A Real Dragon

Crystal Clarity’s heart thrummed in her hollow chest as she sweated under the covers of her bed. She swallowed. To her, these noises seemed as loud as claps of thunder, but somehow neither her mother in the room across the hall, nor Illusion in the one next to hers, woke.

Slowly, she reached one leg out from the bottom of the covers.
A single claw brushed the carpet.
She winced and retracted it, sure that Mom would come running to scold her.
Nothing happened.

Clarity spread the claws of her back hoof out over the floor. Her lungs collapsed in a sigh of relief. She promptly went into a panicked quiet-coughing fit from the ensuing smoke.

It took what seemed like an hour just to uncurl her tail with a minimum amount of rustling, but eventually Clarity’s entire body was free of her covers and on the ground, and her pillow decoy was in place. After allowing herself a devilish grin of victory, she slunk out of her room and down the hall, taking care to check that her mother’s breathing cycles really were still heavy and slow. Really, she could have just listened for Rarity’s cacophonous snores (though it wasn’t exactly as if one had to try) but she wanted to be absolutely sure.

When she came to the stairs, Claire laid herself carefully down over the lip of the first step. She rolled over onto her back, wincing and pausing as the step creaked slightly from the shifting of weight, ears pricked and straining for any hint of a disturbance from her mother’s room. At last she was confident enough to slip her foreclaws around the tip of the railing and swing herself up.

Clinging upside-down by all four legs, she inched down the railing. All the way, her panicked lungs pressed down against her back, and her frantic miniature heart sent its hot blood rushing down to pool at her head. But somehow, she stayed calm. Gently, she touched down on the bottom floor, knowing that she had now officially broken her mother’s rules, but also that every step she took now brought her farther out of the others’ hearing range.

She looked around. Her mother’s old shop, to which they had returned only for a week, seemed unnaturally cavernous and silent in the darkness. Hazy vague shadows were cast about from the stars and flickering Ponyville streetlamps lingering just out of sight.

Claire wouldn’t be going anywhere near those tonight. She took one final moment to steel herself and smile.

If anyone was watching, a tiny silhouette could have been seen to linger for just a moment, defiantly proud against the cold blue windows. Then it slipped away into the chilly June night as silently as a cat.

***

Prince Illusion could feel that something was off as soon as he woke. Every muscle in his young body stiffened with alertness, though he couldn’t yet tell why.
Out of habit, his hooves and paws walked across the room and up the wall. He stood on the ceiling, his coat transformed to match its color and texture exactly, as naturally as he’d stand on the floor.

His father had taught him that ponies hardly ever looked up.

Crouched low--or it would be high--Illusion crept around into Rarity’s room, where she was sleeping soundly. He wondered if anypony had ever told her how loudly she snored sometimes.

The hallway was empty, and at first glance Chrys’s room seemed alright, too. He could see the shape of her body where it lay, discreet and tiny, under her covers.

But something was definitely off. Illusion wracked his brain trying to put his paw on it.

Suddenly he knew. It was the smell of smoke. That smell, the faint traces of which followed dragons anywhere they went--or at least anywhere they breathed--wasn’t there.

It took everything Illusion had to keep him from descending into a panic, but if there was anything he’d learned from his mother, it was to always stay calm.
The colors of the walls around him passed over his body like familiar shadows as Illusion, with a thudding heart, floated down to peel back Chrys’s covers.

She wasn’t there.

Illusion breathed an enormous sigh of relief at discovering that his best friend was not, in fact, dead, before it really dawned on him: she wasn’t there.

He felt himself falling violently through the floor. He actually did fall violently through the floor. He gulped, picking up on the traces of a smoke trail leading out through the back door of the shop. Crystal Clarity was out at night, and that never meant anything good.

There was only one thing to do, or so he convinced himself.
Illusion--that is, a slight ripple in the color of the floor--followed.

Clarity’s shadow slunk lithely across the Ponyville cottages. She tried to think of what her mother would call them, and at some point her wandering mind settled on the word quaint. She couldn’t remember quite what it meant, though.

As the smooth green line of the Everfree approached in the distance, Claire could hardly contain her excitement. She’d been planning this for months, ever since her mother’s last furious outburst forbidding her to communicate with any “wild” dragons. And her father had just stood by and watched! She snorted to herself as she crept along the side of the street. There were times when she could swear that she was a dragon who had been born into a family of ponies--ponies who didn’t care in the slightest what they said about dragons.

Well, she would show them. Her mother just didn’t want her making a new friend; she was sure of it. There was no way imaginable that most dragons--creatures like Spike, the sweetest softie of a dad imaginable--were the ferocious big ugly pony-eating beasts that her mother described. After all, it wasn’t as if it was unlike Rarity to exaggerate.

Clarity crossed the town’s outer boundaries and crept into the untamed brush, her hooves tingling with their newfound freedom. That same devilish smile crept across her face again as Clarity worked her legs up to a run. Nopony was watching now.

