tartarean hunger unequaled by all imbibed themselves on Equestria’s treasured oxygen would languish unglutted. 

He smothered a knavish chortle before he spoke. “Is this a joke, Gary?” He raised his fingers. Lion’s paw raised and relinquished by the enrapturing leisure of the armrest, digits separated by centimeters. “A jester’s git-up would be spectacular on you about now.”

Gary glowered. Exhilaration subsisting midst the sultry, tempestuous hellscape of his blusterous orbs. Through the drapes of wuthering flames of wrath and wroth globes, twitching with unexpended blood and thunder, a glinting will-o’-the-wisp of felicity sparkled. A scarce diamond lodged in an infernal rough divulged from the cavernous mines of Hell. 

“You know what I want. I’m sure you do, too.” Gary’s eyes flicked back to the maze for a split-second. “A few minutes in there with those sorry sons of b*****s and this’ll all be worth it. My ‘spoils’, remember? You owe me.”

Discord stroked his chin and toyed with the pale tuft of snow-white hair like a tongue of quartz dangling from his chin. “I thought you had your fill of bloodshed. First those hunters, then those ponies,” Discord waved a hand in the broad direction of the lorn corpses, slip-shodly lost amongst the unfettered maddening twists and kinks of the hedges.

“The hell’s your point?”

“Haven’t you had enough? Especially after what I saw in your lovely memories in Alabama. It appears you’ve had enough to last you a lifetime.”

“Nobody asked you to snoop through my mind.”

“What’s the fun in asking?” He chirped with a lambent grin.

Gary huffed. “Let me down there. Five minutes is all I ask. I’ll put on a show, just for you. You won’t believe your eyes.”

“Chaos is my art, Gary, I know the methods like the back of my hand. I’ve seen spilled blood. It never-”

“We’re really gonna go back and forth when the ‘Man in Blue’ is right under our feet! We could finish their little hero from the stars here and now! What the f**k’s the wait for?” Gary exclaimed, pointing an exasperated arm towards the maze. “You owe the s**t out of me.”

A vexed sigh eddied around the vapid chambers of his lungs, restively itching for an empyreal termination of its confinement. Clawing at the coveted salvific paries of his throat. Butting the aggregate of its bulk into the palisade of grated teeth, stampeding across the floor of his tense jaw. A vociferous maelstrom of vexation swashed around each and every cavity of his frame, from the gloomiest of scissures to manifest crannies. His mandible quaked with a vehement yearning to trounce the b*****d’s woeful beseechments. The uproar of mutiny was rampageous. Intramural rebellion flogging the previous veracious covenant. That wretched noisome pledge he pledged in unbridled, panotpic veridity. A temerarious testament to one of the endangered benevolent tenets glorying in the dregs of elysian sanctuary seeking asylum somewhere in the adust topography of Discord’s psyche. Where unabatable mayhem, its scope pridefully parading far beyond the margins of intelligible explication, had salted the moldering earth long ago. Furnished with the vehement solitary objective of annihilating every vestigial flimmer of iridescent benignity. An onus that was long dispatched far earlier than the negligible prospect of camaraderie with Gary Demonio was ever granted the time of day. Yet, irrespective of the lusterless vitality weidled by those cadaverous sparkles blinking within his soul, the dominion they once begriped with brassbounds digits was unflappable. And if there was one malevelolent construct they fervently refused to hostel, it was the fetid odor of abjuration. 

Discord was a pestilent creature. That was a vigorous statement he couldn’t fell, regardless of the passion of any otiose denial. Notwithstanding the bounds he’d briskly scorched and decimated, immolated on the altar of his unending conquest, some morals tenanting his ticker rebuffed the notion of fleeing. Not allowing their sojourn in the heart of the God of Chaos to be a fugitive memory snapped from existence like a dying star, unnoticed and thoughtlessly marooned in the inky lakes of obscurity. 

In the end, with a conclusive sigh and deliberative stroke of his beard, Discord was nothing more than facile prey to his regent scruples. 

“On second thought, you’ve blown my expectations out of the water so far, maybe you’ll color me surprised again. I’ll allow it.”

Gary beamed. A foolhardy emphatic stamp of breath-robbing euphoria shaped like a crescent moon. Teeth whiter than starlight in the honed javelins of gilded radiance.

“Really?” He inquired, akin to a rash teenager finally accorded permission by his father for whatever rakish indulgence that snagged his eye. Orbs engorged with an unholy, unutterable glee threatening to torch holes into his partner’s sockets. His pupils dilated. Two emboldened umbras bordered by margins of zealous amber. 

