Archive of Our Own

Fluttershy’s death hit Discord like a sack of bricks.

It was far from sudden. The mare was ninety-two and had been fighting cancer for the past few years, so the flu that she had caught was just the final straw for her weakened immune system. She also hadn’t been the first of their friend group to kick the bucket either; Applejack had passed a few years prior and Rainbow Dash hadn’t been far behind.

Discord knew, of course, that her end was coming. He had known for decades. He’d offered multiple times—once in her thirties, once when she turned fifty-five, and once more when she had been diagnosed—to restore her to her youth and gift her immortality. Each and every time, she’d just smiled at him softly and shook her head.

Still, despite that knowledge the draconequus hadn’t really considered the finality of it all, the impermanence of mortal life, until he had been sitting next to Fluttershy in her final hours. The elderly pegasus had laid her hoof on his talon and just given him that smile of hers and he’d broken a bit as he finally realized that this was it. In just a few scant hours, this beautiful, wonderful mare, the first being in all of existence that he had ever considered a friend, would be dead. There’d be no more Fluttershy.

And for the first time in a long while, Discord shed a few tears.

Well, perhaps it was more than a few.

But Fluttershy, with the finality of a mare that knew her own end was nigh, kept her soft smile and weakly reached up from her hospital bed to wipe away his tears. She made him promise that her end would not be his. That he wouldn’t revert back to the self-centered Lord of Chaos that he was before her friendship. That he’d still care for others, that he’d stay and be there for their remaining friends, and for Twilight and Spike and the others who’d continue to be around long after she was gone.

Through his tears, Discord promised her that he would. And when Twilight was delivering a eulogy as Fluttershy’s casket was lowered into the ground just over a week later, just as she had during AJ’s and Rainbow’s funerals, he promised himself the same thing too.

He’d see this through.

Until the end.

It almost felt wrong for Spike’s death to hit him harder than Fluttershy’s had.

After all, Fluttershy had been his first friend. The mare who’d shown him that interpersonal relationships could be worth it. That he didn’t have to cause indiscriminate chaos all the time. The days following her death had been the worst week of his life, even beating out the many, many weeks that he had been imprisoned in stone. For anything to pull at his emotions more than her death felt almost heretical.

And yet, Discord had known Spike for far longer than he’d known Fluttershy. While her memory would always, always be with him, the dragon had been a close friend for the past several thousand years, and in all honesty he’d been one of his only friends. He’d never admit it to one of the alicorns, but he’d been almost scared of making friends with another mortal. They lived such short lives that, with every passing generation, it had felt less and less worth it to try and make friends with them.

Twilight still did, as did Celestia and Luna and Cadance and Flurry, but they were all fundamentally ponies. They still thought like ponies, despite being millenia old. Discord didn’t have that privilege. He was always an outsider, and could never think quite like how ponies did. He hadn’t minded, though, since he had another being that understood that, to some extent.

Sighing, Discord looked over to the mountain-sized corpse of his friend.

He had had someone else that understood.

Snapping his fingers, he teleported away to let Twilight know that her brother had passed. He still had to fulfill his promise, and it wasn’t like he was totally alone—he had the alicorns still.

He’d stick around.

Until the end.

The capital of Equestria had moved around quite a lot over the millenia, and what was once the city of Canterlot had been abandoned for a long, long time. The city itself no longer existed, having been wiped off the map by numerous earthquakes and landslides over the years, but every so often Discord still found himself returning to the mountain. He’d sit there at the summit for hours, days, or weeks at a time, staring down at the spot where he’d been imprisoned oh so long ago.

A mere thousand years seemed so short, nowadays.

For a long while, he considered digging through the mountain to find the final resting place of the Legion of Doom. They’d made his life hell for a while, sure, but he was almost tempted to bring at least one of them back just so he’d have someone to talk to from way back when. No one had seen Celestia or Luna in three thousand years at this point (though for those two it wouldn’t surprise him if they were on an extended vacation), and Twilight, while she was still nice and definitely missed her original friends, was more detached from the past with every passing year.

Ponies, even alicorns, forgot things over time.

Draconequi did not.

Eventually, though, he discarded the idea. At this point, returning any of those three to consciousness, over twenty thousand years past their initial imprisonment, would just be needlessly cruel. Snapping his tail, Discord teleported away.

