Editor's Note:

I don't normally do this, but this time I had to. You would not believe how much I had to get Discord to let me cut here. He went on for pages and pages about the entire history of the world, how centaur magic works, Tartarus being a gateway that connects to other places on our planet as well as to a prison for really evil creatures and a lot of pegasi having migrated here through that gate, the existence of alicorn cows, the complete ecology of the Far North, the history of ponies getting addicted to something called Harmony Violets and why that proves that harmony is bad, and the history of ponies pre-Equestria, all because he didn't actually want to write about what happened to him in the Crystal Empire.�

Normally I don't cut anything he writes, mostly because he won't let me but also because I guess if he meanders a little and includes stuff that has nothing to do with his war with Anon... it's reasonable that chaos might mean he has to do that kind of thing.� Ponies are trained to write succicently, with as few words as they can get away with, but even Twilight's been known to wander off topic a little.� But there was no way I wanted to copy out something like twenty thousand words that had nothing to do with anything except in Discord's head.

I saved the pages of information I cut; they're still in Discord's original rough draft. Really fascinating stuff! It's funny; when you ask Discord questions or talk to him about things that really happened, he generally lies, makes jokes, refuses to answer, or gives non-answers. Like before I knew about the chaos avatar Ar, I asked if dragons had ever used chaos magic, and he did this whole dramatic thing about how I was trying to replace him, called me his Sith Apprentice, whatever that means, and managed to never answer the question at all.� But when he writes... well, I can't prove that he's telling the truth, but there's nothing in anything he says that sounds like an obvious lie. And it's really interesting stuff. But completely irrelevant to his fight with Anon.

To be honest there's some stuff in here that isn't really relevant either, mostly stuff about King Sombra, but Discord wouldn't let me cut any of that. At least there isn't as much of it as there was of the other stuff, the stuff he did let me take out.

This is stupid.

I can't stop shaking. But nothing happened. Not really. It was all illusions. I mean, if you don't count the part where I could theoretically have been skewered by Twilight's Big Bumbling Brother Fool Forever, except that he was too dumb to kill me when I was helpless and all he managed to do was wake me up.� But that didn't really happen either. I mean, the part about him killing me, since, as mentioned, he was too big of an idiot to actually do me any harm.� And I don't generally spend my time ruminating on things that didn't happen, even if they could have been really really bad if they had. And especially I don't spend my time quivering in my boots (or outside of my boots, either) over illusions.� None of it was real.

I will give it to Sombra � those were some seriously realistic illusions. Remember, I'm an expert on realistic illusions and realistic dream-states. Spend a thousand years in sensory deprivation, hallucinating, and you'll get good at telling when something isn't real too. It takes some serious power to fool me. At the end, when she was starting to slide into Nightmare Moon territory and she was turning vicious, Luna used to try to warp my dreams into nightmares and torture me for some kind of revenge... for being alive when she's convinced the "real me" is dead? (Did I mention this? Luna thinks the real me is dead. That is, when I died the first time, I stayed dead, and the "me" who I am, who came back from the dead, is the Spirit of Chaos � which is true � and is identical to the Spirit of Chaos who killed her mother � which is false, that was Mayhem � and is lying about being her foster brother Discord. I don't know where she gets this from. My name is Discord. How does she not get that I was always destined to be what I am? But I digress.) For some of the things I said to her when she'd come visit me in dreams? (I want to clarify, just so you all know, that Nightmare Moon was not my fault. Sure, I poked at Luna's insecurities... a lot... and yes, I'll admit that I went out of my way to push the narrative that everyone loved Celestia and no one loved Luna. But I wouldn't have had those insecurities to poke at if they weren't already there, and I didn't have the power to do anything to her mind magically. If I did contribute anything to her fall, I did it with nothing but words. Which would actually make me amazing, if I could make someone open up to the Nightmares and fall just by flapping my lips, or in this case my imaginary lips since my actual lips were in stone, and I am amazing, but I'm still pretty sure it was mostly her own fault.)

Anyway, I always knew it was a dream. Always. Luna's very, very good at her job, and some of the stuff she inflicted on me was pretty darned horrifying, but I didn't fall for any of it. The best she could manage was to lure me in with a pleasant dream I wanted to believe in and then start the horror show, except even that didn't quite work because while I was happy to let myself be soothed with pleasant dreams (I was stuck in stone. I'd take any form of entertainment), I did know in the back of my mind that it wasn't real. I just didn't care, until the bad stuff started, and then I'd use my own power over my own dreams to turn them back on her, or play up as if I was terrified and then laugh in her face.

