> Of Purple Dragons, Great and Small
>  by Mannulus
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

> A Long Walk to a Short Dragon
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


Of Purple Dragons, Great and Small

A Misadventure of Derpy Hooves

By Mannulus

Chapter 1

A Long Walk to a Short Dragon


Summer was a happy time for Derpy Hooves these days.  Her daughter was home from school, and for the first time in years, she had a very special somepony.  The days were hot, and that made her work difficult, but when she got home, there was always somepony waiting for her.  That thought alone made the tedium of the day seem less oppressive.  It gave her hope and drove her on toward day's end.  This was the life she had wanted for years without ever even taking the time to realize it.  Her stumbling upon it had been in itself a stroke of good fortune that even a few months before she would have considered far outside even the realm of her wildest fantasy.
On this particular midsummer afternoon, however, she found herself curiously alone.  Chill Breeze had weather work to tend to, and would be occupied until late that evening, and she had left Dinky in the company of Sweetie Belle, Scootaloo, Applebloom, and several other girls their age, who were engaging in the ancient rite of the slumber party, courtesy of Princess Twilight Sparkle, who had assured their parents, Derpy included, that all proper procedure would be observed.
That being the case, Derpy had decided to take a long walk in Whitetail Wood, and there, alone with the trees, the sound of the breeze in their leaves, and the occasional glimpse of a deer or rabbit, her thoughts had turned to how strange her life had been recently.  She had nearly died several times.  She had saved Ponyville from certain destruction, though nopony in the world but her would ever know that or likely even believe it if she told them.  She had made a friend out of a pirate, and seen that friend hauled away in irons.  She had seen something of herself reflected in an evil queen that once she would have thought too alien for her to ever understand; had even felt pangs of pity for her.  She had found comfort for years of grief with somepony whom at first she had taken for gruff, cold, and even mean.
"I'm just Derpy," she said aloud. "I'm the cross-eyed delivery mare."  This she said, though at that moment, as was always the case when she put her mind to the business of working out matters of who she was, she was not cross-eyed, at all.  "I'm Dinky's momma," she continued. "I'm just... Ditzy.  I'm not cut out for all this."
She gave a little giggle, and shrugged.  It didn't matter if she was cut out for it, or not.  She seemed to have born up under the strain, and her reward for that had been a better life, whether she had expected or sought it.
No, she had never sought her misadventures.  They had always found her, always with their beginnings in a little, cardboard box in a brown delivery bag.  Today, however, one would find its beginning in a completely different place: a place she had not been to in years, and that she only realized she had been heading toward when at last she found it.
It stunned her a bit when she stepped into the clearing with the little pond.  Partly because she had almost forgotten it was there, and partly because she was no longer alone.  For there, seated on a tiny, stone bench, covered with moss and weathered with the decades since somepony had placed it there, was a little, purple dragon -- one who looked quite forlorn.
"Spike the Dragon," she said, drawing him out of his reverie.
He had been hunched over, staring into the pond, tossing a stone up and down with a claw, as if considering whether to skip it across the water's surface.  Faint ripples upon the pond's surface testified that such must have already been his entertainment for some time.  Something seemed to weigh on his mind, giving an intensity to his expression and a depth and weight to his very presence that were far beyond his meager years.
He looked up, slightly shocked to encounter somepony this deep in the woods, and fumbled with his skipping stone for a second before allowing it to drop beside the old bench.
"Oh! Hi, Ms. Hooves!" he said, awkwardly.  He tried to sound cheerful, but Derpy could see and hear a note of melancholy in his greeting.
She stepped over to the bench and looked out across the pond's surface, now settling from where it had last been disturbed by the dragon's chosen pastime.
"Mind if I sit down?" she asked.
"Go right ahead," said Spike. "What are you doing out here?"
"Me?" she asked, taking a seat, "Just out for a walk."
She smiled, remembering the last time she had sat on this bench.  Once, that thought would have brought any number of expressions but a smile to her face, but Derpy had learned in recent months to turn her focus towards the better parts of her past.  It used to terrify her to do that.  Remembering the good times had only ever made her feel sorrow for the fact that they were gone, but now she saw that just because a few bad years had come and gone did not  mean that good ones could never come again.
"I used to come here with somepony a lot," she said. "I'd almost forgotten this place."
Spike gave her an odd look, and scooted to the far end of the bench.
"What is it?" she asked through a faint laugh.
"You're Dinky's mom," said Spike. "Don't talk about stuff like that with me.  It's weird."
"Alright," she said, laughing harder, now.
She had to remind herself that even though Spike was a different species, he was still fundamentally a child.  He acted very mature for his age, probably a product of Twilight Sparkle drilling her own work ethic into him at every opportunity, but his life experiences and understanding of social dynamics were still limited by his age.
"What are you doing out here?" she asked. "You shouldn't be sitting here alone looking so glum.  You're a kid, and it's summer.  Why aren't you out with your friends having fun?"
"Are you kidding?" asked the dragon. "I don't know how to be a kid."
"Huh?" was all Derpy could muster.
"Well," said Spike, "dragons aren't like ponies.  We learn to talk and can learn to read and write really early.  Princess Celestia sort of took care of me when I was really little, but she was so busy that it was really more just a bunch of nannies and butlers that looked out for me.  Then, as soon as I could walk and talk, she made me Twilight's assistant."
"Do you not like being Twilight's assistant?" asked Derpy.
"Well, yeah, I like it," said Spike, "but with her, it's all about working, studying, and research, you know?"  He sighed. "And nowadays, she's getting as busy as Princess Celestia always was."
"I see," said Derpy. "But at least you're always right there with her."
"Sometimes," said Spike, "but these days I end up running a lot of errands, and then there's days like today."
"Oh," said Derpy. "The slumber party."
"Yeah," said Spike. "I get it that she's trying to do something nice for all the fillies in Ponyville, but I... eh..." He waved a claw at the water, giving a glum stare.
"You feel left out because you're not a filly?" asked Derpy.
"I guess so.  I mean, I'll go back home later, but she'll want me to just kinda stay out of the way, you know?"
"Well, it's just one night," said Derpy.
"Yeah, I know," said Spike. "I guess I just... I watch all the colts and fillies in Ponyville, and they've all got..."
His words trailed off.
"What, Spike?" asked Derpy.
"They've all got... parents.  They've got ponies that have time for them, you know?"
"Not always," sighed Derpy. "I wish I had more time for Dinky, some days."
"Yeah, but you want to," said Spike. "That's what I mean."
"I'm sure Twilight wants to spend more time with you," said Derpy.
"Not like you're thinking," said Spike. "She's not my mom, and neither was Princess Celestia.  Neither were any of those nannies that used to feed me and put me to bed.  I don't have any idea of what it's like to have a mom or a dad or anything.  I don't even know if dragons are supposed to have moms or dads around, but I'm not much of a dragon, either."
"You're a fine dragon, Spike," said Derpy. "I've seen you breath fire, eat rocks, and demolish half of Ponyville."
Spike blushed.
"And I'm sure that even though Twilight and Celestia both know they're not your mom, they've always done their best to be there for you.  At least it seems that way from what I can see."
"I guess so," said Spike, "but still, I have to wonder what it's like."
"It's different for everypony," said Derpy. "All families are different, and not all of them are even happy."
Spike shrugged, and said nothing for awhile.
"Come on," said Derpy, finally, standing up. "Twilight Sparkle will probably be wondering where you are."
"Don't count on it," said Spike, but he stood up and followed, all the same.

The pair made their way back to Ponyville, and as they crossed the small bridge leading into the town square, they were accosted by Pinkie Pie, who popped out of a nearby fountain wearing goggles and a snorkel.
"Oh, there you are, Spike," she said, lifting her goggles.  "Twilight'll be glad to know you're alright."
"Twilight's looking for me?" asked Spike, confused.
Derpy merely stood there, staring at the soggy, pink pony that had popped out of the fountain.
"Yeah, she's been looking for you for like an hour," said Pinkie Pie. "I volunteered to check all the ponds and streams because I thought you might have gone for a swim."
"You're in a fountain," said Spike, flatly.
"Well you weren't in any of the ponds or streams, and I already had the snorkel, so..."
"Right," said Spike.
At that moment, Twilight Sparkle landed beside Spike, and shoved her face into his own, scowling deeply.
"Where have you been!?" she asked, the last word spiking sharply enough that her voice cracked slightly.
"Hanging out with background ponies, it looks like," said Pinkie Pie. "We must be in a fanfic."
They all stopped, and stared at Pinkie Pie for a moment.  She was still in the fountain, resting on its edge with her forelegs folded as if in a swimming pool, though the fountain was not physically deep enough to accommodate the rest of her body, given her posture.  Nopony responded, prompting her to shrug.
"Cheers, all!" she said, popping her goggles back over her eyes. "I'm out."
She popped her snorkel into her mouth, and disappeared beneath the water's surface.  Nopony even looked for her to reappear.
"Spike, don't run off for so long like that without telling me where you're going," said Twilight.
Spike grumbled under his breath for a moment, his brow furrowed and his arms crossed.
"What was that?" asked Twilight, suspicious and perturbed at the dragon's defiance.
"I said, 'it's not like you're my mom, or something.'"
"Oh, boy," said Derpy, worried that this show of attitude was at least partially her own fault.
"Well," said Twlight, gritting her teeth, slightly. "I may not be your mom, but I can still send you home to your room!"
"That's where I was going, anyway," said Spike.
"Good," said Twilight still obviously perturbed. "Go there, and don't come out until I tell you to!"
Spike turned, stone-faced, and walked away, throwing his claws out to his sides.
"How is that gonna be any different than how tonight was already gonna go?" he asked, his voice fading as the space between he and the two mares widened.
"Aaagh!!" Twilight groaned. "What am I supposed to do with him!?"
"I don't know, Princess," said Derpy, and for once Twilight did not protest her use of the title.
"He's my responsibility," said Twilight. "Mine, and I'm supposed to take care of him and make sure he turns out okay.  But what am I supposed to do?  I don't know how to raise a dragon."
"Well," said Derpy. "I don't know how to raise a pony, either, but I'm trying."
"A point for the gray pegasus," said Twilight her posture slumping.
"Speaking of which," said Derpy, "If you're here, who's with Dinky and the other fillies?"
"Fluttershy," sighed Twilight.
"Oh, that's not gonna cut it," said Derpy, imagining for a brief moment the yellow pegasus tied up and locked in a closet.
"And Applejack," said Twilight.
"Better," said Derpy, releasing a sigh of relief.
"I just wish I knew more about him and what he is," said Twilight. "I don't even know how long I have with him, really.  I mean, he's a dragon.  Even if we reign in his worst instincts, he'll still grow up, one day.  How long will that take?  How long until he's just too big to live with me anymore, even in a castle?  How long until he outgrows his silly crush on Rarity and wants a big, scaly girlfriend who breathes fire?  What am I supposed to do if he comes home with that?  What if she's not... you know... nice, like Spike is -- a regular dragon, you know?  I'm sure that'll go over really well with the neighbors, but am I supposed to tell him he can't have that?  And can I even be there for him forever?  How long will he live?  How long will I live?"
A faint shout came from across the square.  It was Pinkie Pie, now sitting outside Sugar Cube Corner drinking a milkshake.
"Seriously, the writing staff hasn't been at ALL clear about that; how long WILL you live!?"
"Ignore her," said Twilight, quietly. "She's insane."
"Twilight," said Derpy, now dispensing with formality, "I don't have answers for those things.  My biggest day-to-day concerns are whether I read an address right, and whether I can outfly that evil turtle of Rainbow Dash's every month when the new Daring Do comic comes out...  I still don't know why he doesn't like me."
"You always smell like muffins," said Twilight absent-mindedly. "Tank likes muffins."
"Oh," said Derpy, making a mental note to toss the tortoise a treat next month rather than lead him on the usual merry chase.
"I guess Spike's just my burden," said Twilight.
"Burden?" asked Derpy.
"That came out wrong," said Twilight. "But he is mine, you know?  And I feel like I'm failing him."
"You'll figure it out," said Derpy. "Try going home and talking to him."
"I don't think he'll listen right now." said Twilight.
"Then tomorrow," said Derpy.
"Tomorrow," said Twilight Sparkle, and she turned to walk away.
"OH!" she said, turning suddenly.
"What is it?" asked Derpy.
"Wait here," said the alicorn.
She winked quickly out of sight in a purple flash, and then reappeared a moment later, holding a small, brown box.
"Can you get this to Princess Celestia for me?  It's really important that it makes it to her, but I don't have time to go all the way to Canterlot for a couple of weeks, at least."
"Sure," said Derpy. "I'll take care of the paperwork on it.  Just try to have fun with the girls tonight, and at least stop by Spike's room and tell him you're not upset with him.  That might mean more to him than you'd think."
"Thanks, Derpy," said Twilight, and she flashed once more into thin air.
"Neat," said Derpy Hooves, watching the purple shower that had marked Twilight's disappearance effervesce into nothing. "I think I'll stick with my wings, though."
She leapt into the sky, and headed for home.
> A Priceless Thing, Indeed
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