Regardless of even the alicorns’ evident clinging to mortality, he would stay.

Until the end.

Ponies no longer existed.

Well, Discord mused, perhaps saying that the species no longer existed was a bit misleading. They didn’t exactly go extinct—they simply diverged into multiple descendant species. Unicorn horns had grown longer and curved over time, pegasus wings had gotten bigger, and earth ponies developed stronger legs and thicker bones. At this point, crossbreeding between the three was simply mechanically impossible. Thus, ponies, as a single, coherent unit, were no more, reduced to naught but a clade.

Twilight and the other alicorns had long since hung up their political capes, choosing instead to occasionally disguise themselves as one of the three species and just live a lifetime or two among the populace. Right now, Celestia had chosen a life as a simple unicorn bartender in a port city that oh so long ago had been known as Manehattan (though the original city had burnt to the ground two hundred ninety-five thousand years prior, had been rebuilt, and fell again many, many times over the many dozens of millenia). Her sister was in the same city disguised as a pegasus mailmare, while at the same time Cadance and Flurry were taking a few thousand years off hanging out in some cave up north.

Twilight, in the meantime, had thrown herself back into the sciences, once again living life and making friends. While he’d never accuse her of it to her face, Discord suspected that she’d almost forgotten her fellow Elements, having lived for so long that her finite mind simply lost the information over time. Her current life almost seemed like a parody of her original lifetime in Equestria. Did she even remember that she was once a unicorn?

The more Discord thought about it, though, the more he came to the conclusion that the ability to forget was all that kept the alicorns sane over the hundreds of thousands of years they’d been alive. He knew he’d lost his sanity long ago.

But still, he’d be there. Be it as a protector of sorts or just to keep his fellow immortals company, he was staying.

He’d made a promise, after all.

Until the end.

The landmass that was once known as Equestria was a few hundred kilometers west of where it used to be.

Continental drift was a slow process, but Discord could still notice it. He noticed as the continents drifted ever closer together. He noticed as the subduction zone on the west side of the continent made a new volcano every now and again. He noticed as the time zones slowly drifted out of their original positions.

Millions of years ago, over where Ponyville used to stand, he knew where the sun had been in the sky at noon. Now, it was a few degrees east, the westward drift making the proper noontime sun come later. But, as Discord stood over a patch of dirt in the middle of the ever-growing Everfree, his attention wasn’t on the sky.

He came here every dozen millenia or so to pay his respects. The headstone had long since been claimed by erosion, and he was certain that the body had decayed millions of years ago, but Discord would never forget Fluttershy’s final resting place.

Every so often, he would fantasize about what could have been, if Fluttershy had allowed him to make her immortal. But then reality set in, and he knew that that would’ve been a curse in all but name. He’d watched the alicorns lose themselves to their finite memory over and over and over again. Their memory was only good for a few hundred thousand years. He was a constant in their lives, at least, so he was remembered, but even if he were to remind them of some details, they’d just forget eventually. None of them even remembered how old they were, even.

Idly, Discord wondered if his mind would eventually degrade too. If his memory wasn’t truly infinite, and it was just unfathomably larger than the alicorns’. After a moment of consideration, though, he decided that that wasn’t an issue. As long as he kept reminding himself of it, he’d never forget his promise.

No matter what, he’d still be there.

Until the end.

Celestia’s death caught him by surprise.

Alicorns were supposed to be immortal. Even if their memories were finite, their bodies shouldn’t have been. Outside of complete brain death or something as extreme as decapitation, they’d live forever off of metabolizing magic itself. For Celestia to have been taken down by something as banal as cancer—which an alicorn’s magically boosted immune system should have made them practically immune to—something must have been wrong with the ambient magic of Equus.

Immediately, Discord teleported to where the Tree of Harmony once stood. Even with the Tree destroyed (the second tree that the Elements’ young students had created oh so long ago had been destroyed in an earthquake about twelve million years beforehand, and Discord was honestly surprised it had lasted as long as it did), it was still an area that channeled massive amounts of magic.

Except…he couldn’t feel nearly as much magic as there should have been. There was simply no longer enough magic on the planet to sustain five alicorns. Discord didn’t exactly know the cause of such a decrease in ambient magic, but looking up at the star that Celestia had once had such control over, he had the beginnings of an idea.

