Until Reisuch slipped from otherwhen and struck Syvarth from behind, there was surely no way that we could have prevailed. Even though my entropic shields were glittering like frozen space and Elganath held the Bludgeon of Scattered Desires, Syvarth would still have beaten us down and reshaped the nascent glowing world below us to her own revolting desires.

But Reisuch darted back from the Was-To-Be and struck with all might at Syvarth’s unguarded double tails, and down she fell, landing on the world below. The poor little globe trembled, its barely formed continental masses rippling in mighty waves. As she was distracted in the fractured rock, we reformed our defenses.

It was a brief respite; Syvarth rose from the congealed magma again, cunning and glassy, and uttered a challenge that filled the black sparkling sky with thin deadly shards.

I stamped hard into the glowing rock and it splashed an umbrella around me and my associates, which cooled just as the blades fell. They chipped and cracked the thin shell, but it held, ah yes, it held!

And now Elganath stepped forward and his Bludgeon danced, striking hard at Syvarth’s unwholesome and lethal intentions, shattering and scattering her will. And I stepped forward to spread chaos below her supporting tendrils, laughing with draconic equanimity. And lithe Reisuch, she -- she was not here, now, but this surely was the point where she nimbly slipped back through time and gave Syvarth the backstabbing nudge that would ensure our victory.

Syvarth howled and struck at us again and again with her wiles and her knives, but we held the ascendancy now. As brave Elganath brought down his bludgeon like a vast silver hammer, and I shifted the values of physical law underfoot, and Reisuch, popping back to the present, lashed out with a glowing whip of binding, Syvarth raged in despair, for she knew her rude challenges for the fate of our little world that we’d all built together were now at an end.

Reisuch’s whip spiralled inexorably around Syvarth’s multiple tendrils and my entropic forces eased the way as the mighty bludgeon descended and struck the final blow! With a wail of despair and shock, Syvarth shot like an arrow straight down into the semi-molten world below, passing through rudely formed mantle and incandescent magma to come to her permanent resting place at the center; a fit punishment for her presumption and betrayal.

I stared down at the crater, white hot at the rim with the brown roiling smoke inside--

---

“Discord? Is the tea not to your liking?”

--And the whole noodly forking length of me, unfolded through time like a bolt of lightning, gets frozen to one spine-cracking point. Here I am, not elsewhere where most of the action is happened, or did happening, or…

I stare down at the tiny white porcelain circle with the literal spot of swirling tannin-stained water in it. From the corners of my eyes I see through the windows distant mountains, eroded to roundness now, but once spiky with the force that threw them up, the very edges of the crater that Syvarth made as she fell screaming for the last time. If the ponies could look down through the ground, as I can, past the blazing depths of Tartarus, they’d be able to see that curled form frozen at the heart of the world, skull with jaws spread in its last, eternal challenge.

And slim Egalnath of the Dark Cunning, Reisuch who slipped through instants of time like the thinnest possible blade, Olsibena with his great round maw that swallowed rocks and asteroids and then worlds until he eventually ate enough to become a star… where are they? The paths they took do not even exist any more; they have vanished not only from present and future but also past, so that now I only have my shaky memories to recall them, and must wonder if I only deceive myself to think that such terrible splendor ever blazed its way through existence. And the leakage of Syvarth’s screaming dreams now have lent their power to such trivial little schemers as Grogar and Tirek, who have not the wit to comprehend what true chaos was, or what true power once meant. And I in my little encroaching fences cannot hold my own against even these. My potential still branches through pasts and futures like a tree, but it is like an evergreen now, smaller and smaller as it extends into the glory of the New Order. I, who once played with the forges of creation, reduced to parlor tricks and niceties...

“A fire has to burn; how else can it be a fire?” I mutter.

“What?” says the pony serving tea, blinking with cowlike innocence. “Would you like some more honey with that?”

I extend the tiny, insultingly cool cup, the tiny bubble of congealed matter that I could fragment to gamma rays if I just squeezed my claws one tiny bit harder.

“Do make with the bee-barf, dearie,” I say through my teeth.