Chapter 2

A Priceless Thing, Indeed


As it is wont to do, tomorrow became today, and by and by, with the approval of her foreman, Boxxy Brown, Derpy Hooves hopped a train to Canterlot to make her special delivery to Princess Celestia.  It had required some creative manipulation of the schedule and Derpy's own completion of the necessary paperwork, but the big, brown stallion would have none of letting down even one princess, let alone two at once.
As she stepped off the train, Derpy paused for a moment to take in the splendor of Canterlot.  In the grand scheme of Equestria's history, the city was not particularly old, but Princess Celestia, the city's sole planner, had taken a great deal of care to give it a sense of timelessness and grandeur.
"Maybe Chill and I could move here," said Derpy. "Dinky could stay at home, then."
She let the thought dwell in her mind for a moment, but quickly realized that she would be missed in Ponyville by far, far too many.  Best that she stay where she was, she decided, and just be Derpy Hooves, the cross-eyed delivery mare in the background of the important ponies' lives.
"Oh, well," she said, and she turned her eyes towards Canterlot Castle in the distance. "Delivery to make."
She made her way to the castle, and was pleased to find that, unlike her previous visit, Princess Celestia was not buried deep in some secret meeting upon which she would have to intrude.  She was instead in her own chamber, entertaining someone who had only been described by her chief aid, Raven, as "an important dignitary."
Being known both to Raven and the guards, Derpy had been allowed to wait outside the Princess' chamber, so that she could deliver the package directly.  It was, after all, sent by none other than Princess Twilight Sparkle, and had been delivered into the pegasus' own hooves for that expressed purpose.
After a few minutes, the door to the Princess' Chamber opened, and out floated a being that gave Derpy a start:  Discord.
"I still say the best solution would be to turn them all into pumpkins," he said lackadaisically, floating on his back, and looking back at an obviously exhausted alicorn, "but if you insist," he continued, "I suppose I can simply alter the geography enough to satisfy both parties."
He rolled over, and looked down at Derpy, who gulped at having come under his scrutiny.  He chuckled at her obvious discomfort, and patted her on the head.
"Don't worry," he said. "Those big, ol' pretty eyes of yours are more than ridiculous enough to satisfy my... creative maladjustment.  I'll leave you be."
He glanced around.
"The guard that's patrolling this hallway could use a fu manchu, though," said the draconequus, and he glided off down the hallway.
Derpy sighed with relief at having been spared Discord's unique depredations.
"Somepony else out there?" came a calm but weary voice from within the chamber, and Derpy hopped to her hooves.
"Uh, yeah... Yes... Yes Ma'am... No... Yes, Your Highness!  Coming!" she said, trying to combine cheerfulness with respect and humility, an effort at which she was sure she had failed.
She glanced over her shoulder, and was unsurprised to hear the characteristic, shimmering FWOOSH! of a transmutation spell from down the hall.  Then came then a "What the!?" which was immediately followed by a deep belly laugh, another flash, and the crackling tones of a teleportation.
A stallion's voice echoed down the hall: "Aww, this isn't regulation at all!  Now, I gotta go shave!"
"What was that about?" asked Derpy, curiously.
Princess Celestia, who lay on her belly at low table rubbing her face with a hoof, groaned slightly before speaking.
"Border dispute between Mustangia and one of the neighboring provinces," she said, and then she looked up.
"And you are Derpy Hooves," she said, some cheer sneaking into her tone, and her eyes brightening.
She smiled, and it made Derpy feel all at once glad and uneasy.  She did not feel she had any right to be known to even one princess; much less two, and yet here she was in the presence of one who knew her by name, having been asked by yet another to deliver her a package.
"Princess Twilight sent you this," said Derpy, and she dug the box from her delivery bag.
It glowed faint gold, and pulled itself from her mouth.  It was a strange sensation to her.  She had given unicorns packages many times, but when Celestia took the box, it was the first time in all her memory that it had not left her feeling as if she had just been to a heavy-hoofed dentist who practiced without a license.  It slipped away from her teeth gently, without the faintest hint of pain or discomfort.
Celestia opened the box not by tearing off its wrapping telekinetically, but by levitating a letter opener from a nearby desk, and slitting open the tape that held shut its flaps.  What she lifted out of it caused her to give a single, mirthful "Ha," and she turned it around for Derpy to see.
"Well, would you look at that?" she said, happily.
It was a framed photograph of Twilight Sparkle and quite a few other ponies from Ponyville.  Spike was among them also, of course, and they all seemed quite happy.
"Why aren't you in this photo?" asked Celestia. "Aren't you one of Twilight's friends?"
"Heh," Derpy gave a chuckle. "Apparently, I'm a background pony, whatever that means."
"Have you been talking to Pinkie Pie?" asked Celestia.
"Every morning when I pick up my muffins," said Derpy.
"Ignore her," said Celestia, shaking her head. "She's insane; good-natured, but clearly insane."
"So I've heard," said Derpy.
"Besides, we're all in the background from time to time," said Celestia, "but we all have our days in the spotlight, as well."
"You can keep the spotlight," said Derpy, and it crossed her mind that she had just unintentionally made a bad pun. "I like my life when it's quiet, simple, and safe."
"Now, that's hardly a life, at all," said Celestia.
Derpy took a deep breath, and sighed.
"Oh, don't mind me," said Celestia. "I'm just teasing."
"I know," said Derpy, flicking her tail to sooth an itch on her flank.
"So odd that such a powerful little unicorn should have been born to a mare like yourself," said Celestia. "Your daughter nearly burned down the evocation lab last semester.  Did you know that?"
"No," said Derpy, feeling her spine tingle. "I'm sorry."
"Think nothing of it," said Celestia. "It was her pyromancy teacher's fault, really.  He assumed he'd get sparks on her first try with a new spell.  Her... attempt... was considerably more energetic than that."
"Did anypony get hurt?" asked Derpy, sheepishly.
"No," said Celestia. "Fire extinguishers are a wonderful invention."
She looked down at the photo.
"But not as nice as the photograph, in my own estimation."  Her eyes softened. "A moment of time captured forever.  Now, there is a priceless thing, indeed."  She studied the photo for a moment. "Spike is taller than he used to be, isn't he?  Twilight as well, of course, but Spike even more so."
"I bet he'll get a lot taller than that," laughed Derpy.
"Oh, certainly," said Celestia. "He'll be one of the few friends I have who actually stands taller than I do, I suppose."
She gave a gentle "Hmm," and stared a the photo for a few seconds before she spoke again.
"And one of the few who stays with me more than a scant few decades."
"You know, he's a good kid," said Derpy. "He gets frustrated, I think.  I guess it's hard for him, being a dragon surrounded by ponies, but I think he'll turn out alright."
"I hope so," said Celestia, and her eyes turned towards her window. "I really hope so."
"Why wouldn't he?" asked Derpy. "He's got Twilight looking out for him.  She worries a lot, I think, but she does better by him than I think she thinks she does."
"I'm sure she does," said Celestia.  "That girl always worries that she isn't doing well enough by everything that she considers her own.  That goes for her friends, her studies, her position, and her little, purple dragon."
"Well," said Derpy, "I'm sure you're busy.  I'll just be on my way, if there's nothing else."
"No papers to sign?" asked Celestia.
"I took care of it at the front desk," said Derpy.
"Thank you," said Celestia. "I'll have to thank Raven for taking care of the grunt work the way she always does."
"Well, I need to get home," said Derpy. "Dinky's home for the summer, after all.  Can't waste a moment."
"No," said Celestia.  "Whatever you do, don't waste a moment."
Celestia glanced back into the box, and gave another "Hmm."
"Twilight put a couple of spare photos in here, it seems."  She levitated two more photos -- both without frames -- out of the box.  A few foam packing peanuts, spilled away as she did so.  All of them glowed with Celestia's golden telekinesis before even reaching the floor, and found their way quickly back whence they had come.  "One must be for Luna," said the alicorn, "but I can't imagine who the other is for, unless it's her parents.  Could you take it to them?"
"Certainly," said Derpy.
"I'll just write their address on the back, here," said the Princess, and she stood, reinforcing for Derpy her immensity.  It reminded her of her encounter with Queen Chrysalis, but unlike that day, there was no fear in her heart.
After scribbling on it momentarily with a quill, Celestia levitated the photo back to the pegasus, who took it and carefully tucked it into a inside pocket of her delivery bag.
"Well, it was good to see you, Princess," said Derpy, turning to leave.
"It was good to see you, Derpy Hooves," replied the big, pearl-white horse, "and even better to see that you have an easier time looking others in the eye, these days."
Derpy turned back, gave a nod, and a cross-eyed smile that all but totally invalidated the Princess' compliment.  Then, turning back, she strode out the door.
As she left the castle, she took note of the time on an ornate clock that stood on a street corner.
"Oh, dear," she said.
The train back to Ponyville would be leaving in fifteen minutes.
"If I don't catch it, I won't make it home until Dinky's already in bed, even if I fly flat-out with no breaks," she said, raising a hoof and nibbling at it, slightly, "but I told Princess Celestia I'd drop this photo off."
She groaned in her throat.
"I promised Dinky I'd be home when she got there," she said.
Whatever you do, don't waste a moment, Derpy remembered Celestia saying, and she sighed.
"I guess she'll forgive me if I have to mail it to them, instead," she said, and she took off towards the train station at a quick trot.