If Sombra had been there in any of the illusions he cast on me... I would not have been laughing in his face.

I can't believe how off-guard he took me. I've seen the TV show, the reality we should have had if it hadn't been for Anon, where the archway that paralyzes ponies with their worst fears played a prominent part. (It should surprise no one that Twilight's greatest fear was disappointing Celestia and Spike's greatest fear was being kicked out by Twilight. Oh, the mommy issues those two have.) I knew Sombra's specialties. I fought him, back in the day. (He took himself so very, very seriously, I don't know how I was supposed to resist throwing lemon cream pies at him. Eventually he figured out that he could drive me off by completely misusing the Crystal Heart to broadcast harmonized fear and misery, because it turns out that if everyone feels the same negative emotions, it's still harmony, but for a while his own fear of the Heart prevented him from keeping me out of the Crystal Empire, and you'd better believe I made good use of my time. You haven't seen anything until you've seen the Dark Overlord of Fear with a clown nose and oversized inflatable horseshoes.) So I should have known what I was getting into. I should have known it was an illusion.

It made no sense, and when things don't make sense and I didn't cause them, that generally means my understanding of the situation is imperfect in some way. But it took me so long to question.

What you need to know is that our entire world is full of an ecosystem ponies hardly ever see, creatures animal, vegetable and mineral whose purpose is to purify and clean magic.

Raw magic, as I've said before, is chaotic. It's supposed to have no prior imprint, no history of intent marked on it, but the emotions generated by dark magic in particular, and by any truly powerful, emotion-driven casting, can remain engraved on the magical energies, altering them, generally for the worse. I like my chaos to have no preconceived notions of what it wants to do whatsoever, thank you. So, just as I exist in order to ensure that nothing interrupts the existence or flow of magic, there's an ecosystem of creatures that exist to keep magic that's not in use cleanly chaotic.

Here in Equestria, the West Coast � which you've probably never been to, because Celestia declared it off-limits to settlers for exactly this reason � is home to the Harmony Violets and the tatzlwurms.� I mentioned Harmony Violets when I was talking about fighting Winnie.� They are small flowers that draw in magic and purify it of dark and any other intentional elements. (Intentional elements being emotions imprinted on magic.� Magic that wants to play a funny prank on you because I was just working with it is also an intentional element, as is magic that wants you to make friends and sing kumbaya while holding hooves in a circle. It's just that dark intentional elements are a lot more common.)� They do this by harmonizing the magic, which is not the way I would have chosen to do it, but whatever.� Any parts of it that cannot stay in harmony with the pure empty-headed intentionless will of the violets are excreted through the roots, where the tatzlwurms � creatures that look like animals, but are actually plants � live. Tatzlwurms are about the length of my snout (my snout, not yours; they're not that short) and are predators that feed on magic and magical creatures, but they're small enough that the only sapient magical creatures they could possibly be a threat to are Breezies. They eat the dark magic and other such intentional elements that the Harmony Violets pass down to them, as well as magical small creatures such as parasprites, twittermites and the like, and fully consume them.� Usually by sucking them in with tentacles, but they can also spray goo that paralyzes magic.

Celestia declared the area off-limits to pony development because these creatures are an important part of Equestria's defense system against clouds of dark magic floating across the ocean and invading our borders, and ponies were harvesting Harmony Violets at one point, threatening to drive them extinct.� Ponies can hardly be blamed; Harmony Violets can cure pretty much any magical illness, and disrupt chaotic or dark magic, and from what I hear they taste pretty good (I wouldn't risk eating one. See "disrupt chaotic magic", in the previous sentence.)� Many ponies found that making their loved ones eat Harmony Violets after I'd messed with their personalities just a bit could clear them right up and restore them to boring, I mean normal, I mean I was right the first time, boring.� Meanwhile tatzlwurms might actually be a threat to ponies, and even to me, if someone nefarious were to gather enough of their magical paralysis goo.� I wouldn't even be telling you this except that you're not going to be reading it unless I'm dead or in stone.� So that's why you can go have a picnic on the west coast shoreline if you want, but you can't build a house, or a Hayfries Shack, there.

