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"I… wasn't a very good child, Fluttershy"

——

Discord wasn't exactly always the goofy loveable noodle we know him as. He wasn't even the chaotic temporary ruler of the world the Sisters knew him as, thousands of years ago. He's quite a bit older than that.

Back around a million years ago, Gaia resembled our Tellus quite a bit; roughly the same continents, mostly the same type of animals, a heliocentric solar-system. The main difference was the ever-increasing amount of magic in this part of the universe; turns out, being able to harness and use this energy is very beneficial to one's survival, so most animals had started to change from ours to do so. But being able to control magic the most efficiently requires quite the amount of intelligence. Basically, magic caused natural selection to favour bigger and more complex brains, until many creatures were what we would consider sapient. Life in general creates some magic, but sapient life — complex emotions and ideas — creates even more.

Eventually though, as the amount of magic grew stronger on the planet, some side-effects were born. I won't go into too much detail here, but 'Spirits' are beings made from pure magic, tied to/representing/is something which creates or otherwise affects magic. Essentially, anything which Sapients spend mental or emotional energy on, or larger universal concepts. Chaos, or rather randomness, is a prerequisite for any form of complex life, so Discord was one of the first spirits to come into being.

When he was "born" he wasn't really a sapient lifeform, as much as a… force of nature. He used magic to create more chaos, which led to more magic. He swept across the planet, just doing what he was. Magic around him grew magnitudes stronger, and any creatures in the surrounding area would start to notice mutations cropping up much more frequently, which sped up evolution even more.

Eventually though, as he aged, he became more and more aware of himself as an entity separate from his surroundings. What was space? What was time? What was those glowing thoughts and emotions traveling away from him? Could he do something with them?

He was now firmly in the baby-stage of "exploring everything around him by putting it in his mouth" — except of course, "putting it in his mouth" in Discord's case was to pull it into his magic and turn it inside out, just to see how it worked. He didn't really care if he hurt other creatures -he still hadn't actually developed have any empathy yet. Or the ability to understand language. Or a very defined concept of himself -at the time, he wasn't even considering himself to be male, as he didn't know what gender was. He was getting tired of not really having a body though -surely the other wriggling thing didn't need all their sticking out things? He'll just grab some and try them on. His body changes many times over his life, but his first one was basically just a rolling mass of bodyparts -limbs, heads, internal organs… he wasn't a pretty sight.

But he didn think playing around with putting things together was fun! So he did more of it. Just grabbing some things, pulling them apart and putting them together in more fun looking ways. He didn't really care if what he was grabbing was a creature, plant or inanimate object. Just mixing thing together as he pleased. He was not popular with the locals, to say the least. They tried to kill him over and over, but since he doesn't really exist on the same plane as them, nothing worked, and he continued "playing".


Over the next thousands of years he explored and developed his cognitive abilities. He was starting to understand that the moving things had thoughts and feelings like him, and began to maybe feel… bad… about how he pulled them apart; it hadn't seemed like they'd liked it as much as he had. He was also starting to become really lonely -there's only for so long you can get social interaction from speaking to copies of yourself.

Language was really hard for him to learn, what's with the whole creating order to random sounds, but he worked at it until he could communicate with the closest sapients (ponies of the time). Hoping to find some type of friendship (though he didn't know that's what he was looking for, only that he was missing something), he was instead met with screams of terror and everyone fleeing. He'd seen this behaviour before, but for the first time, he realised what it meant.

For the first time, he realised that the other creatures had opinions about him. Very, very negative opinions.

And for the first time, he was angry.

In his rage… he turned the sun into a miniature black hole.

…well.


He certainly didn't like the creatures on the planet anymore, but he didn't want them dead. Dead things don't move, or think or feel. Or play, or create, or… So he froze time for a while to figure things out. His eventual solution was to make a burning moon, powered partially by magic and partially by him trying to copy how nearby stars worked.

He couldn't get it to move the way he wanted it to though. It was either too far away, or wanted to crash into the planet. He'd also somehow managed to bungle with the orbit of the actual moon as well.

He eventually gave up, as he's not known for his patience, and figured he'd just make sure they're good little celestial bodies and move them himself. Triumphant, he continued time, and returned expecting praise for saving everyone from a situation that totally wasn't his own fault. That obviously didn't happen. So he basically decided that this stupid planet could go screw itself, and he'll just go and find a new, better planet where they'll appreciate him.

He left with a 'pop' for the nearest galaxy, leaving the creatures of Gaia to scramble to try and get their moon and new 'sun' moving again.


He eventually returned, hundreds of millenia later. This time, he decided to make the creatures adore him, even if it meant warping their minds and twisting their world into a landscape of pure chaos. Two alicorn sisters disagreed; and the story after that you all know.


Thousand years after that, he's having weekly tea with a tiny yellow pegasus, trying to suppress his very first memories. Until she showed him some photos of her as a filly and telling the stories behind them. And innocently asked what he was like as a baby. …He thinks she doesn't like the answer.


———-


Wanted to explore a bit more how Discord came to be in my next gen universe :) And seeing how in this version, he came into being so long ago, and had contact with the ancestors of ponies, I thought it'd be fitting to show what their thoughts on him was.

I tried to somewhat mimic how cave paintings look; however, seeing how diverse they are in style, I mainly just tried to get the same 'feel'. They're also obviously in better condition than what we find, with sharper lines and more consistent colors. I wanted you to really be able to see them after all. I do have an in-universe explanation for this though! Since I am doubtful that these paintings would survive for around a million years (I believe the oldest known one in our world is over 64000 years old?), Discord has actually pulled the cave through time to show Fluttershy -so it's actually just a couple of years old.

I also tried to think about how a stone-age sapient horse would draw -so when they wanted to depict baby Discord, they really focused on eyes watching them, and moving rolling limbs following them. They would also be much better at drawing horse and horse-like creatures, as well as any other creature they interact with often, compared to other. So the horses and donkeys are really well made, followed by cows, sheep, goats and chickens. They are really bad at birds, and have no idea how a bat works. When trying to draw another creature Discord brought from somewhere (a monkey) they don't understand how the limbs work, and make very pronounced knee-like elbows. Since to them it looks like its forelimbs are put on backwards. The proto-dragon also got turned into an alligator (which they have seen before), with the same strange elbows and their interpretation of bat-wings.

Don't forget the really exaggerated cloven hooves, gotta show that only horses (and donkeys, but whatever) have the clearly superior one-toed hoof. (Let's just say, there's a lot more behind Rainbow's "cloven-hooved" comment regarding the Storm King than just a comment on his appearance)


Also, if you're wondering, after hearing this story, Fluttershy will start crying and trying to hug him while blubbering over how awful it was that he didn't have any parents and were all alone for so long. In a while she will deal with the.. other stuff… but right now she thinks he needs sympathy more.

Upvotes at import: 81 | Stars at import: 58
Posted previously at: 2020-03-04T22:13:50 | Posted previously by: Mildgyth