That should have been the end of all matters concerning how the life of Derpy Hooves related to those of alicorns and dragons.  After all, Twilight and Celestia were royalty, and Spike was, in his own right, a unique, special individual, a baby dragon who lived among ponies and an assistant to a Princess, whereas Derpy hooves was just Ponyville's cross-eyed delivery mare, forever in the background, unnoticed and insignificant, except as a living, breathing sight gag.  However, as it had tended more and more in these past months, the life of Derpy Hooves would once more find a way to cut its course through a tale into which the mare would likely have never chosen to interpose herself.
It began, as Derpy's most difficult and hard-fought days always seemed to do, with what should have been a routine stop by Boxxy's office to receive her day's route list.  What first tipped her off that something might be amiss was when she saw Rarity exit the front door of the Equestrian Parcel Service's Ponyville hub as she approached it.  The unicorn gave her a pleasant smile and a "Good morning" as she passed, and while she returned both out of courtesy, Derpy knew that nothing good could come of what had just happened.  For her, involvement with shipments from Carousel Boutique was always an omen of terrible things to come, and as she stepped into Boxxy's office, her suspicion was quickly confirmed.
"Got a live one," was all he said, gesturing at a weathered, wooden box that sat on his desk, bound with dirty twine and with the words "return service requested" scrawled on it in black ink.
"Oh, no," said Derpy.
"Chin up, Derpy," the big, brown stallion half-growled, never lifting his face from the mountain of forms that always seemed to occupy his desk. "It's all you got on your dance card, today, and I'll see you get double overtime for it."
"But it's summer," whined Derpy. "Dinky's home."
"Don't you live with that weather guy, now?" asked Boxxy, looking up briefly. "She'll be fine with him."
Derpy sighed.  Dinky would, in fact, be fine with Chill Breeze.  He adored the little filly like she was his own, and that was no small part of why Derpy had fallen in love with him.
"Fine," said the mare. "I'll do it, but I want tomorrow off."
"Tomorrow's Saturday," said Boxxy.
"Then I want Monday off."
"Nope," said Boxxy, scribbling at some form or another that currently occupied his desk.
"Tuesday?"
"Maybe," was the stallion's only reply.
"Good enough," said Derpy, and she slid the box into her saddlebag with a wing.
"Where's it going?" she asked.
Boxxy chuckled.
> The Scorched Wings
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


Chapter 3

The Scorched Wings


"Why the desert?" Derpy mumbled to herself as the sun beat down upon her.  "Why the desert in the middle of summer?"
Even high in the sky, where the temperature was significantly lower, she could not stop sweating.  She had brought plenty of water, but the sun had warmed it enough that even though it restored what moisture her body lost through perspiration, it did little to refresh her.
Below her, the San Palomino desert stretched out to the horizon.  Its surface was hard, cracked, and thirsty, full of high buttes and mesas that flung themselves upward to plateaus of sparse sagebrush and the occasional small, round cactus.  This, at the very least, provided pretty scenery for her to enjoy, but even that soon gave way to an endless sea of flat, shimmering sand.
The place was more wretched and uninhabitable than even the lands of Queen Chrysalis had been, but she was fairly certain she was headed in the right direction, at least.
She could not guess who might live out here to even receive a package, and the return address of the box had read only "The Scorched Wings, San Palomino Desert, followed by coordinates given in latitude and longitude.  How whoever had sent this to Rarity had even managed to mail it to her was a total mystery, but "return service requested," meant "return service obliged" to the EPS, even if the return address was on the other side of a lifeless desert.
Derpy powered herself onward over the sand, stopping to hover occasionally and check her location on a map.  She had, in the course of her training as an EPS delivery pony, been taught how to use the compass, the sextant, the astrolabe, and several other navigational instruments for deliveries to out-of-the way places with no formal address, but she had not actually had to use such instruments in all her years with the organization.  This, of course, had precisely the effect that Derpy had anticipated, all along:  she became hopelessly lost.
"Hate my job," she sighed. "Didn't I have a better idea than this, at some point?  I mean, my cutie mark is bubbles, for crying out loud!  I could literally do, like... anything."
She strained her mind for a moment, trying to recall what it was she had wanted to do as a filly, but it escaped her.
"Well," she said, looking up over her map as she hovered over a small patch of sand dunes, "It could be worse.  At least I brought plenty of water... and I can always just ride the jet stream back east to get to someplace where I can probably find some more, but..."
And then, a stroke of luck:  Near the horizon, she caught sight of movement.
"Maybe somepony that knows where I am?" she asked herself aloud. "Might as well find out."
She flew towards the tiny, moving speck, and as she approached, it began to distinguish itself as several tiny, moving specks.  Then, as she grew even closer, the specks became distinguished as the forms of quite an unusual party of travelers.
There was a camel, a zebra, a donkey, and a griffon.  All were heavily laden with many bags, which led Derpy to believe they must be traders of some kind.  As she approached, the camel waved to her, and she waved back.
At last, some good luck for a change, she thought, and she spiraled slowly downward, landing beside the group.
"Hello, traveler!" said the Camel, smiling broadly.  He was bearded, had several gold teeth, and wore an outfit typical of his desert race:  A Keffiyeh and a white tunic to reflect the sun's rays and keep him cool.
"Well, hello," said Derpy. "I'm Derpy Hooves with the EPS."
"And I am Steve!" said the Camel.
"Steve?" asked Derpy, blinking twice.
"My camel name is all but impossible for most ponies to pronounce," said Steve.
"So you went with 'Steve?'" she asked, her voice thick with disbelief. 
"Yes," he said, and these three are Will, Chet, and Fran," he said, indicating the donkey, the zebra, and lastly the griffon.
"Uh-huh," said Derpy, not even attempting to hide her confusion.
"Yeah, we all made up our own handles as whatcha m'call a... solidarity thang," said Will, the donkey, with a twangy, hayseed accent that would have made Applejack blush. "Y'see, us four are known all 'round these parts as..."
And the four dove together, making a dynamic posed tableau, and shouted in unison:
"THE MULTICULTURAL TRADER TRIO!!"
And with that, The griffon stood up from her position at the back of the group, and pointed both of her index claws at Derpy.
"Plus Fran!" she said.
"Fran came on late in the operation," said Steve, "and we'd already worked out the whole bit.  We tried going with 'trader quartet,' for a little while, but it had such a terrible ring to it."
"Right," said Derpy. "I'm... uh... looking for a place called the Scorched Wings."
"Scorch-ed." said Chet, the zebra. "Not 'scorcht'"
"Excuse me?" said Derpy.
"It's more poetic to say it thus," said Chet. "And if you go there, you must be nuts."
"Was that supposed to be a rhyme?" asked Derpy.
"I grade myself on a curve," said Chet. "It's easier on my nerve...s"
"Chet feels like it's kinda dis unfair steereatype that he hasta speak in rhymes," said Fran, her voice thick with a Manehattan accent. "But he can do it wheneva he really wantsta.  It makes him seem more authentic and whatnot for da customahs."
"Yeah, I'm actually from Philly," said Chet. "I mean, my parents used to speak in rhyme, but I think it's a waste of..." He caught himself, and thought for a moment. "Brain power," he finally said.
"Seriously, though, girl," said Fran, stepping forward. "Ya don't just go to the Scorched Wings.  The ponies and camels and whatnot what live out heah don't even go theyah.  Dat place is kinda... It's, like, sacred or cursed or haunted or... somethin.'  The stories are all, ya know, different... But you wandah 'round the little towns out heah in the desert, and you heah plenty of 'em."
"You know," said Derpy, "there's really nothing about anything you just said that I wasn't just sort of already expecting.  And I have to go there; I have a package that has to go to somepony that lives there."
"Ain't Nawpony lives at the Scorchid Wangs," said Will. "You sure somepony ain't yankin' yer chain?"
"I gotta at least go there and check," said Derpy. "It's my job."
"Well, I s'pose we could tell ya the ol' nursery rhyme," said Will, and all eyes turned to Chet.
"Really?" he said, incredulously. "Just 'cause it's a rhyme, the zebra has to lay it down?  That's whack, y'all."
"Just do it, Chet," said Steve. "I don't like this Keffiyeh, either, but I wear it, anyway.  And do you know how hard it is to put in these hokey gold teeth every morning?"
"Yeah," said Will, his voice suddenly articulate and concise, "and this really wasn't the way I saw myself using a Master's in Equestrian Lit, either."
Chet huffed, and looked at the griffon.
"Gonna get your word in, now, Fran?"
"Nah, I like griffon steereatypes," she said, and the trader trio gave her a hard look.
"Griffons're cool," she shrugged. "I mean, we just ah."
Never mind that Fran sounded like none of the few Griffons Derpy had ever met; the pegasus did not have time for this.
"Um, I really need to get moving," she said.
"Fine, y'all" said Chet, and he turned and stared into the west, his gaze intensifying. "I got this."
And with that, Chet threw out a hoof to the horizon, and began, in a booming voice, to "lay down," as he had put it, the most gallant, sincere recitation of poetry that Derpy had ever heard or witnessed.

In the west where all is sand,
An ancient and forbidden land,
There rises where the sun shines bright
A pair of wings which once were white
Blackened now by ancient fire
A legacy of cruel desire
Below them lies a secret tomb
Accursed is that place of doom
Never shall one cross its door
And see the light of day once more
For secrets lie there, best untold
Until, with time, these wings shall fold

The trader trio looked on in silent admiration of Chet's flawless recitation.  The zebra took a deep breath, shook himself loose, and turned back to face them.
"Whadja think?" he asked the group.
"Absolutely flawless," said Will.  "Perfect meter, every time, this guy," he said, gesturing towards the zebra while looking in Derpy's direction. "Gives me chills."
"Yeah, I don't much keeah fa' poetry," said Fran, "but I don't mind it s'much when it's coming outta you, Chet."
She batted her eyes, and Chet gave her a wide, toothy grin.
'Oh, I know baby," he said. "See, it ain't even a thing; the stripes teach you to sing."
"But that was a recitation," said Will. "Not a song."
Chet gave him a hard look.
"It was good!" said Will defensively.	
"Donkey gonna ruin my moment every time," said Chet.
"Never mind the donkey," said Steve, nodding appreciatively. "Song or recitation, it was absolutely wonderful."
"Uh, guys," said Derpy.
"Yes, Ms. Hooves?" said Steve, looking her way.
"That rhyme doesn't tell me anything about where the place is, and now I'm just terrified to go there."
"Oh, yeah!" said Fran. "You wanna get to da Scorched Wings, just follow dis road heeah."  She pointed down at what Derpy only now realized was a paved, brick road, thinly dusted with sand. "It'd take yas a day on hoof, but you'll make it in like three owwahs wingin' it."
"Thanks," said Derpy.
"Dimension it," said Fran. "Just watch for dese little mahkahs, heeah."
She stepped to the side and flicked with her claw a wooden marker she had been standing directly in front of.  It was as simple, wooden stake driven into the ground, with its top painted what had probably once been bright red, but had dulled to pink with the battering of the sun.  Derpy glanced left, and realized that there was long line of such markers, spaced several yards apart, each, leading off towards the west.
"Dey put 'em down to help yas keep da road if a sandsto'am covahs it up."
"Well," said Steve. "It was a pleasure to meet you, Derpy Hooves, but you have your business, and we have ours!  Good day!"
With that, the Multicultural Trader Trio plus Fran turned, and headed off down the path towards the next stop on their trade route.
"That was weird," said Derpy, and she scratched at the side of her face with a hoof.
"You know, they don't have a pony in their group," she said. "That's kinda wrong."

