Princesses of Equestria

Chapter 14: Intellectus

The world was on the mend, and it was all thanks to her.

Armonia could see as much from her place of meditation, atop the peak of Canterlot mountain. Hectare by hectare, her phobomancy purged Discord's deformations from the realm. Chequerboard hills grew fresh golden grass. Holes in swiss trees filled with real leaves. Floating rocks reattached to the ground where they belonged.

She'd healed everything between Ponyville and here, the center of her power. For miles in every direction, her dominion stood out as a lush island of natural splendour.

An island in an ocean of filth.

The aftermath of Discord's Pandemonium stretched well beyond the horizon, even from the dizzying heights where Armonia meditated. Were she to go a mile higher, that chequerboard horizon wouldn't change. And were she to go higher than air, higher than sound, high enough to behold Equestria's sphere in its entirety, that sphere would have Discord's repulsive claw marks all over it.

Just like I do.

Steel scraped against steel. Armonia realized she was touching her chestplate again, on the exact spot where, under fear-forged armor, the old scars lay. The scars he'd branded upon her.

Armonia seethed, and resumed her meditation. She yearned to face Discord again, and give him some scars of his own. That was off the table, however. After her victory, she'd had ample time to scour Canterlot's grounds, and find the hedged courtyard where Celestia and Luna kept Discord's petrified body. She'd prowled in there, heart hammering fit to burst, all her gathered phobomancy boiling at her horntip, rounded the corner with a cry ... and found an empty plinth, traces of Harmony's magic, and nothing else. Not a trace of the disgusting snake who'd tormented her. Only one spell could be so absolute:

Disintegration.

Armonia had shuddered then, half from remembered agony, half from relief. They'd finally done it. Executed him for his crimes. Armonia stifled the urge to vomit. Despite Tia and Lulu's many, many weaknesses, here they'd shown more strength than she ever could.

Armonia knew, firsthoof, what being disintegrated felt like. The numbness that ate skin, flesh, and bone. The sickening absence of crumbled extremities. The terrifying plunge into the sleep before death.

True, Armonia had been spared that death. But she had still woken crippled, and no power in Equestria had been able to fix that. Even her own phobomancy could not restore Equus's broken body, and compensated by creating a better body around it.

Disintegration was irreversible. As was the death of a soul. Dead plants could be restored, their simplistic biology re-enervated or fabricated from scratch by Kindness's magic. Creatures of flesh, blood and will were another story. Disintegrate them, and nopony save perhaps Queen Eponia Herself could remake them.

And since Queen Eponia had died to make the world, that option was off the table too. Along with the option of Armonia using disintegration magic ever, ever again.

If she had encountered Discord, frozen there in Canterlot garden, completely at her mercy, she couldn't have done it. Oh, she would have given him something to remember her by. A broken horn, two broken wings, a scarred chest, and a one-way ticket to the Silent Realm.

But disintegration? Death? Cold-blooded murder?

Armonia's stomach churned. Her ears rang from the echoes of her own screaming. Begging for somepony to save her, anypony to save her, as she died from her own killing blow.

She lurched forward, coughed, and wiped the bile from her mouth.

Never again. Even if he were standing before me right now. Even if he laughed in my face. I wouldn't do that to him. Or to anypony at all.