Well, the far north, where all of the world's magic is sucked in toward the pole, has a lot of these kinds of creatures. The World Serpents, crystalline snakes made by Loki in the days before he went off the deep end, are one example; they crawl through the frozen ground below Arctica eating dark magic that was pulled underground by the pole.� Dragon eggs serve to absorb a lot of loose magic, and dragons lay them in Arctica and Antarctica (where the same thing happens to magic, only southward instead of northward.)� And at the top of this food chain are a race of true crystal ponies, the Umbra.

Now that the Crystal Empire has come back, you're probably all familiar with the so-called "crystal ponies", who mostly look that way because of extensive exposure to the Crystal Heart. Umbra... are not like that. They're more like the lupequus of folklore, except that instead of being ponies that turn into wolves under the light of a full moon, they're ponies that turn into crystals when they are too low on magic to remain ponies, and when they're full-up on magic they can transform into pure magic. More like Nightmare Loon did than like I do; when I turn into magic I'm usually a specific shape, not an amorphous cloud of darkness. The way they were originally supposed to work was that Umbra would feed on dark magic, thus draining it out of an area; they themselves then become large pools of dark magic, but it doesn't corrupt them because they're born to do that, just like chaos magic drives ponies insane but not moi.

This didn't work out.

When Yggdrasil was still alive, beaming its pernicious harmony all over the Not-So-Frozen-Back-Then North, the Umbra were a thriving, well-balanced race, not seething overpowered pits of mobile dark magic. They were most active during the long winter night, in the Far North; they're not exactly harmed by sunlight, but it doesn't do them any favors either. When Mayhem corrupted Yggdrasil, split the reindeer civilization into normal reindeer and evil caribou, and unleashed the windigos on the ponies living in what is now the Crystal Empire � which is, in fact, the original homeland of all North Amareican ponies, the place you came from before the founding of Equestria; betcha your Hearth's Warming pageants in elementary school never told you that�the amount of dark magic being generated began to unbalance the Umbra. Too much of a good thing is rarely a good thing itself. They started overdosing on the dark magic, becoming entirely too prone to violence against each other, as well as against frost dragons, dragon eggs, caribou, and other entities that could either fight back or had angry moms who could fight back. So their numbers were getting kind of thin.

Now, the other thing you need to know is that even when Yggdrasil was alive, the latitudes of the ancient pony homelands � Unicornia, Crystallia, and, eventually, Stratopolis, after the pegasi got here � were always quite volatile. Magical ley lines flow through our entire atmosphere as well as underground, but just a short distance north of the borders of Equestria, those lines start to dip down in preparation for going underground at the North Pole.� This makes the weather quite changeable and violent up there.� Yggdrasil kept it calm and peaceful until the windigos killed it, at which point the weather in the old countries became literally intolerable.� Churning, perpetual storm fronts that would need alicorn magic to contain them came in.� The civil war that broke out between the three pony races wasn't only due to the direct actions of the windigos and the Element of Hatred; they were being forced into proximity to each other as well, the weather driving them into tiny enclaves where they could take shelter.

The founders of Equestria left around this time, thinking south would be better � which it was, somewhat, until they brought their feuding with them and made things utterly intolerable.� In the North, the three pony nations had to give more and more ground to the storms, until finally in desperation they were all hiding in the caves in the crystal mountains, killing each other for territory. The pegasi got the worst of this; they're not at their best in caves.

So a small group of especially desperate pegasi fled even further north, trying to reach Yggdrasil.� They got there, discovered it was dead, and discovered that there was one living fruit just lying on the ground, covered in snow, where Mayhem had never bothered to notice it.� That was the Crystal Heart.� The fact that this particular group was tight-knit enough to survive the Element of Hatred and windigos trying to corrupt them against each other meant that they were, ugh, harmonious enough to activate the Crystal Heart, which created a bubble of artificially decent weather around them.� Also, their leader, Wind Singer, became an alicorn, renamed Aria di Vento because in those days, it was generally understood that princesses had to have fancy names.� (Something got lost in translation; the new name actually meant Song of the Wind.) When they returned to their homeland, the king of the unicorns � King Palladium, father of Princess Platinum, who I'm pretty sure you all know from your school Hearth's Warming pageants � was near death (this wasn't surprising; most of the ponies were near death, and he wasn't young).� So the new Princess Aria married his son, Prince Iridium, and became the new ruler of the Crystal Empire, uniting the tribes.