Derpy followed the markers as she flew westward, and what came into view after Fran's promised three hours almost made her drop the muffin she'd been munching on for the last few minutes.
"Wha... Huh!?  How... Like WHOA!?" was all she could muster.
It had been a Pegasus city, once, larger even than Cloudsdale.  It was now spread over many miles of the desert landscape, parts of it floating at uneven altitudes all throughout the sky, supported on bits of cloud that must have been woven together by pegasi with skills that would defy the imagination of Derpy's modern kin. All of Cloudsdale would drift apart and dissipate completely without constant maintenance, but these ruins, by the look of their architecture, must have been thousands of years old.  Still, time had not left them unscathed.
There were many damaged columns, cracked and separated, floating at angles they were never meant to occupy.  There were what must have once been huge dwellings and places of business that were now bent to the point of breaking.  There were buildings of government with fallen and half-vaporized cloud domes.  There were places of commerce, also, these with their ornate signage long illegible, and fallen into ruin.  All of these things floated there, some more or less whole, and others shredded to chunks of stone-shaped vapor that hung limp in the dry desert air, anchored in place by the remnants of ancient magic that would one day fail, allowing them drift into wisps of cloud that would be quickly evaporated by Celestia's great light, off so far away in the cosmos.
Most strikingly, though, all shared one thing in common:  They were black.  It was not the black of dark storm clouds, either, but the filthy, sooty, and very opaque black of a cloud of smoke.  Every single building in sight was polluted with it, so that all were uneven, sooty shades of dark grays and blacks, with only a little white left to be seen, here and there.
Above it all, there rose a pair of towering wings, these polluted so thoroughly that they seemed less like cloud and more as if they had been painted onto the sky in pure tar.
They filled Derpy with such dread that she felt no greater urge than to stop, turn around, and fly home.  Instead, she lit upon one of the least blackened patches of cloud she could find, and finished her muffin, craning her neck around to take in the scene of desolation that lay before her.  She did not want to go any further, but she knew that she must.  First, though, a little water to quench her thirst and another muffin to give her courage were both in order.
After a drink from her canteen, She stuck her nose into her bag in search of something appropriately calming, and was surprised to notice the edge of a photograph sticking upward over the edge of an inside pocket.
She had forgotten to mail Twilight's parents the picture.
"Really, Derps?" she asked herself, but at the moment, it was far from her greatest concern.
She was, after all, sitting on the edge of a dead city of her own kin, and in her bag lay a mysterious box meant for somepony somewhere deep inside it.
"Probably right in the middle, beneath... those." she said, looking up at the enormous wings that dominated the wrecked skyline. "How is it I just don't know about places like this?  Why doesn't anypony ever tell me these things?"
She dug out a muffin, and slowly picked it apart, nibbling at it bit by bit to stay her inevitable advance into this ancient, terrifying place.  In the end, however, she finished it, and though she toyed with the idea of having another -- or three -- to further stave off her coming foray into the unknown, she finally shut her bag, stood up, and flew forward.
> Lock and Key
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