“Sure, why not?” Discord replied with the parlous haphazard of a reluctant heedless father. “If this isn’t good enough payment for your efforts, I doubt I could ever appease you.“

“You won’t regret any of this, Discord.” His fists crumpled. Left hand buckled into a calloused flinty bulb of rangy digits and ghost-white knuckles. One could only ponder the orotund, ungoverned scope of the skull-crushing grapple garroting his Beretta’s grip. A hard-bitten clasp that, lest the victim be any other entity whether living or exanimate, appeared to bear the capabilities of bisecting a universe in two. Craggy hands bated to trivial conduits for that unholy grasp, seeming to be capable of bashing stars into bare wisps of thought and torrid fervor. 

The callous executions deep in the charred rancic nave of the abominable Everfree. Every abiotic tree bereft of corporeal vivace or undisguised vim and thorned bushes black as roof shingles forever painted by the unmendable malady of Gary’s ruderous vices. The retinue of shambolic afterimages forsaken in his wake. Stock-still chromos of those grim baleful transgressions pounced upon and feasted by esurient beastly obliviation. Accoutered with a titanium maw ripe for brutish rip and tear of its ingrained savagery and a yawning craw drowning in flagrant avarice. Distensible to a degree Discord had failed to ever properly perceive or intuit in any plaguy region of his spaceless nous. Slinking in the umbrageous pouches of shadow in his bounteous vaults of treasured recollections of his illustrious swaths of chaos-laden chaos. 

Never once in all of his teeming lifetimes lived at the altar of the mighteous muse domineering his zealous heart had he seen a channel of ruination. Nothing following the regimental contours of Gary Demonio. 

“Whatever you say, my friend. Go have fun!” An ample beam glittered across his jocund visage. Scythe tooth jutting from his luminous Cheshire grin, its perfect ivory color a blunt converse to the edgeless soil-like hue of his upper coat. He conjoined his fingers for a spry snap and, akin to the pacifying glimmer of a vagabondage firefly, commandeered his partner with a spry snap. 

Gary was masticated by the orgulous minion. His throne and thewy figure ingested by the bulb of ingrateful color, sponged from the immense slate of reality as though its existence was a shadowy chimera allocated no broader significance than that of a grain of sand. Within a sliver of a blink, he materialized innumerable feet above Discord’s ostentatious bespoken talisman stationed high in the disarray-coated atmosphere. An infernal unflagging sentry sicking his sure-footed vassal to dig his teeth into the naked throats of all he yearned to see flounder in lakes of disgorged spirited ichor. The male rolled his shoulders and scathed the loathsome discomfort gripping every cubic inch of flesh. Deadening a parching lour at the thick hide of sweat shellacking his physique, oscillating up and down his extremities like sleeves of wet seaweed. 

Drawing back the slide and surveilling within, his wicked zealous gaze was mesmerized by the gilded round. Notched snugly in its worn chamber, no stranger to the toilsome battery and titillated exertion of the trigger that clambered across the horizon. He released the slide. Stygian gelid metal slamming together, clicking into their rightful positions. Embattled. Consummate. Primed for another barbaric raft of needless, gratuitous savagery and primal annihilation. Unmerciful destruction uneducated in the enactment of ruth on a biblical scale. A disciplined, unwearying agent of boundless brutality operating on an ineffable scope like some chthonic amalgamation of centuries-worth of sin and vice uttered in the Book of Revelations. 

Gary homed his Bereta in his waistband. Flexing his fingers before balling them into carnage-starved fists. He cracked his neck and reveled in the evanescent bliss of his assuaged joints. Glorying in the nomadic respite slithering down his fine and fizzing along his bones, refusing to cement its roots upon any one sect for a moment longer than the self-alloted epoch it incepted. 

The hedge split before him. A flawless aperture bloomed on the prodigious wall, beginning as a slit that outspread like automatic double doors. The ingress arrived without any gaudy residue of Discord’s steady-handed minion’s presence. No dreg of its influence coated any minute constituent of the foliage. Not a spectral thread of repugnant yellow or onyx particle of the hallmark onyx smoke. Just the way Gary Demonio preferred. Cast onto an island occupied by a paltry fistful of damned, execrable souls. Gary’s devil-may-care spirit and the ill-starred spirits ravished from the mortal world and pilfered by his ensanguined hands. Forever ingratiated into the unfeeling steel and polymer of his firearms. 

‘You’re gonna wish you never crossed me, Levi. Not in a day in your sorry f*****g life.’

Gary cracked his knuckles into his palms, succour echoing through the wrinkles of his timeworn hands, and strode northbound across the kempt grass. To say he was merely prepared was the superlative of all unjust understatements. Rhapsodic giddy rocking his skeleton beatified with seismic vibrations of elation. He trudged headlong into the novel orifice and the mammoth stockades of bush reconciled behind him, evacuation from the kafkaesque purgatory rendered unfeasible. Apprehension extinct in his alacrituous strides.