***

Illusion was watching Clarity very carefully, and he was growing more worried and unsure of himself by the second. After he had caught up to her, he had almost revealed himself.

Something about the stiff and careful manner with which Chrys crept among the looming houses had, however, clued him in that she would sooner claw her friend quiet than let him go back to her mother, so he had kept his cover.

For the first part of her journey through the town, Illusion had glided behind Chrys as undetectably as a ghost, but by now he had grown too tired to maintain his magical flight and was (while maintaining a good distance) padding through the increasingly long grass on hoof.
Illusion’s stomach winced as if shot through with cracks of nervous lightning. Some part of him had been aware all along that she was heading into the Everfree. He just hadn’t admitted it to himself, hoping, maybe, that she’d get scared and turn back.
He should have known better.

With a sickening blow, he realized that now it was too late: if he tried to go and fetch Rarity now, they wouldn’t make it back before Chrys had already entered the forest.

And Rarity would wonder why he hadn’t come to her before then…Illusion grimaced in the darkness with guilt. A few pony-lengths ahead of him, Chrys’s determined--no, utterly bullheaded--little body passed between rippling waves of dark grass and under a lone tree. An owl hooted plaintively from somewhere within its branches. Illusion shivered. His fur was standing on end, every muscle in his body clenched. Why couldn’t she just see how dangerous this was?! What was she even doing here in the first place?

***

It was when Clarity’s tail ducked completely under the shadows of the forest that her first inklings of doubt began to creep in. It dawned on her a little more with each passing heartbeat, each rustle which revealed itself after a few seconds as a bird or rabbit skittering through the darkness but stopping to turn up and give her a blank-eyed stare, that she was alone...in a forest...at night.

In spite of the gradual curdling of her blood and stiffening of her bones, Clarity kept up her pace. Her legs, whose endings could be transformed from hooves into claws or vice versa at will, maneuvered around both rocky and marshy terrain with ease. And yet she could not shake the feeling of unsettledness that came with the constant flashing of amber eyes--imagined or real?--in her periphery, or the grunts and squawks it was always possible to believe were occuring just around the fringes of her hearing range.

All at once her hoof slipped and she lost her balance, tumbling over the lip of a ravine that she had been too distracted by her own fear to notice. Her limbs dashed themselves desperately against the rock and miraculously, a few of her claws were able to snag on the same branch.

Even as Clarity was falling, she had not dared to scream. The forest already had her under its spell, and she was now firmly of that most unconscious and primal of beliefs that making even the slightest noise, let alone the piercing shriek of the freefalling, would somehow rip a hole in the delicate, tautly stretched fabric of peace and let all Tartarus loose.

On the other hoof, Crystal Clarity realized as she dangled by two of them from a branch, at least this was the ravine where Nidra had told her that the dragon lived.

Deftly working her claws into every available cranny, Clarity let herself gradually down the vertical rock wall. She /had/ always had a knack for climbing. It wasn’t as strong at the moment as it usually was, though--every few seconds her ears would pick up another phantom noise and turn to face its maker. Clarity couldn’t wait until she reached the dragon--certainly it would know what to do.
Just a few more minutes, she told herself, squinting down into the ravine’s shadow-swallowed depths, and the nice dragon would help her out. She tried to take a deep breath. Everything would be fine.

Finally, after an amount of time that, if asked, Clarity supposed she wouldn’t even be able to put into words, all four hooves were down on the ground again. For a minute or two she simply stood there, with her back against the rough wall, petrified of moving any further lest she rip a hole in that delicate sheet of peace. But as her eyes gradually adjusted to this place of utter, eerie liquid darkness and silence, sheltered from moonlight by high walls and tree canopies, she saw something that motivated her. At the ravine’s opposite end she could make out the mouth of a cave--a dragon-sized cave.

For the first time in hours, Clarity stuck out her chin and asserted her proud smile while marching onward, through the mud, towards her destination. Wouldn’t everypony look silly when they found out that Claire had been brave enough to see through their little game?

***

Drip.

The sounds of the droplets echoed through the water-slick chambers of the dragon’s cave. Clarity worked up the bravery to say something.
“Hello?” ...and immediately regretted it. The cave took her near-whispered word and turned it back on her into something brash, wet, alien.
Unsure of themselves at first--was she trespassing? What time did dragons sleep at? What if the cave had been...taken over?--her feet began to tread the invisible, moist surface of the cave floor, taking her deeper inside.

She waited some time longer for a response before admitting to herself that it wasn’t coming, and she might as well try again, slightly louder this time.

“Hello?”
For a few moments, the cave echoed back this terrifyingly loud sound to itself, eerily.
Then the entire cavern erupted into violent sound and light--the animal, manic roar and furious yellow flame of--

Oh, no.

