He rushed through his dimension, himself following closely behind. He clutched the tiny horn close to his chest, as he gleefully flipped and spiraled through the chaos towards his house.

"It'll work, this will work!" he said, as he turned back to smile at himself. "This can direct and control their magic!"

"So what, it can direct magic!? How's that any different from other things? Their magic still will just exit wherever it wants!"

"Because it's not a thing! It's a body part! That's why it works, why unicorns' magic is directed through it and doesn't just go everywhere."

He slammed open his door, which turned into butterflies as it hit the wall.

"Fleshy people's magic follows pathways in their bodies, pooling and swirling in different places. Then existing through their wings or hooves or mouths or whatever as they use it."

He skittered over to the egg, gesturing to it. "Their magic would have just swirled around and either tried to exit too much and blown him up, or exit nicely and then chaosified the closest object." He gently lifted the egg up into his arms, even as he floated the horn over to his face to study it again. "Like, turned his heart into a rubber duck or something."

Discord moved closer hesitantly. "But with the horn…"

"Unicorn horns are made to be exit points! So if I can attune it to their chaos magic, the path of least resistance means magic will go through it, and as it does…"

He whipped around, a magic grin on his face. He shrunk himselves down and turned intangible, going into the horn to point at hollows in the bone, filled with meat and microscopic crystals.

"It passes through these puppies! Biological magical control crystal… things! With this on their forehead, their magic will want to exit through it, and then they can control what happens."

Discord wrung his hands. "Right. But…"

"Okay, maybe not completely. It is chaos magic after all, not unicorn magic. But it should be enough for them to not accidentally fill their own lungs with beanie babies."

"But it's not…

"Not theirs, I know. But that's easy. Just gotta change the info enough so their blood-things don't think it's an illness. This will work, trust me! It's just putting one creature's body part on another creature -I've done that literally thousands of times before."

"And I thought I said I'd never speak of that again!! Much less do it again!"

Discord stopped dead in his tracks. Staring at himself.

He looked away, wringing his tail in agitation. "This is what I did before. When I was playing. Pin-the-bodypart-on-the-bodypart, see how the new creature reacts," he said. "But, they, they weren't toys, and how many… how many didn't…"

…

Discord also looked away, as he became alone again. The gesture inadvertently made him look at the horn floating beside him.

It… wasn't him that had taken it. He'd just found it. On the floor. He didn't remove it from the baby's head, some stupid ponies had done that. It was already off her head. He'd just found where they dropped it.

But everyone had been looking for it.

It's not like they could have done anything if they'd found it. It'd been removed for too long for ponies to be able to reattach it. The nerve endings were already too damaged to fuse together again. It wouldn't help her to return it, the ponies couldn't do anything with it.

He could probably reattach it somehow. Like how he can put it on the baby in the egg.

Why should she have the right to it over the baby? They needed it to not die —she could survive without it. He couldn't just make another one; the crystals inside were much too orderly for him to copy. Not that he was ever very good at copying. So there was one, and they needed it more than she did.

It was hers to begin with. Her life might be harder without it.

Two thirds of ponies have perfectly good lives without horns. And even for hornless unicorns, he had noticed that she had little earth magic in her too, so she'd be fine, even better than the pink-purple serious one.



. . . what if this was a sign? That Discord wasn't meant to-


No.

He knew where those thoughts led. So he lifted his head off his shoulders and shook the idea out of it. Placing it back on his neck, he again turned to study the horn.

It didn't matter. This was for Fluttershy. If compromising his morals a little bit to give her the baby she deserves, well, he'd done a lot worse for far less valid reasons. This would just be another thing to weigh on his oft-ignored-conscience.

He got to work.