They were quickly able to use the Crystal Heart to control the weather, making it tolerable in the immediate area of the Heart � which is why the Crystal Empire, once an actual empire, was reduced down to a single city.� But they had to re-activate it every year, in the springtime, since the winter would generally wear away at the defense the Heart produced. This was the Crystal Faire, a festival during which the entire city would have a huge party, and re-apply the Heart's protection through the love and harmony and happiness and gag me with a spoon that the big party invoked in them. Funny thing about ponies and parties. Pinkie Pie has a point � no matter how depressed and miserable ponies are, it's generally pretty easy to cheer them up with a party. Even I managed to get ponies to chin up and embrace chaos, at least for a night or two, by throwing parties. Of course mine were... rather different than Pinkie's. But I digress.

Once the caribou started generating magic that they locked to themselves, unusable to anyone else, the Umbra didn't do so well. There wasn't enough loose dark magic available in the Far North to help them overcome the damage they'd done to themselves by consuming the imbalance of dark magic generated during the pony civil war and general period of windigoes. And here's where the problem of having creatures magically evolved to naturally clean up the stuff you want to get rid of comes in. As long as there was plenty of free dark magic available in the North, the Umbra were fine, and they did their job. Dramatically increase the available amount because everyone was at war with everyone else, and they become addicts, hungry for more and more. And then the supply dropped, as ponies got themselves under control and the caribou locked up their own supply. Yaks and griffons were never magic users, the reindeer don't use dark magic at all... what's a creature that feeds on dark magic to do?

The problem here is that Umbra are sapient. Tatzlwurms are not smart enough to go out and try to find more dark magic. They eat what the Harmony Violets filter down to them, and they paralyze and eat magical creatures. They can't go stir up strife and cause pain and fear in order to increase the available dark magic. Sapient creatures can, and the Umbra did. They roamed through the frozen wasteland, finding pony or reindeer settlements and causing the inhabitants to turn on each other in fear, or riling up yaks (a very easy task) to attack them.

Then they made the mistake of going after the Crystal Empire.

At this point in time, I was roaming around, free as a bird, doing anything I liked anywhere I liked... except the Crystal Empire. The barrier that keeps out horrific storms caused by the churning chaos of magic coming down from the atmosphere to plunge toward the earth also keeps out my chaos. �Celestia and Luna would occasionally run there to hide out from me, and I let them do it, as long as they didn't stay there too long, but I wouldn't let any other Equestrian ponies leave the country. Otherwise they'd have all voted with their hooves to flee the chaos and then who would I have had to play with?

The Umbra tried to get in, multiple times. Ponies would have been a lot more valuable to them than most of the prey they generally found; they can impersonate ponies pretty well, considering that they are a species of pony, albeit a really weird one, and ponies are more magical than most other races.� So they were motivated. Plus, the same barrier I had up to keep ponies from escaping Equestria was keeping them from migrating into my country, so the Crystal Empire was the only game in town. (They could have broken through my barrier, more easily than they could the one generated by the Heart... but they wouldn't have liked what it would have done to them. My barrier had a bad habit of turning species into other species, and anything pony-like would have probably ended up as a mouse or a frog.) Finally, they thought they had it... the protective shield was fading and they thought they'd break through then. But the reason the shield was fading was that they were preparing the ritual to renew it. When the annual renewal of the Crystal Heart's protection happened, the Umbra were, for the most part, frozen into their crystalline forms... after trying to escape underground as magical constructs. So they weren't just crystallized. They were turned into veins of crystal within rock.

Never run away when a fruit of Harmony has locked onto you and is about to zap you. As terrible as the consequences will be when it hits you... there are worse fates than being a statue. Like being a smear of crystal buried within rock.

Their Queen, the most powerful of their race, was pregnant at the time.� She managed to magically shield her baby from the Heart, weaving a protective shield around him and teleporting him out of her body with the last of her magic. Thus she was crystallized on the surface. Her son was teleported into the Crystal Empire, where somepony found a baby foal on their doorstep and took him to the then-Princess, Amore, to find his parents. Of course, she couldn't, so she sent him to a temporary home for foals while she tried to find him some foster parents to take him in.