Crystal Clarity ran like Tirek was after her. The inferno behind her roiled to engulf the entire chamber, and her breath had to be sawed back and forth across her lungs in the heat. She howled and turned her desperate legs even faster as the flames licked the spines on the tip of her tail.
The dragon roared again, a sound as wild and cacophonous as a million bits of wood and glass shards being scraped across ten thousand windows. The dragon was catching up--Clarity put on an extra burst of speed even though she knew it was no use--her legs were like twigs compared to that beast’s tree trunks--oh, why did she come here?!

In the moment before she was swallowed by the dragonflame, Clarity imagined that she heard another roar from somewhere outside.

And then everything went dark.

To her surprise, Claire found herself actually coming to her senses again. Did that happen after a pony was dead? And the floor of the place where she was dead was very similar to the floor of the cave where she had been before she died--could it be that…?
An enormous, growling huff of hot breath from a pair of nostrils the size of hoofballs was released directly behind Clarity. The heat rolled down her back. The dragon was only listening for something. It was the happiest noise she had heard in her life.

Then the other roar--the one that had apparently stopped this rampaging dragon--sounded again from outside the cave walls, somewhere in the ravine, and Claire suddenly found herself very worried again.

Nevertheless, since sticking around with this dragon for too long more or less meant certain doom, Clarity supposed she had better take her chances outside.

She snuck as quietly as she could--catlike--this time with her life at stake, through the cave and out of its mouth.

And into her mother’s hooves.

Clarity’s eyes went round and her mouth hung open. She could feel that Rarity’s face was wet with tears when her mother hugged her once before looking back at Claire with a gaze full equally of terror and fury, then turning back toward the cave’s mouth to emit yet another animal roar capable of making a full-grown dragon stop in its tracks.

Clarity decided that if utter awe existed, she was in it.

But the moment was over, and the dragon had had enough.
“GooogogogoGO!” Rarity shrieked as she swung Crystal Clarity up onto her back with Illusion--Illusion?! and galloped at lightning speed away from the blue dragon, which had just rounded the corner out of the cave’s mouth and was proceeding to aim directly at them with every fiery roar.
Rarity’s desperate hooves were able to keep three ponies ahead of the dragon for far longer than Clarity’s claws had been able to hold her lead, but in the end, it appeared that all it took was for the dragon to get a tad impatient.

At once, their pursuer was not closing in behind but soaring above them. Rarity couldn’t turn around fast enough, and within seconds, all four of the dragon’s enormous limbs had contacted the ground with a quake-like boom, flinging Clarity into the air and leaving her dangling by a few claws from her mother.

A jet of flame opened fire from down the dragon’s throat and erupted into an inferno that lit up the night.
For one split second, Clarity seemed to feel herself burnt to a crisp by the mighty flame.

Something collided with her. She screamed, but realized she wasn’t falling--just tye opposite. She was soaring up, away from the rampaging dragon’s roars, and through the cool air like nothing had ever happened.

“...D-Dad?” Crystal Clarity broke down into a coughing fit. Her father’s head turned around from where it had been guiding his flight.
“Hello, Clarity.” He smiled at her wittily, flashing his sharp teeth. “I didn’t think I’d be seeing you for another few days. What a nice surprise. And you, Illusion. And Rarity, dear.” Spike smirked and waggled his eyebrows at a point beyond Clarity on his back. She followed his gaze and squinted into the darkness to find that her father had somehow managed to sweep everypony up just in time.

Clarity looked down over the tip of her father’s wing as he dipped to swirl around an updraft. The dragon, far below, was still emitting frustrated--or were they confused?--bursts of yellow flame, and stood out as a point of flaring light against the darkness of the forest surrounding it.

“Whoa.”
“Young lady, before you marvel at the spectacle of an infuriated dragon you’ve just created, I ask you, what could you possibly have been doing out here?!” Claire turned around to face her fury-contorted mother (not to mention Illusion, who still appeared to be in violent shock). “You would have been KILLED if I hadn’t gotten up and noticed you were gone in time! And no matter WHAT your answer is, do NOT think your father and I are not disappointed in you or that you won’t suffer the consequences…”

Clarity decided that she would deal with her mother later. Apologies would happen, certainly--and berating questions for Illusion!--but for now just closed her eyes for a while, tuning Rarity out, smiling to herself and feeling the wind in her mane as she flew atop her father. No matter what “real” dragons were like, Clarity decided that it was pretty awesome to have one for a father and, although it wasn’t something Rarity would brag about, a pretty good one for a mother, too.

Author's Note:

From this Fun Fact:

When Claire was younger, she was fed up with how everypony would talk about how dangerous and scary dragons were. She was shocked when even Rarity said dragons (other than Spike) were dangerous. She refused to believe they were bad and when on a vacation to Ponyville with Rarity and Illusion, she went into Everfree to find one. Illusion followed to make sure she'd be safe. The dragon ended up being quite dangerous as predicted and Rarity, along with Spike, who came later, had to save the two children.

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