Chapter 4

Lock and Key


The old city gave Derpy a deep sense of unease as she winged her way through its soot-blackened reaches.  These were places where pegasi like herself had once lived, worked, gone to school, shopped, grown old -- and died.  The distinct lack of ghostly moans and unexplained phenomena left her fairly certain the city wasn't haunted, but it certainly felt like it was.
Finally, after some time, she found her way to the place where the two huge wings stood, and brought herself to lite on a small, dirty cloud near their base.  She looked up at them in awe.  They were gigantic, taller than the tallest towers of Canterlot Castle, and even in their torn and blackened state, they seemed majestic, somehow.
"I don't have time to gawk," said Derpy. "I just gotta get this box dropped off, and go home.  Now, where would this pony be?"
Having said these words, she recalled the zebra's rhyme.
"Below them lies a secret tomb," she said, and then she gulped, and whimpered out the next line of the poem: "Accursed is that place of doom."
Still, she steeled her will, and walked to the cloud's edge.  She looked down, and beheld something she had not noticed before, so transfixed had she been by the destruction that surrounded her.
Down on the desert floor, there stood a structure of brown-gray stone.  It was round, and seemed to be full of sand.  She could tell little about it from here, but curiosity and a need to see her job done drove her to step forward and spread her wings, gliding downward in a wide, hesitant spiral.
As she grew nearer, what the structure was became apparent:  It was a stadium or coliseum of some kind, or at least the remnants of one.  Time and the desert winds had piled so much sand within it and around it that only its topmost reaches were still visible, but even so, what little Derpy could see had a distinctly familiar architecture.
"This doesn't look like a tomb, at all," she said.  "It looks like the Cloudoseum back in Cloudsdale."
She continued downward, and finally set her hooves on the sand.  She did not land inside the structure; she was too afraid to enter it unbidden.  Instead, she put herself down outside its front gate -- or what little of it remained visible, anyway.  Though only its top third still protruded above the sand, what Derpy could see of the portal looked just like the main entrance of the Cloudoseum, but for the fact that it was built of stone.  No shutter, portcullis, or other means of preventing passage through it remained, but the eeriness of its similarity to something so familiar was enough by itself to keep Derpy from wanting to step inside.
She stood there awhile, taking in the antiquated, sand-weathered edifice, and as she did so, Derpy became more and more convinced that this place must have, in some way, been the inspiration for the design of the Cloudoseum.  The lines and form, though not identical, were far too similar for anything else to be true.
"But the Cloudoseum was commissioned by Princess Celestia just a few hundred years ago," said Derpy. "Does that mean she's been here?"
"Well of course she's been here," said a scratchy, wavering voice from somewhere in the shadows of the huge archway.  "She used to be quite fond of the games when she was younger, or so she told me, once, when first I took this post."
Derpy felt her heart leap into her throat, and hopped quickly backwards and away from the source of the sound.  She felt the muscles in her wings tighten, ready to carry her away at the first sign of danger, but what emerged from the archway did not seem dangerous, at all.
It was a pegasus stallion -- pale orange, and very, very old.  His face was drawn and wrinkled, and he had a mustache which was waxed and curled in a fashion that had not been popular since decades before Derpy was born.
"Yes, there were all sorts of games here in those days," he said, "races and jousting and horn fencing and the like."
Derpy looked the stranger over carefully, becoming more aware all the time that the pony before her was as much a relic as the place in which they both stood.  He wore barding emblazoned with the Crest of Celestia's Solar Guard, but it looked like no armor Derpy had seen on the Solar Guard as she knew them.  Its design was simpler, having fewer plates and chainmail voiders to cover the areas this sparser plating would have otherwise left exposed.  It had been gilded gold, once, as was the custom of the Solar Guard, but that was only evident in the few thin patches of the precious metal that remained in the crevices and recesses where the plates were joined to one another.  Mingled therewith in these recesses, and in a few spots here and there on the chain links of the voiders, there were only the few barest specks of rust.  For the most part, however, the entire suit gleamed the bright, silvery white of burnished steel, the gilding being long worn away by the fastidious polishing and maintenance the armor seemed to have received, for likewise its brass fittings and buckles shone bright, with only the slightest hints of tarnish in those tiny recesses where a hoof or a muzzle could not easily push a polishing cloth.
"Who are you?" asked Derpy, still uncertain what to make of the old, mustachioed stallion.
"Now there may be the ultimate epistemological question," said the ancient pegasus. "Who? Am? I?" He tickled at the edge of his mustache with a hoof. "Who are any of us, really?" he continued. "I am a pair of wings with a very old pony between them, I suppose, and a hundred years of questions both deeper and more mundane."
"I... really just wanted a name," said Derpy.
"Well, you should have been more specific, then," said the stallion. "Lockinkey is my name," he continued, "but that tells you very little about who I am."
He stepped towards her, his pace incredibly slow, his ancient legs trembling under the weight of his armor, and Derpy worried for a moment that they might buckle, leaving her alone in the desert with an old, stricken stallion and no available medical care.  Miraculously, however, he remained aright, and his tired, aged eyes softened as he spoke again.
"To tell you who I am would require the recounting of thousands of days spent here in this place, standing guard over this forgotten metropolis and the terror that lies beneath these sands.  It would require I recall many thoughts and even more feelings.  It would take more than the considerable time I have lived to fully explore the experiences I have had in it, limited though they be compared to those of some ponies, and I doubt that you have nearly that amount of time to listen -- and myself even less in which to speak."
"Really, now?" asked Derpy. "Well, that's a shame, but..." she stopped mid-sentence, and then spoke again. "Could you go back to that part about a terror beneath the sand?"
"I might," said the old pony, "but for the moment, you have me at a disadvantage."
"Excuse me?" said Derpy.
"You have my name," said Lockinkey, "but I do not have yours, dear lady."
"Oh," she said. "Well, I'm Derpy Hooves with the EPS.  We received a package that was listed for return service here to this place."
"A package?" asked Lockinkey. "A package..."
His face grew solemn, and he stared out at the horizon, squinting against the sun's abusive glare on the distant dunes.
Derpy realized, as the crow's feet around his eyes became even more pronounced, why it was that his face was so shockingly wrinkled.
"I wonder if it could be that it has made its way back here, at last," he said, and he turned towards the gray mare.
"Step inside," he said. "It's a bit cooler in here out of Milady's sun."
"Milady?" asked Derpy.
"Princess Celestia," said Lockinkey, "who gave me the honor of this noble post, the responsibility that lies therewith, and my one, soul purpose in life."
He turned and crept back towards where he had emerged from the shadowy archway, every step seemingly a struggle, and Derpy followed obediently, though she was still unsure whether it was advisable to do so.  In time, he made his way to a small doorway.  Once, it had been a relatively tall window, but with the sand piled so high, it stood just tall and broad enough for a pony to pass through.  It was bereft of any shutter but an old, tattered curtain, which, like Lockinkey's armor, bore the emblem of the Solar Guard.  He pushed it aside, and beckoned Derpy inward.  Upon crossing the threshold, she was pleased to find that it was, as promised, several degrees cooler inside.
The room itself appeared to have once been a small lobby or foyer of some kind, but it had at some point been converted into living quarters.  There was a little fireplace built of clay and set into what had once been a small window, and a small pot was suspended over the remains of a fire built with what appeared to be charcoal.  Near that stood several sacks of flour, rice, and other foodstuffs that could be purchased in bulk and kept in dry storage.  There was an old bed with linens that were tattered but flawlessly and neatly folded.  There was an ornate table that might once have been beautiful, but was now worn almost entirely bare of varnish.  It was also especially scratched and gouged in one particular spot near its head.  There were a few wooden dishes that sat upon a shelf, and there was a jug of water that sat near the fireplace with a battered tin dipper lying beside it.  There was also a bookshelf full of very old, well-worn books, most of which having titles that indicated them to be books of philosophy, poetry, and history. Lastly, there was a lance that hung on two hooks near the door.  Unlike the old pony's barding, however, it looked brand new, as if it had rarely, if ever, been used.
It was made of beautifully flamed white maple full of curl and bird's eye.  It had a tip of polished steel, and rather than the emblem of the Solar Guard, it bore on its vamplate a likeness of Celestia's cutie mark, rendered in what appeared to be pure gold.  Derpy stared at it for several seconds until the old pony spoke.
"Let me see this package you mentioned," he said, and Derpy dug it from her saddlebag.
She put it down upon the table, and Lockinkey stepped to where it lay, so that he might examine it more closely.
"I have not seen this box for at least thirty years," he said plainly. "And in that time, rarely have I seen another pony, now that I think about it.  More and more rarely, in fact, as the years have fled."
"You've lived here for thirty years?" asked Derpy.
"Much longer than that," said Lockinkey, and he smiled at Derpy's stunned expression, "but it was about that long ago that I took this box eastward, and left it with somepony who promised to find someone, somewhere who could fix what it contained.  I had long believed he had deceived me, and sold it, or perhaps that he had died.  Hmm... Perhaps, in fact, he did one, the other, or even both, but whatever its odyssey has been, the box, at least, has returned.  But what of its contents?"
Lockinkey reached to his waist and drew from a sheath fastened to his armor a little knife so old that the wooden scales of its handle were worn almost perfectly smooth, showing only the faintest hints that they had once been finely checkered.  He cut the twine which bound the box shut.  Then, putting the knife away, he put the tip of a shaky hoof into a small recess on the surface of the lid, and slid it open.
What now appeared was so strange that Derpy did not even speak.  Her mind was so taken aback to see the thing that Lockinkey now carefully lifted out of the box that it took several seconds for her to convince herself that it was even real.
It was an egg.  More precisely, it was a bejeweled egg about the size of two hooves clasped together, and it was ornately inlaid with gold filigree.  Wherever this golden lace did not wind its way across the egg's surface, it had been colored deep violet with some type of metallic paint that seemed to glitter and sparkle in the changing light as Lockinkey carefully rotated the artifact to examine its surface.  Furthermore, set amongst the interlaced, golden lines of the filigree were many emeralds of a deeper green than Derpy had ever beheld in such gems before, all finely cut into multifaceted ovals.  Even to a pegasus like Derpy, with no natural ability to sense enchantment, it was obvious that such a thing must be magical, and must have been crafted by somepony -- or something -- for some very specific and probably very important purpose.
It made her uneasy just to look at it, and even more to know that she had been carrying it around for the better part of a day.
"Okay," said Derpy. "That's it for me. Whatever that thing is and why ever it belongs here probably have a story behind them that I absolutely do NOT need to know.   This is return service, so all I need is one or two signatures, and I'm outta here."
"But I still have not answered your question," said the old pegasus, raising an eyebrow.
"What question?" asked Derpy, and then her eyes went wide. "Oh, yeah! The terror beneath the sand thing..."  She cleared her throat. "See, that's exactly the kind of thing that I meant when I said I didn't need to know.  If there's some kind of ancient, evil whatsit buried around here, you can spare me the details.  I'll just leave, and it can stay buried.  Then, I can go home and get Tuesday off, maybe."
Lockinkey nodded very gently.  Derpy wondered if it was intentional, or merely his neck straining under the weight of his helmet.
"Before you go," he said, "I must at least make sure it was properly repaired.  Otherwise, I must send it back with you, again." 
"What do you mean, 'repaired?'" asked Derpy.  "It's fine," she said, gesturing at the egg. "Look at it."
"Wait a moment," said the old stallion, and he gently opened a trio of tiny, claw-footed legs that were cleverly folded into the design of the egg's splendid, gold-laced surface.  He sat it down gently upon them, and did a thing that confused Derpy even further:  He opened it.
Reaching forward, he pressed one of the emeralds, and it sank back slightly into the egg's surface, producing a faint click.  At seams which were so finely fitted that Derpy had not even noticed them before, the front, upper half of the egg split, and two tiny doors folded slowly open, leaving a sort of half-dome which was, inside, even more stunningly inlaid than the egg's surface.  It glittered and shone with what must have been a thousand miniscule jewels of all different colors, each one cut more carefully and precisely than the mare would have thought possible.
"Ah," said Lockinkey. "It is, indeed, repaired.  Whoever did this must have a talent with jewels and things of finery unrivaled in all the world."
"Yeah, Rarity's pretty slick," said Derpy. "May I go, now?"
"Aren't you at all curious what this pony -- whom you seem to know, I might add -- even did?"
"I know she's good." said Derpy. "She makes dresses, too; they're gorgeous.  But I get the worst feeling that if I stay anywhere near that thing, something awful is going to happen."
"At least have a look here, so you'll know what she's done," said the old pony, "and so you may properly thank her for me."
"Alright," sighed Derpy.  It did only seem right to relay the old stallion's thanks.  She walked towards where the egg sat upon the table. "What did she..."
And Derpy stopped dead in her tracks.
"Love of Luna," she whispered.
Inside the egg, in the middle of a remarkable diorama of the inside of a jeweled cave, there was a stunningly perfect statuette of a sleeping dragon.  Derpy could not believe the sight, and though it had at first stunned her to immobility, she felt a powerful urge to draw nearer to it.
She did so, and the closer she drew, the more stunned she became at its detail.  Every minute feature seemed to be rendered with perfect fidelity to a real dragon, and Derpy had seen a dragon much more closely than most ponies.  Her eyes only inches away now, Derpy realized that this miraculous thing was not even cut from a single piece of stone.  Every scale, tooth, and claw had to be an individual piece somehow glued precisely into place, for no chisel or paintbrush was fine enough to reach into many of the tiny recesses where careful inspection revealed as much detail existed as anywhere else.  It was as if someone had literally shrank a dragon to a size that could sit upon a pony's hoof.  So real did it seem, in fact, that Derpy marveled it did not breathe..
"Lockinkey," said Derpy, "What is this!?"
"It is a dragon, obviously," said Lockinkey, "or a very convincing -- if miniscule -- facsimile thereof, anyway."
"This is what's down there, isn't it?" asked Derpy, feeling her knees weaken. "The... terror beneath the sand?"
"Yes," said Lockinkey. "Xindathrana, the Hope Murderer.  I have spent the last thirty years fearing day by day that she might awaken, but now, with the return of this egg, I can at last rest easy."
"Xindawho?" asked Derpy, shaking her head.  "The WHAT!?"
"There are dark, dark times in Equestria's history," said Lockinkey, and he nodded at his shelf of decrepit books. "There are few books which still tell of them, and fewer who know the languages in which those books are penned.  Such stories have been my company for most of my life, and Xindathrana's story in particular is long, strange, and known to very few who still live."  He paused for a moment, and shook his head slightly. "And it is horrible enough that fear of seeing it played out once more has kept me here for all these years, but I am too old to much longer stand my post.  So, I am glad that this egg has been returned to me, that I might at last complete the one task with which I am charged."
He looked down at the tiny dragon forever asleep within the egg, and spoke in a low voice.
"Oh Xindathrana, Murderer of Hope, ye who struck our forebears from the sky, and scorched the whole land in your rage, sleep ye now until the end of time, that both ponykind and thyself may knoweth peace."
He turned to Derpy.
"Would you like to hear the rest of the story, dear lady?"
"Uh," Derpy began, scratching at one foreleg with another. "Can I have the short version?"
Lockinkey gave a quiet chuckle.
"I suppose the short version is that she meant to burn the entire earth bare of all life, and she might well have succeeded if not for this very device.  It was commissioned by Princess Celestia, made by the greatest jeweler in the world, and enchanted by a distant ancestor of none other than Starswirl the Bearded.  The Princess presented it to Xindathrana as "tribute;" a gift of humility in honor of the dragon's own greatest accomplishment: her own creation of a single egg -- not naturally lain according to the course of nature, mind you, but magically cast from Xindathrana's own flesh and blood, and imbued with the agony and despair of a million dying ponies."
Lockinkey looked out the window to stare up at the blackened ruins above for a moment.  Derpy thought she saw him shiver before he began to speak again, but even at rest, the old pony's body was so tremulous it was difficult for her to be sure.
"Xindathrana alone was not strong enough to stand against all the united races of the world, you see, but what would one day hatch from her egg would be a dragon so evil, terrible, and powerful that it would complete Xindathrana's work and wipe out ponykind -- and all else that lived -- including other dragons."
"Celestia's gift to her of this egg," said Lockinkey, nodding at the artifact on the table, "was a rouse."
He reached into the neck of his cuirass and lifted from therewithin a small, purple key suspended from a golden chain around his neck. This he fit it into a tiny recess just in front of the place where the miniature dragon rested within the little, glittering cave. He began to turn it, and, there came from within the egg the sounds of tiny springs tightening and gears grinding.
When he withdrew the key, the sharp, metallic notes of an eerie lullaby emitted from within the egg's base, and the tiny effigy of Xindathrana began to slowly rotate in place.
"This melody locks the dragon in an eternal sleep from which she can never awaken, so long as it is played in her presence just once a century.  This task was last completed by my father, and though I had hoped I should have an heir who would have been next to perform this duty, such is not the way my life has played itself out.  It is not often pretty young mares like yourself come to visit me, you see."
Derpy snickered at his remark, and shook her head.
"I suppose I should have tried harder," he continued. "As time went by, though, I found myself more and more unable to understand the world outside this place on those few occasions that I did venture forth to restock what few supplies I need here.  In time, I accepted that I was not meant to have a family of my own."
Unlike the matter with Spike, Derpy could think of absolutely no words that might comfort the old pony.  So, she remained silent.
"All that is no longer of consequence," he continued. "This day, I shall wind this music box in the dragon's hearing, and then I shall take it to Princess Celestia to be relieved of my duty.  What will happen to this egg after that and whoever shall stand guard over Xindathrana the Hope Murderer will no longer be my concern."
"I'm sorry that things haven't gone quite the way you would have wanted," Derpy said, thinking of the old stallion's years of isolation, "but the box is fixed now, and I need you to sign for this delivery."
Her eyes narrowed.
"Hold on a second!  Why did you ever let this thing leave this place!?  And you just trusted something this important to some random stallion!?" she almost shouted, and her mouth remained slightly open as she finished her outburst.
"Of course not," said Lockinkey. indignantly. "I trusted it to my own nephew.  It only seemed appropriate to place it in the keeping of a member of my own family, as the watch of this place and this box have been our duty for thousands of years.  Moreover, Unlike me, my nephew at least had a family.  If any of his children or their children still live, this duty will fall next to them.  I took it to him, left him explicit instructions for what should be done with it, and returned to my post here so that if, in the egg's absence, Xindathrana awoke, I could stand against her."
"Listen, Lockinkey," said Derpy. "I'm sure you've got some pretty solid... uh... dragon slaying chops, but that thing?" she nodded towards the little, spinning dragon in the egg-shaped music box. "It's name is "Xindathrana the Hope Murderer.  I mean, did you even tell Princess Celestia about all this?"
"I could not," he said, dropping his head. "It was my own fault the device was damaged.  I could not resist the urge to touch the tiny image of Xindathrana, and I broke off one of its wings.  The magic would not work if the image was not restored, but your friend has done such a fine job of repairing it that it is impossible to tell it was ever damaged, at all.  I am positive it will function as designed."
The shame in his words was palpable as he explained his error, and equally so his relief at Rarity's exquisite repair.
"I was too fascinated by it; spent too much time with it open here on this very table, examining it too closely.  It was made to be too beautiful and too perfect to ignore.  You see, that is part of its magic.  It is how the dragon was ensnared by it, for with the exception of this one thing in all the world, Xindathrana cares not for things of beauty.  She cares only for despair, agony, and the suffering of others.  That is why the city above lies in ruin, you see.  She consumed the very anguish of its inhabitants when she burned it.  It was those feelings that she focused into the magic that allowed her to create her egg, and which would have fueled the unstoppable rage of the beast meant to hatch from it."
Derpy felt her spine tingle, now fully understanding why the ancient ruins had chilled her blood and set her so ill-at-ease.  She was no unicorn, but if Equestria was truly a magical land -- and it was -- then a place like that must be full of memories that could affect anypony, regardless of race.  All that murder, violence and despair had been wrought in the name of creating something meant to inflict even more of it.  The very thought made her bones feel cold.
She looked at the music box, and suddenly, something about its coloration -- and that of the tiny dragon inside it -- began to bother her.
"Lockinkey," she said slowly, "What happened to that egg?  Xindathrana's egg, I mean."
"Princess Celestia took it," said Lockinkey. "Princess Luna advised she destroy it, but Celestia insisted that there was a life inside of it which had done no evil and did not deserve death, regardless of what it might do in the future."
Like those inside the music box on the table, the gears in Derpy Hooves' mind began to turn.
"This egg," she said, her stomach twisting slightly, "what did it look like?"
"Well, this was long, long before even my time, of course," chuckled Lockinkey, "but given Xindathrana's own coloration, and the fact that this music box was meant to resemble it in some respects, I should imagine it would have been purple with green spots.
It can't be, thought Derpy. It just can't.  This all happened way, way too long ago.  There's no way.
The story of how Spike the Dragon had been born was well-known in Ponyville -- that he had been hatched from, in his own words, whenever he related the tale "a cute, little purple and green egg" by none other than Twilight Sparkle as her entrance examination to Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns.  Was it really possible that the little dragon was the son of the horrible being whose tiny effigy now spun on top of a collection of gears and springs that were at that very moment playing a melody meant to lock her in eternal slumber?
Derpy Hooves had often been accused of being "slow on the uptake;" everything from a bit ditzy to an outright imbecile, but even she was not delusional enough to imagine that these matters were a mere coincidence.  No, they could not be; Derpy was sure of it, partly because all the signs seemed to point that way, and partly because this matter would be all too well in keeping with her own luck as of late.
Somewhere very nearby, asleep beneath the desert sand, lay Spike the Dragon's mother.  She was incredibly and undeniably evil, responsible for countless deaths, and she had created Spike to carry on in her footsteps.
Derpy felt her head swim. and she stumbled towards the bed, where she sat down, and hung her head.
"Are you alright?" asked Lockinkey. "Do you need a drink of water?"
"Yes," said Derpy.
The old stallion stepped to his water jug, and dipped her out a drink.  he passed her the dipper, and she quickly drank down its contents.  Her head began to clear, and she passed the dipper back to Lockinkey, who laid it on the table.
No, I must be wrong, she thought.  Spike's a good kid.  Twilight Sparkle hatched him -- not Xindawhatever. There was that one time he went a little nuts, sure, but nopony got hurt, right?  I'll tell Twilight about all this, and she can ask Princess Celestia.  I'm probably wrong, like usual.  I mean, this was all thousands of years ago from the look of that city.  Maybe Celestia did just finally destroy the egg, and anyway, there's nothing I can do about it, right?  I should just go home.  I don't want to be anywhere near this place, anymore. 
"Well," she said, getting to her hooves, and reaching a wing into her delivery bag for her clipboard, "if you could just sign one or two forms, I suppose I'll be on my way."
"Actually," said Lockinkey, "I was wondering if you could help me with one thing."
"What?" asked Derpy, her head still clearing.
"I am responsible, at least once more, for placing this music box before the dragon, and letting her hear its melody play.  Until I do this, I cannot be relieved of my duty."
"Well, go knock it out, then," said Derpy.
"It is not so simple as that," said Lockinkey. "My hooves have grown weak in my old age, and I fear I can no longer operate the machine."
"You just did," said Derpy, nodding at the music box.
"Not that machine," said Lockinkey.
> Plink
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