No one wanted to. I wonder why not.

I believe Sombra found out what he really was (and murdered Amore, and took the throne) when he wasn't much past the standard age for a cutie mark. I haven't paid that much attention to his history, so I couldn't say for sure. I know that he reigned for around the last 30 years or so of my reign, and some time after that before Celestia and Luna felt themselves strong enough to deal with him... and he definitely did something to Luna that weakened her and let the Nightmare get a foothold within her, before the sisters launched their final attack and, sore loser that he was, he sent the entire Crystal Empire to the far future. Umbra don't age, as long as they have a healthy supply of dark magic to draw from, and Sombra had that. I don't actually know how long it was after I was turned to stone that Celestia and Luna defeated him, or rather, didn't.

Sombra wasn't as powerful as an alicorn, but he studied magic intensively, he practiced constantly, and the torment he kept his subjects in stirred up a lot of dark magic, which he was very, very good at channeling. His uses for that power were rather banal, although I suppose he had reasons � he enslaved the Crystal Ponies and forced them to work in the mines because he was trying to dig out his people, the rest of the Umbra. I suppose I can relate. I'd have made ponies work in mines too if I'd thought I could save my mother and older brothers and the rest of my draconequus tribe that way. Although I wouldn't have had to enslave them. Ponies were very, very eager to work for me when I offered them jobs. I never had to enslave a single pony; hardly any of them, aside from Celestia and Luna, would refuse a single request I made. And yet Celestia and Luna claimed they were living in torment under my rule! I ask you, would tormented ponies be so very eager to make mango cheese smoothies and grilled lemon sandwiches for their tormentor? Maybe they'd have been less enthusiastic about mining; I never asked them, since getting ponies to dig in a mine for something I could snap my fingers to summon would be a pointless waste of time. There's nothing fun about digging in a mine.

The replenishment of the Crystal Heart's protection made the child Sombra sick near death, every year. But he lived through it because he didn't have enough dark magic, as a child, for it to crystallize the magic within him and turn him to stone. It just hurt... the way the Tree hurt me, before I was the Avatar of Chaos, when I was just a mortal chaos mage. As an adult, he feared it... but eventually figured out that it was the only way to keep me out, and I'll say this for Sombra. He wasn't shy about facing his own fears. So he figured out how to harness it to the darkness he'd caused in the Crystal Empire, fueling it with the fear and pain and despair of his slaves. Like I said, if everyone feels the same thing, that's harmony... doesn't matter if what they're feeling is awful or wonderful. Sombra brought about order (that was one of the reasons I kept poking him), and order can enforce a harmony of suffering.

But you all want to know about the Element of Hatred. Sombra left the Empire as a colt of cutie mark age (although Umbra don't get them, so he would never get his.) He wandered about, discovering his affinity for dark magic without understanding what the forces he was playing with actually were. He found the stone his mother had been turned into, and she cryptically directed him to go to Yggdrasil... where the Element of Hatred still lay nestled at the roots of the dead Harmony Tree. When he brought it back, he discovered how easily he could use it to make caribou, yaks, griffins and even reindeer turn against each other and attack one another... which made him stronger.

Once he returned, he was able to re-awaken his mother enough to have a conversation with her, in which she showed him his true power and told him what had happened to her and the rest of his kind. So when he returned to the Empire, he used Hatred to turn the mostly earth pony population of the Empire against their unicorn rulers. They viewed him as their champion and savior when he killed Princess Amore, who he claimed had been hopelessly corrupted. Unicorns, who could potentially have challenged his rule, were either driven out, forced to enter Equestria (my barrier didn't keep ponies out; if they wanted to come enjoy the chaos, the more the merrier! Umbra just don't count as ponies to my magic) or sent out into the northern storms to die. Some had their horns broken. Pegasi started making noise about seceding from the Crystal Empire and going to try to rebuild Stratopolis; Sombra's goons arrested a number of them and broke their wings, and Sombra himself, who was at that point using his own magic to hold off the storms rather than the Crystal Heart, wove them into a barrier no pegasus could safely cross.