It was a small detail to notice, one that only he, with his seemingly infinite memory and fine eye for detail, could notice. But notice he did.

The sun was a bit brighter than it used to be.

Eventually, he could tell, life on Equus would be impossible.

But he’d be there.

Until the end.

Discord was there when the last drop of water evaporated from what used to be Equus’s oceans.

He was there when the last alicorn, Flurry Heart, died hundreds of millions of years prior. He was there when the last eukaryote died only a hundred million years later. He was there when the last of the oceanic bacteria, huddled around hydrothermal vents, died thirty million years ago as the oceans boiled away and the salt concentration continued to increase. Now, the only life left on Equus was living deep underground, feeding on minerals contained in the planet’s interior. But those bacteria were living on borrowed time, as temperatures continued to increase and water became more and more sparse.

Though, perhaps the statement that those microbes were the only life left on Equus was inaccurate. After all, Discord remained.

Maybe there wasn’t much point to sticking around on a mostly dead planet. Surface mortal life was long since dead and there were no more friends for Discord to keep company. But something kept him there, staying on the same planet where Fluttershy lived and died. As he looked up at the ever brighter star in the daytime sky, he could tell that chaos still existed. Chaos would continue to exist, and thus so would he.

Until the end.

The end of Equus had come.

Perhaps it was strange for Discord to be almost giddy at the prospect. After all, this was the planet where so many of his memories were. But after waiting so, so long for something interesting to happen, the slow, grueling experience of watching the sun get ever larger in the sky finally coming to an end was almost a relief. The ever hotter temperatures and stronger solar wind had stripped away Equus’s atmosphere long ago, so Discord could look up into the blackness as he floated above the liquid ground. Soon, Equus would be naught but a ball of gas before becoming one with its host star.

Discord wondered what it would feel like. No matter what, he’d be there for it.

Until the end.

Boiling alive for a billion years or so hadn’t been the best experience, but at least it had been something. Now he’d been hanging out on the surface of a white dwarf star for the past several billion years waiting for something, anything else to happen.

He’d witnessed a few supernovae, which were interesting but were barely a blip on the timescales he was used to. He had watched as the stars began to blink out, their fuel used up, but that was only the more massive stars. The red dwarfs were still around, and stellar remnants still gave off residual light.

He could feel the chaos around him still, though. He could feel the universe marching ever closer to its maximum entropy. And perhaps it was a bit silly, but the star he was on still reminded him of his first seventy years out of stone, still reminded him of when Fluttershy was still around. He’d stick around and wait.

Until the end.

The last white dwarf had cooled to having a surface outside of the visible spectrum.

The universe had gone dark.

And still Discord waited.

Until the end.

Witnessing the decay of a black hole was a sight to behold.

A singularity, ordinarily something that did nothing but distort space so much that nothing could escape, could decay. It took an unfathomably long time for them to do so, but Discord had nothing but time.

Watching those explosions of light was one of the few things left to change in the universe. One of the few chaotic things left in this ever-colder universe. But there was still some minimal amount of chaos left, tethering Discord to this star that once consumed the planet that Fluttershy once lived on.

He wondered if any particles that had been part of her were now some of the blackened carbon and oxygen beneath his feet.

Regardless, there was still some change in the universe, and so Discord waited.

Until the end.

The dead, darkened remains of what was once Equus’s sun was no longer composed of carbon and oxygen. Random quantum tunneling events had, ever so slowly, transformed the dead star into a perfect sphere of pure ⁵⁶Fe. Blithely, Discord tapped his hoof against the metal star.

Predictably, without a medium, no sound was made. The draconequus just shrugged and resigned himself to waiting even longer.

Until the end.

Discord could feel it coming just before it happened.

The random quantum fluctuations had finally destroyed the ball of iron that used to be Equus’s sun. All at once, the entire mass of the star suddenly compressed itself into a singularity, forming an event horizon about a kilometer in radius. And on a timescale that might as well have been instant from Discord’s new, long-term perspective, that new black hole decayed in a spectacular flash of light.

With the last vestiges of Equus gone, the other stellar remnants of the universe followed. The universe had finally reached its entropic maximum. All particles were rushing away from each other at relative speeds higher than the speed of light. Nothing could interact with anything else ever again, so chaos was irrelevant. It was over.

The universe had reached its end.

And Discord went with it.