Chapter 5

Plink


Derpy stood in a room above Lockinkey's quarters which overlooked the sand-filled coliseum.  It was a tiny chamber at the top of the gatehouse, which stood at one end of the coliseum's oval-shaped floor.  It was full of levers, gears, and long, wound spools of chain that had managed to rust by sheer virtue of time, even in the dry air of the desert.
"This is where they operated the great machinery of this place, once upon a distant past," said Lockinkey, standing behind her. "These mechanisms allowed huge, oaken gates to be opened, allowed a great, retractable linen roof to be extended outward over the spectators, and allowed water to flood the main floor for naval displays -- or to be drained."
"I need you to turn that valve, there," said Lockinkey, pointing at a large bronze wheel that protruded from a collection of massive gears near the window. "It will not turn easily, but you look strong enough."
Derpy stepped to the huge wheel, and sized it up.  She was not immediately certain that she agreed with Lockinkey's assessment of her ability to manipulate such a ponderous contraption, but she resolved to give it a try, anyway.
Taking a deep breath, she reared back, and placed her forelegs on the wheel.  Then, she grunted, and gave a heave.  The wheel did not give at all, and she ground her teeth together and pressed harder, growling all the while.
"The other way," said Lockinkey, after two or three seconds.
"Oh," said Derpy, and she used the gathered tension in her muscles to shift back hard the other direction.  At first, the wheel moved only very slightly, but Derpy continued to strain. She was surprised when, all at once, whatever corrosion or imbedded sand had impeded the mechanism's movement broke loose, and allowed it quite suddenly to turn, which it did far more easily and quickly than she had imagined it might.  She stumbled to the side, so sudden was the release of the gathered torque in her shoulders and back, but with a few flaps of her wings, she managed to stabilize herself.
"Good," said Lockinkey. "Keep turning until the wheel stops."
Derpy placed her hooves back on the huge valve, and did as she had been asked.  Soon, she heard from far beneath her a terrible, grinding racket, as if the tiny gears and springs of the music box she had heard winding earlier had been magnified a thousand fold.  Then, there came a low hiss that raised in volume to a dull roar, and when she turned her head to look out the window towards the source of this sound, she was stunned to see the sand that had filled the coliseum slowly draining away, pulled into what looked like huge sinkholes that were widening as she turned the wheel.
After several rotations, the wheel all at once refused to turn any further, having found some sort of positive stop designed into the massive gears which it operated.  Likewise, the sound of the grinding machinery below ceased, giving way to only the rumbling hiss of the sand seeping into unseen drains.  Derpy let go of the wheel, and dropped back onto her hooves.  Lockinkey's request accomplished, she stepped to the window, and stood alongside the old pony.  The pair stared forward in stunned silence.
"There are great caverns beneath this edifice," said Lockinkey. "Into them this sand has spilled dozens of times over the centuries, and many times before that, water borne here on long-fallen aqueducts, that ships might be floated and mock battles waged within these walls.  All this has emptied into them, and yet still they are not filled.  Such caverns must be spectacular beyond imagining, and yet nopony has seen them but those who first lay these stones and set these cogs in place."
"It really is amazing," Derpy said, quietly. "Why does nopony know this is here?"
"Some terrifying old nursery rhyme concocted to keep ponies away," said Lockinkey. "Also, I imagine the place itself is rather... unsettling to most."
"What about to you?" asked Derpy.
"To me?" asked Lockinkey. "I suppose it is home."
Still the sand drained, but now in the center of the coliseum floor, there seemed to rise from it a thing that sent Derpy's blood cold, despite the desert heat.  She'd seen dragons before, and of course had seen the tiny Xindathrana in the music box, but what struck her now, above and beyond all else, was this creature's sheer size.
Xindathrana was, in a word, a behemoth.
She was at least four times longer than the largest dragon Derpy had ever seen before, and as the sand drained away to reveal them, her scales gleamed in the desert sun like tourmaline and jade.  In form, she was not unusual for a dragon.  She had one head, two wings, four legs, and a tail.  She was covered in scales, and she had great, ivory-white teeth that protruded from her lips, even though her mouth was shut.  She had no horns; only a ridge of sharp, green, blade-like plates that reached from the top of her head all the way to the end of her tail, which terminated in an enormous, spiked ball, battered and weathered from what Derpy presumed was use in battle.
Or slaughter.
"You were gonna fight that?" asked Derpy, flatly.
"I was younger, then" shrugged Lockinkey.
With that, he turned, and headed down the stairs.  Derpy followed, and the pair made their way to his quarters, where he promptly stopped, and stretched out a hoof to removed the old lance from the wall.
"What do you need that for?" asked Derpy, cocking her head to the side.
"In case she wakes up," said Lockinkey, his tremulous hoof still outstretched towards the weapon.
"Oh, I'm sure she'll appreciate you bringing her a toothpick," said Derpy, her off-kilter eyes narrowing.
"It is not that I can succeed, Ms. Hooves." said the old stallion. "It is that I must try.  It is simply part of my duty -- my one purpose in all the world."
Derpy watched how his ancient, frail wings and hooves shook as Lockinkey lifted the lance from where it hung, and he did not even manage to gain full control of it before it slipped from his grasp, and landed on the floor.
"Could you... pass that to me, please?" he asked, clearing his throat.  He did not look at her as he said this, his eyes seeking instead the floor.
Derpy sighed as she bent down to lift the lance for the old pony, and a thought came to her.
What if he drops the music box?
The idea made her start so suddenly that she almost dropped the lance, herself.  If that music box was destroyed, the dragon would eventually awaken.  Xindathrana had to hear its melody once a century, and Lockinkey looked at least a hundred.  From his own stories, Derpy could only assume he had been watching the dragon and the music box for most of his life.
If this music box were broken, how long would it be before the wicked monster she had just seen awoke?  Derpy did not in any way want to draw closer to that enormous, ancient beast, but could a pony so old and frail still be trusted with a thing so precious as the one artifact in all the world that could keep Xindathrana asleep?
"I'll carry the music box for you," sighed Derpy. "You can take the... this thing."
She passed him the lance, which he took with a wing, and he leaned into it like a crutch, jabbing the rear of its haft into the floor.
"It is my duty to see this done, Ms. Hooves."
"You can wind the music box," said Derpy, "but I'm carrying it, whether you like it or not." 
"Well, I do not," said Lockinkey.
"That makes two of us," said Derpy.
She gingerly shut the still-open doors of the music box tight.  Having made certain they were secure, she wrapped a wing around it firmly, and lifted it from the table.  Resolved now to her mission, she took a deep breath, turned, and headed for the door.
"Ms. Hooves," came the old stallion's voice from behind her.
"What is it, Lockinkey," she said, exasperatedly, not even turning to face him.
"Thank you."