By the time he showed his true colors and began enslaving the ponies who had cheered for his rule, it was too late. There were no ponies with both the strength and the will to fight him. I don't like tyrants, so I showed up to make his life more entertaining on multiple occasions and publicly humiliated him, as well as carrying off some of his slaves and bringing them to Equestria because they declared they'd rather pledge allegiance to me and my chaos than live under Sombra, but... I'm ashamed to admit, I had the power to defeat him completely and kick him out of there, free all the ponies and bring them back under my raining umbrella, but I didn't. He was even more fun to taunt and torment than Celestia and Luna; I didn't want to ruin my toy so quickly. And then he figured out how to harness the Heart, and I couldn't return.

I don't know all that much about what he did or didn't do after he figured out how to activate the Heart with dark magic instead of light, since from that point on I couldn't get back in to the Crystal Empire.� (It's not that there's a barrier. It's that a mage who knows what they're doing, in control of a powerful artifact of Harmony, could seriously harm me, up to and including turning me to stone again. I didn't dare go within range of the Heart while the Empire was ruled by unicorn mages who knew what they were doing, and I didn't dare go within range once Sombra figured out how to harness it.) But I know that, while unicorns and pegasi repopulated during his reign, none had the will to fight or stand against him. He was ruthless, cruel, smart, and would engage in mind control spells if somepony did show some signs of resistance... if he didn't just torture them to make the population more fearful of him.

I know that in the cartoon, Cadance used the Heart to shatter him while he was in his magical form, drawing on harmony from her new subjects, after Spike jumped to her with the Heart in his hands. In that version of events, Twilight and Spike, while looking for the Heart, encountered a room guarded by a door that shows you your worst fears. They then figured out that the Heart was someplace else (back in the throne room they'd left, hidden by dark magic.) Sombra was almost fully manifested and completely inside the perimeter, well within range for the Heart to attack him full force; he was annihilated, except for his horn.

In our reality, Anon knew where the Heart was all along, because he'd seen the cartoon. He had Twilight cast a spell to reveal its location, they brought the Heart and performed the ritual, and Sombra, who was still outside the city at this point, was able to protect himself, shielding himself from the energies of the Heart. Anon ended up having to go out in the storm and fight him with the Element of Protection, because the crystal ponies had gotten the barrier up but Sombra was flinging spears of black crystal through the barrier � it was intended to keep out evil magic, not projectiles. The end result was the same, of course, and Anon made sure to slice the horn to bits. Not sure why. Maybe he thought the horn would have eventually regenerated into a full Sombra in the cartoon. I'm not at all sure it works that way.

I, personally, knew Sombra well enough to know that he wouldn't simply leave a powerful spell on a door that goes nowhere interesting, just to be a decoy. He'd have known that there are too many ponies and other entities who can sense magic; Celestia and Luna, for instance, would have known the Heart wasn't behind that door if there was nothing there at all. To work as an effective decoy to lure ponies trying to find the Heart, he'd have had to make sure that something of similar power levels was hidden behind that door. After all, he wouldn't have known that it would be Celestia's prot�g�, not Celestia herself, who'd be searching. (Plus, while the cartoon didn't show it, and the Twilight of our world didn't do it, since Anon didn't expect her to � I strongly suspect that in the actual events that would have happened if Anon hadn't interfered, Twilight would have been casting a spell to find powerful magic items, and that was why she was so certain the Heart had to be behind that door in the first place.)

Sombra had quite a few magical artifacts. But the Crystal Heart is the fruit of a Harmony Tree, equal in power to an Element of Harmony. (More powerful, technically, since it can act on its own � it channels harmony from a large population, not from specially designated bearers.) Something that shows up magically as being of equivalent power? I wonder what that could be. Hmm.

So I decided that would be the first place I would check, and I was fairly sure I'd find it. A quick in and out, no alert raised, no one the wiser.

I took the train in. Teleportation into an area protected by an artifact of Harmony is kind of like cannonballing directly into freezing water. Once I was acclimated to the harmony field I'd be able to teleport, use my magic and do whatever I wanted, but I needed to let myself get used to it before using my magic.