A few minutes later, Derpy stood at the edge of the coliseum floor, she and the old pony having made their way down through a series of stairwells which were still partially full of sand.  From the tower where Derpy had turned the wheel, the dragon had seemed huge.  From this distance, standing on the same level where she slept, she almost filled Derpy's entire field of vision.
"Is this close enough?" Derpy whimpered.
"No," said Lockinkey. "We must place it right beside her to be certain she hears it.  Her ears may still be full of sand."
"Hadn't thought of that," said Derpy.
It was a valid concern.  Though most of it had disappeared into several large, round drains that were now visible on the coliseum floor, each one covered by an iron grate, the entire dragon was still thickly dusted with sand.  Little by little, it spilled off of her in thin streams and puffs of grit with each breath she took -- breaths that were actually visible, even from over a hundred paces away.
Derpy hesitated, her own legs and wings quivering with fear much as Lockinkey's seemed to do merely from normal exertion.  She was not sure if she could even approach the enormous leviathan which slept across the sandy floor of the old coliseum, until she heard Lockinkey murmer something strange.
"She is my responsibilty," was what she thought she heard, and then, "It would break Milady's heart if I should fail."
"Come on," Derpy heard herself say, "We can do this."
They took those hundred paces one at a time, each individual hoof fall leaving Derpy more convinced that the gargantuan mass of muscles, scales, claws, and teeth was going to spring from its slumber and either crush her into the dust beneath her own hooves or completely immolate her in an instant.  Her one sense of comfort was that either death would most likely be all but instantaneous, and thereby relatively painless.
But then, of course, everypony she knew and loved would probably also die.
"Why does that situation keep ending up a thing in my life?" she grumbled under her breath.
"Shhh!" Lockinkey scowled.
After a minute or so that seemed like hours, they stood before the beastly leviathan.  From so close, Derpy could feel Xindathrana's body heat.  It was so intense that it perceptibly raised the temperature around the dragon's body, even under the desert sun.  Sweating intensely, partly from the creature's radiated heat, partially from the sun, and partially from stress, she bent down and very carefully placed the music box on the ground near the dragon's head.
Lockinkey knelt, somehow finding a way to move even more slowly than usual.  Remarkably, not even his armor made any significant noise as he did this, and the tremors that normally wracked his body seemed to be absent.  It was as if all the old pegasus' focus was being directed with every ounce of intensity he could muster towards this one, simple task of ever-so-quietly activating this little, egg-shaped machine. As he pressed inward the emerald that acted as the lock for the tiny doors, both ponies cringed at the miniscule click. Now, Derpy thought back to the last time Lockinkey had wound the contraption, and she dreaded the tiny, grinding noises its gears would produce.
At least it won't be as loud as the sand was, she thought.
"Wait a minute," she said out loud.
Lockinkey's eyes widened with mild panic and shifted towards her, but he said nothing.
"No, seriously," she said, and Lockinkey frantically shook his head very slightly left and right, miming shushing sounds with his lips.
Derpy just raised a hoof in response, and continued to speak.
"All that racket when the sand drained didn't wake her up, right?" she asked.
Lockinkey froze his lips mid-shush, and shifted his eyes left, and then right.
"You have a point," he said plainly.
"Either the spell's still working," said Derpy, "or she's a really heavy sleeper."
"Well, still," said Lockinkey, blushing slightly, "I must wind the box and make certain that she does not awaken for another hundred years."
He fit the little key once more into its place, and wound it several times, producing the familiar sound of the box winding.  He spoke as he did so, and his words bore the cool, sighing satisfaction of decades of uncertainty brought to final, welcomed relief.
"And there... we..."
PLINK! went the music box, and the key suddenly began to spin freely, as if no longer properly resisted.  The melody did not play, and the gears and springs did not wind or grind. Lockinkey spun it around several times completely before he gave up and withdrew his hoof.
Both ponies just stared at the box, blinking their eyes.
"It broke," said Lockinkey, after several seconds had elapsed.
"Why now?" whined Derpy. "After all this time, why now!?"
"Well, I suppose anything mechanical only lasts so long," said Lockinkey. "Though, to be fair, had I not wound it earlier today, it might have worked just this once more."
"Lockinkey," said Derpy, "I do not need you to point that out, right now."
"It would have dawned on you eventually," said the old pony.
Derpy shrugged, nodded, and said nothing.
"The utmost droll thing about this, though," said Lockinkey, "is just how many times in my life I have imagined this exact scenario.  I would call it a recurring nightmare, except that I most often considered it while awake. Of course, the horror of it was that in those flights of fancy, the dragon always awoke.  The fact that she has not just makes this whole situation rather amusing."
"Lockinkey," said Derpy, sternly, "don't tempt Fate."
"Tempt Fate?" said Lockinkey, incredulously.  "Ms. Hooves, you are being obtuse.  You said it yourself: If the sand draining out of here did not awaken Xindathrana, nothing will.  After all, what are the odds that the previous enchantment would wear off at this precise moment? Tempting Fate?  Pish and posh."
As if in punctuation to the stallion's declaration, the dragon, of course, awakened.
It began as a low groan from the creature's throat.  The frequency was such that Derpy did not so much hear the sound at first as she did feel her bones vibrate inside her.  Then, she saw the titanic creature's chest swell with the deep breath of a yawn; heard and felt air moving into the vacuum that Xindathrana's cavernous lungs created with their expansion.  It whistled like a distant gale in the dragon's throat, and then was exhaled, the sounds and sensations repeating themselves in reverse.
"Touche,` Fate," said Lockinkey.
Derpy looked at him, and gave a weak "Ugh," and a gentle shake of her head.
Saying nothing in response, he took two steps forward, and weakly thrust the lance into the dragon's side.  Having wedged the weapon's tip between two of her scales, each one taller than himself, Lockinkey released it, and stepped back, leaving the lance hanging limply from the dragon's body. 
"That's it?" asked Derpy. "That's all you're even gonna try to do?"
"That is all I have to do," said Lockinkey.
Then, the dragon struck.
> Milady's Leave
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