Well, most of my magic. I was in the form of Twister on the train. Which set off some uncontrollable shivers and a lot of muscle tics as we crossed through the invisible shield of Harmony that the Heart generates, and a few concerned ponies asked me what was wrong. I told them I had a debilitating disease called bonitis, and it caused painful spasms that could only be relieved through massage. In fact the spasms weren't painful at all � more similar to the shivers that go up your spine when you're listening to a pony telling a moderately scary story, and I'm used to them, anyway, as most of the time they signal a magical imbalance or rapid shift. But ponies, being such a friendly and generous species, weren't willing to let me suffer a moment longer than necessary, and I had three ponies massaging me with their hooves from that point until the moment the train stopped. (One stallion, two mares. The stallion was an earth pony, and was using maybe a little bit more force than an actual unicorn suffering spasms would have wanted to take, but I like it rough sometimes. Especially when I'm in another body and can't feel as keenly as I would in my draconequus form.)

Once we reached the station, I wandered around a bit. Probably I could have jumped straight into using my magic, and in the past, I'm sure I would have. I'm not normally one for prudence, or patience. But the fights with Anon have changed something in me; I find myself holding back, calculating odds, making plans... wanting to be sure. As if surety and chaos could coexist. It's frustrating; I don't think I like what I've become, but I no longer have the nerve to jump into situations, cocksure and certain of being able to roll with the punches and come out on top.� I suppose too many near-death experiences can sober even the most reckless draconequus. Before I started throwing around the kind of power that would make me detectable to the Heart, I wanted to be absolutely 100% certain that I was fully acclimated and would have no trouble with my magic unless the Heart specifically targeted me. If it did... well, there wasn't going to be much I could do about that.

In the square in front of the palace, I saw a giant statue of Anon. For several seconds I stared at the thing, unable to quite believe how incredibly dumb that was. A statue of Anon? Really? Of course, they didn't know that he'd warped the timeline and that he'd actually put them in more danger doing things the way he had � Sombra could have killed somepony, flinging dark crystal shards through the barrier. I believe he did, actually, injure a few before Anon went out to challenge him. In the original timeline, no Crystal Ponies were harmed at all before Sombra was destroyed. But the Crystal Ponies didn't know that an original timeline even existed. The only ones who knew about the cartoon were Anon, and me.

If it had been dark outside, I would have summoned up a need to urinate just so I could have peed on that statue. But in broad daylight, I couldn't take the risk without using my magic to turn invisible or something, and I was trying to avoid using magic yet.

You may wonder how I got into the palace without using my magic, or if perhaps I had to wait until I was fully acclimated? No, dear readers, I didn't have to use a single jot of my chaos to get into the palace. They had tours. Yes, the Crystal Palace actively lets its citizens and tourists in to wander around their seat of government. At least Celestia always confined the tours to the gardens. Cadance actually lets ordinary ponies go strolling through the halls of government. I don't think she feels nearly as secure about being a princess or even a ruler as she pretends she does. Wonder if I could talk her into establishing a democracy? Democracies are marvelous; they're the most chaotic form of government possible. Everypony spends all their time shouting at others, rulers are selected by a popularity contest, and nothing gets done. Albion has one with their Parliament, and earth ponies traditionally ruled with them, but Equestria hasn't had one on a scale larger than a city since, well, ever. Not even when I was in charge, since I didn't let any ruling body form over anything larger than a city. I tolerated city-sized democracies because democracies are inherently chaotic, but anything bigger than that and there needs to be a lot of order baked in for the government to work as a government � bureaucracy, procedures, protocols, oh, it's all so dull.

Of course, the tour didn't go anywhere juicy, but that wasn't a problem for me. I told one of the tour guides that I needed to use the bathroom and I'd catch up. As soon as I went around the corner, I dropped Twister and climbed the wall. Negating gravity to make myself lighter and making the crystal wall just soft enough that my claws could hook into it was a small change, no more taxing than being Twister had been. I then used the ceiling to stroll right into the throne room. Since Cady The Pinkness and her hubby were still holding court, I couldn't just drop down the spiral staircase hidden under the floor by one of Sombra's spells, and as much as I'd have loved to distract them out of there with some dancing, singing toads or flying toasters or something, I didn't dare do anything that might tip them off to my presence.

The Crystal Heart takes more of an active role in defense than the Elements of Harmony do; there are things it can just do without a user focusing through it to make it do that thing. The barrier of light-magic Harmony around the city is one of those things. The weather control it performs to keep the storms of the Not-Yet-Completely-Frozen North is another. But attacking me was outside the range of anything it could do without prompting. However, there were an alicorn and a highly trained military unicorn near it at the moment, and I knew from watching the TV show that Cadance has some scary battle reflexes. Just because in our timeline she's never had a chance to use them doesn't mean they're not there, and this far away from Anon I was fairly certain she and Shining Armor would be able to take me on directly, without having to wait for him. (Distance is weird, with Anon. I was able to tell the dragons all about his murder of Faith; I was able to almost tell Spike what was going on with him, even though he was all the way in the Crystal Empire at the time; I wasn't able to tell Celestia anything when I confronted her in Canterlot and Anon was in Ponyville. I'm not 100% sure physical distance matters, except to the degree that when I'm actually in his presence he can directly influence me. It seems just as likely that it's psychological distance that matters. Celestia's very important to Anon; Spike a lot less so, and he didn't even know about the Dragon Lord's existence. I haven't seen any evidence that he cares all that much about Cadance and Shining Armor; he doesn't seem to despise them and put them down like he does Spike, but he doesn't seem to focus any of his attention on them except when the plot requires it, either.) I couldn't risk letting either of them know I was here, because either of them could theoretically cast a spell through the Crystal Heart to attack me... and I might be able to fend that off, because the Crystal Heart isn't necessarily as powerful as the Elements of Harmony. But... I might not. Not willing to test it, anyway.

I didn't know how long I was going to be stuck up here, waiting for court to end. The prospect of several hours of mind-numbing boredom stretched before me, rather painfully. And then I had a deliciously evil idea.

Love is chaotic, but I don't cast love spells because I don't believe in love. (I believe it exists. I just think it's basically worthless.) Lust, however... lust is well within my purview.

Within a few moments, I imagine the Pink Princess was probably starting to find her hubby's shapely muscles a bit distracting from her duties. In a few minutes, I saw her shifting uncomfortably on her throne. Half an hour after I cast the spell, Princess Cadance declared that she wasn't feeling well and was ending court early for the day, and with huge puppydog eyes she pleaded with her husband to attend her in their chambers. I smirked. Newlyweds. It had been a bit of a risk, casting a lust spell on the Princess of Love, but I figured that she'd been sheltered enough by her upbringing under Celestia's tutelage that she wouldn't recognize it for what it was, and would simply assume that Shining Armor's shining flanks were... overly inspirational at the moment. Or that estrus was coming on. Alicorns are erratic; I could always smell it on Celestia, in the first century or so before alicorn age-related infertility came upon her, and I knew she wasn't cycling so much as having it come on her at random.

Court was closed for the evening, the great doors closed, the magical lights snuffed, the curtains drawn over the windows. Perfect.

Ponies would need to cast a dark magic spell through the central crystal behind the throne to make the staircase appear. I just needed to float through the floor, and there it was.

I don't know what Sombra's fetish for stairs was. The spiral staircase was even more ridiculous than it appeared to be in the cartoon, and that was saying something. Fortunately for me I didn't need to actually walk down the steps. I could have flown down, but what fun would that have been? Instead I summoned a toboggan, gave the stairs the property of a snow-covered hill with that great icy crust that's perfect for skiing or sledding, and went tobogganing down the stairs with a very loud "WHEE!" Don't worry, the magical barrier that forms the floor of the throne room is quite soundproof.

The bottom was almost a full trot down, but on a toboggan, I covered the distance very, very quickly. It had been a long time since I'd gotten to do anything sheerly, physically fun; I had to talk myself out of teleporting back up to the top of the slide so I could do it again before going after my Element.

Well. The Element of Hatred wasn't going to collect itself. I surrounded myself with a protective shield against Sombra's fear spell; I hadn't carefully analyzed it, but I already knew what it did and I could see it, and its general structure told me that it was more or less exactly what the cartoon said it was. I sauntered through the door, the fear spell washing off of me like papier mache off the back of a duck. (Seriously, have you ever tried to wrap a duck in papier-mache?) The room wasn't large. At the back of it there was a chest, and I could clearly sense the Element of Hatred inside that chest.

I chuckled to myself. This was going to be a piece of cake.

WAKE UP, Sombra's voice echoed in my ears.

Startled, I looked around myself. Sombra was more than quite dead; why was I hearing him?

THE DELUSION HAS GONE ON LONG ENOUGH, CHAOS LORD. WAKE, AND REMEMBER WHERE YOU TRULY ARE.

And then I woke up. But I didn't open my eyes. I couldn't.

They were made of stone.