Chapter 6

Milady's Leave



The old stallion seemed to vanish.  He had been swept away by an enormous purple claw, Derpy realized as her brain decoded the events of that split second.  Of course, Lockinkey could not really have simply ceased to be.  He was still there in the coliseum, lying a full thirty paces from where he had stood, and some distance below Derpy herself, who had leapt skyward instinctively at the last possible instant, carrying her just over the dragon's swipe.
She turned in midair, and was greeted with a sight that filled her mind with a thought altogether inappropriate for the situation, regardless of how true it might be.
It's probably a good thing I'm so dehydrated.
The sight that had prompted Derpy's moment of mental innocuity was nothing less than a purple face bigger than a house -- a face with massive, open, and very green eyes; eyes fixed into a scowl which the pegasus could not fully decipher as either the dragon's neutral expression or one of manifest displeasure.  It was not until Xindathrana smiled, her eyes yet retaining the majority of their menace, that Derpy came to her decision.
Her face just looks that way, I guess.
"You're quick," whispered the dragon, and Derpy knew that Xindathrana had whispered because if she had not, the pegasus was certain she would have been rendered permanently deaf.
As it was, the sound was still so loud that it left Derpy's ears ringing, and the breeze of the dragon's breath was so hot and powerful that she swooned slightly and had to strain to keep herself from being blown backward.  After all, it would not do to have Xindathrana think she was trying to leave.  From what Derpy had just seen, she was lightning quick, and her huge, clawed forelegs were very, very long. 
So considerate of her to bother with whispering, thought Derpy, and why am I having such odd thoughts, right now?  Am I actually so scared that I can't physically feel fear, anymore?  Can that happen?  I think that's what's happening.  This dragon has actually scared me calm...  You know, Derps, you should probably say something, so she doesn't just eat you.
"So," Derpy began, and the brow of one of those permanently scowling eyes lifted ever-so-slightly, though the general attitude of disgust remained in its shape. "Uh, Xindathrana?"
"Yes, that is me," whispered the dragon, and there came another blast of hot air and a brief ringing of Derpy's ears. "Who, little pony, are you?"
"Well, that may be the ultimate epistemological question," said Derpy.
I can't believe I remembered that word, she thought. What did I even just say?
Xindathrana chuckled at the remark, and turned her gaze towards the music box.  She very carefully and gently picked it up between the very tips of two of her claws, and held it up to her eye, which narrowed and shifted to focus on it.  While doing this, she brought her other foreleg forward, and rested her chin lazily upon her palm, for the bulk of her body was still lying on the ground.  Only her head and forelimbs were erect.  Even her enormous wings remained folded.
"Such a tiny thing," said Xindathrana, "but to me, most things are tiny."
"I can see that," said Derpy.
"What makes it remarkable," said the dragon, "is that it is also beautiful to me.  It gives me... joy to behold it, and to hear its melody played.  It subdues all my rage, and allows me to sleep in perfect peace."
The dragon blinked just once, a work that took two full seconds and produced both an audible sound and a noticeable breeze.  Then, her scowl deepened.
"I cannot abide that," she said.
Xindathrana squeezed her two claws together, and the music box crunched between them, offering no effective resistance whatsoever.
"Now," whispered the dragon, "with that taken care of, I do not suppose that you, little pegasus, would happen to know where my real egg is, would you?"
"Would you believe that I think I actually know what you're talking about," said Derpy, "and I think I actually may know the answer?"
"Of course I believe you," said the dragon. "You are too terrified to lie; the fear has driven you cross-eyed."
"Yeah, about that..." Derpy raised a hoof and almost corrected the dragon's assessment of her countenance.
Let this one go, she told herself.
"Never mind that," she told the dragon.
"I assure you, I do not 'mind' it," came the whispered reply. "Like everything else about you, it is inconsequential."
"Yeah... Now, about your egg," said Derpy, and the dragon's eyes narrowed.
The pegasus felt her heart flutter.  Her initial adrenaline rush and the delirium of it had begun to subside, and she was now becoming aware of just how precarious and potentially fatal her situation really was.
"I don't even know where to start," said Derpy, shakily.
"Take your time," whispered the dragon.  "I have no shortage of my own."
Maybe that's what makes you a jerk, thought Derpy, but then again, Princess Celestia's pretty nice, and she's really old, too.  I guess this dragon really just likes being a jerk.
These things she thought, but she knew better than to say them.
"Well, you see," she said instead, "your egg, uh... It isn't an egg, anymore."
The dragon looked confused.
"It hatched." said Derpy, spreading her hooves out slightly to the side.
"Then why am I talking to a pony?" whispered the dragon. "You should all be dead."
"Well, the dragon that came out of it is still just a baby," said Derpy.
"Really?" asked Xindathrana. "How long ago did this egg hatch?"
"I dunno," said Derpy. "Ten, maybe twelve years, tops?"
"That is too long," said the dragon, her eyes narrowing and concern creeping into her formerly confident tone.  "It should have begun its work by now. Furthermore, that egg should not have been able to hatch without a tremendous magical infusion, which could have only have come from one source, that being myself."
The dragon's head came forward so far that Derpy could have reached out a hoof and touched her nose.
"Are you lying to me, little pony?" asked Xindathrana, and her eyes rolled very minutely in their sockets as she looked over the gray pegasus.
For those few seconds, Derpy's eyes teared slightly, and she hyperventilated.  She gulped several times, but her mouth was so dry that it gave her parched throat no relief.  It was so unbearably hot this near to the dragon that she feared she might pass out, but finally, Xindathrana withdrew her head, and the air around Derpy's body began to cool.
"No," said the dragon. "You are not sly enough to lie.  I have known sly ponies, and sly you are not.  But still, how could my egg have been hatched without a second infusion of despair?  You know more than you are telling, I am sure."
Derpy knew that she should probably hide as much from this creature as possible.  As the dragon had observed, however, she was simply too terrified to even imagine a falsehood, much less to give one voice, and to remain silent would almost certainly spell the end of her.
"W... Well... it didn't.. hhhhhatch on... on its own," stammered the pegasus. "A unicorn hatched it...  Well, she's an alicorn, now, but back then..."
"What?" said the dragon, cutting her off. "A pony hatched my egg?"
"Uh-huh... Yeah," said Derpy. "A little baby dragon came out of it, and now he lives in Ponyville, where I'm from."
"I am... skeptical," said the dragon. "Perhaps you are cleverer than I give you credit for."
"I'm not clever, at all!" came Derpy's protest. "I'm telling the truth!'  And then, her eyes lit up. "I've even got a picture of him!"
"A painting?" asked the dragon. "With you, you say?  Perhaps I was wrong, and you are merely a lunatic."
"No," said Derpy, "Not a painting; a photograph.  It's like... it works by... Okay, I don't know how it works, but I can show you!"
"Please do so," said the dragon.
Derpy fished out the photo, and held it carefully in her lips.  The dragon's enormous head shifted to side, and craned in close.  One of her colossal eyes once more realigned and focused on the miniscule image.
"This is my offspring?" asked the dragon. Mercifully, the orientation of her head prevented Derpy from being once more blasted by the heat of the ponderous furnace that burned inside her, but there was a note of indignation in her voice that Derpy could not fully place.
"Mmhmyeah," responded the pegasus, through clenched lips.
She took the photo from her lips, and clutched it carefully between her forehooves. 
"That's Spike," she said. "He's what came out of... your egg... I think."  
"Oh it is certainly what came out of my egg." said Xindathrana. "The color is right, and also the form... But no... Where are its wings?"
"He's never had any," said Derpy.
"And why is it smiling amidst all these ponies?  It was meant to despise ponies; to obliterate them.  I made it to PUNISH HER."  These last two words raised to a thunderous volume that was physically painful to the mare's ears, despite the dragon's mouth being aimed sidelong away from her. "It should have left her alone in a lifeless world by now, deprived of everything and everyone she loves!"
"Spike's a good kid, though," said Derpy. "He has lots of friends, and..."
The dragon's voice retained much of its elevated volume as she literally spat out the words, "It is defective!"
Thick, slimy spittle flew from her lips, landing in several tremendous pools that gave off clouds of steam smelling so strongly of sulfur that Derpy could pick up the scent even from where she hovered.
"This is Celestia's meddling," said Xindathrana, whispering once more, though now there was a wicked, hateful jeer behind the words.
"This purple alicorn," she continued. "Is she the one who hatched it?"
"Y... Yes," said Derpy. "That's Twilight Sparkle.  Well, I mean, Princess Twi..."
"I will kill her and it!"  Xindathrana's breathing grew rapid and heavy, and the breeze of the air flowing into and out of her lungs tousled Derpy's mane and forced her to flap and throw her hooves out to the sides for the sake of stability.
In this action, the photograph, of course, was released, and it fluttered off on the hot wind of the dragon's exhalation, sailing over the wall to be lost somewhere in the desert sand. 
"No," said Xindathrana. "I will kill it in front of her, and I will kill her in front of Celestia!  Her wretched little sister, too, if time has not robbed me of the strength!"
"But why would... Spike is happy!" Derpy pleaded. "Twilight really loves him and she takes really good care of him!  Doesn't that matter to you?"
"The thing you keep calling "Spike" was created for a purpose at which it has failed," whispered the dragon through gritted teeth that were each longer than Derpy's wingspan. "The only use it can have to me now is to inflict misery on those responsible for that failure!"
"But he's your... baby," said Derpy. "You... made... him."
"A mistake I shall not repeat," whispered the dragon, and this time there came a low, rumbling growl behind the words.
The pegasus hung her head low, and let herself sink from the sky.  She fully expected the dragon to crush her or burn her, but at that moment, she did not care.  The knowledge that a being this malign could even exist had done something ruinous in her heart that left her totally unable to act or even to think.  When at last she sank to her haunches, she looked up, so stunned that such a thing could be real that it seemed necessary to take at least one final look by which to appreciate its sheer hatefulness before it ended her mortal existence.
That was when she noticed the lance.
It was still buried between the two scales where Lockinkey had earlier wedged it, and the likeness of Celestia's cutie mark rendered on its guard was now pulsing with a faint, golden light.  She thought this was odd; perhaps some sort of failed magic meant to put the dragon back to sleep, but she gave it no further consideration.   All her heart and mind were turned elsewhere:  towards a creeping, welling sensation inside her that had begun to manifest itself as a trembling throughout her body.
This was not the trembling of fear; this was something more violent and passionate -- even dangerous.  At the same time, however, it felt justified and rightful.  It swelled inside Derpy until she could contain it no longer, and it came out as just two words.
"You're awful," she heard herself say, never having truly willed herself to say it, and with those two words' emergence, Derpy suddenly became aware that she was more profoundly angry than she could ever recall being in her entire life.
This creature disgusted her more intensely than she had believed disgust could be experienced only a few minutes prior.  She could do nothing to stop a being of this magnitude and power, she knew, but if it was the last thing she ever did, Derpy Hooves the cross-eyed delivery mare was going to give Xindathrana the Hope Murderer a good telling-off.
"What did you say?" said the dragon, her head snapping downward to bring her gaze onto the tiny pony.
"You are nothing but a giant ball of selfishness!" said Derpy, standing up defiantly. "You just wanna see everypony around you hurt as much as you can because you're so rotten inside you can't stand for anypony to feel anything good, ever!  Queen Chrysalis isn't even as bad as you!  You could love, maybe, but you just don't want to because it would mean somepony... dragon... somewhatever other than you might actually feel good from it, and you can't stand the idea of anyone feeling good because you don't even know how to feel good, yourself, and you don't even want to!  You're gonna be miserable forever, and it's gonna be all your own fault, and you know that, so you just want everyone else to be miserable right along with you!  You are the worst thing I have ever met," said Derpy, "and I have met some awful things!"
The dragon actually smiled.
"You know, little pony," said the dragon, "you are foolish, but you have spirit.  I rather like you."
Xindathrana made a noise that, for a creature of her size, might have been a giggle or a chuckle.  To Derpy, it only sounded like a barrel of rusty chains rolling down a hillside.
"Oh, please don't," said Derpy, huffing out each breath in her complete and utter disgust.
"Begging for your life, now?" asked the dragon.
"No," said Derpy. "I'm begging you:  please don't like me!" She hyperventilated, and stared up at the horrid creature. "I couldn't live with myself!" she snarled. "Why, I couldn't even die with myself!  Kill me if you want to, but PLEASE hate me while you do it!"
"Is that your last request?" asked the dragon, and it raised its right claw high above Derpy's head, blotting out the sun.
"I guess it is," said the pegasus.
"Very well," said the dragon. "It would be terribly discourteous of me not to grant it."
There came then a flash from around the dragon's claw, having its origin in the very sun which that claw obscured.
"Hello, Xindy." It was Celestia's voice. "Enjoy your nap?"
The dragon slowly lowered her gargantuan claw, and Derpy saw in silhouette the big alicorn, slowly beating her wings high above the coliseum.
"How and why are you here?" asked the dragon, and these words were spoken not in a whisper, but so loudly that they made the walls of the coliseum reverberate and spill sand from their ancient stones.  It was only the fact that the dragon's head was turned away from her that kept Derpy's eardrums from bursting.
"Maybe I am wise and all-knowing," said Celestia. "Or maybe someone kept you distracted for me while that old beacon buried in your scales did its work.  I don't know what you're doing here, but good job stalling her, Derpy Hooves."
"Stalling her?" asked Derpy. "Is that what I was doing?  I thought I was just mad."  She blinked twice. "Come to think of it, I'm still mad."
"So am I," said Celestia, her eyes fixed on the dragon.
Xindathrana continued to stare at Celestia.  Slowly, she reached down and flicked the lance from her scales with a claw.  Then, in one swift movement that absolutely defied her tremendous bulk, she rolled her hindquarters around and flung the huge, spiked ball at the end of her tail at the little, gray mare.
It was to Derpy's good fortune, however, that she was now under the effects of adrenaline, anger, and renewed hope.   Being thereby fueled, she managed to fling herself skyward, barely clearing the lethal instrument as it passed.  A wave of sand was heaved skyward in its motion, and some of that tickled at her hocks amid the wind of the wicked weapon's passage.  There was no greater harm than that, however; only a breeze.
"Are you still so petty, Xindy, even after so many aeons of peaceful sleep; so many dreams that Luna sent you at my behest to calm your heart and soul?" asked Celestia. "What can that little pony even do to you!?"
"She and the other were attempting to curse me once more with your contraption!" said the dragon, and the walls of the coliseum shook and spilled sand.
"It is a curse to offer respite to a lost soul?" asked Celestia. "Then surely we are all ruined, Xindathrana, for we are all lost souls."
The dragon said nothing, but a low, rolling growl rolled out from her throat.
"Wait," she said, "The other -- the keeper of this place -- where is he?"
"Oh, he is quite ruined," said Xindathrana, and she gestured at the fallen pony with a claw.
"I see," said Celestia, noticing the stallion's stricken body for the first time. 
She shook her head slightly, then turned her eyes to where Derpy now hovered.
"Fly away," she said.
"You don't have to tell me twice!" said Derpy, moving even as the first word escaped her lips.
The dragon gave one more halfhearted flick of her tail towards the pegasus, which missed cleanly, and instead demolished a wall of the time-worn structure in which she had slept for thousands of years.
Derpy ripped into the air with her wings, spurred on by the gust of wind off the dragon's tail, but then a thought came to her.  She ground to a halt, and spun around.
"Princess Celestia!" she shouted somewhat sheepishly.
"What is it?" asked the alicorn, and the dragon turned her head to focus on the pegasus, though she did not speak.
"I gotta be honest; I totally didn't get around to getting Twilight's parents that picture, and I'm not sure, but I think it's lost pretty much forever."
The dragon grumbled something low in its throat, but it was unintelligible to the pegasus.
Princess Celestia's large eyes blinked several times, and it was visible to Derpy, even at this distance, owing to her liberal use of eyeliner.
"It's fine," she said, and though it was not a shout, Derpy heard it plainly. "I'll show them mine.  Please, go."
"Thanks!" shouted Derpy, "I feel much better, now!"
She gave a little wave, then turned around, and slapped at the sky with her wings.
"How did you know letting that purple alicorn hatch my egg would ruin it?" demanded the dragon, and her voice was so loud that Derpy perceived every syllable clearly, even in her flight.
Satisfied that she was far enough away to avoid immediate danger, she stopped and turned to see if she could hear Celestia's reply, and though the Princess' voice was quieter, she could.
"I had no idea," said the alicorn, shrugging. "I honestly just wanted to see if she could do it, but what could it have hurt?  I had already accepted that I would one day have to kill or imprison whatever came out of it, regardless.  A strange thing happened, though: what came out of it was nothing like you.  What you used to be, maybe, but nothing like what you are now... what you became."
"Then it is weak," said the dragon.
"Yes it is," said Celestia, and she shook her head for a moment, and corrected herself: "Yes, he is.  He is weak, insecure, and fearful, just like you were, but unlike you, he has someone who won't allow him to become a monster."
She laughed.  Xindathrana laughed at the top of her lungs, and the sound pounded in Derpy's ears until she thought their drums might burst at each impulse.  The intensity was beyond thunder from inside a storm cloud.
"Do you really believe that you could have made me something other than this?" asked the dragon, and even in her earth-shaking voice, Derpy distinguished two piercing notes, one of accusation and one of regret. "That was what I hated about you, Celestia; what I came to hate about you; so arrogant and prideful... So vain.
What is the sun but a light for the righteous and the wicked alike?   Do you see now?  Do you see me!?  See THIS!?  Xindathrana!?  Aeons of peace could not unblacken my heart.  I hate you now more than ever, and I will kill you if I can, even if the sun should fall from the sky!  This is all I could ever have become, Celestia.  What delusion ever made you believe you could change that?"
"I do not know," said Celestia, "but I know that I was too busy being a child in those days to raise one.  I am sorry for that."
"And so you seek to atone for your failure by trusting another child to raise one?"
"Again," said Celestia "What could it hurt? She cannot possibly do any worse than I did."
"Trusting another to correct your own mistake?  How like you, Celestia."
"No," said the Princess. "This time, the mistakes will be hers to make and hers to correct, if indeed she makes them.  As for my own, I will correct it before this day I lay the sun to rest ."
The dragon laughed again, but more quietly; the same sound, but as if it echoed from within a deep, iron canyon.
"Do not fool yourself, Celestia." she said. "You cannot stop me.  The ruins above our heads bear testament enough to that."
"Then let us decide this in their midst," said Celestia. "But be forewarned, my dearest scribe: This time, you do not face a child, and you are not so young as you were then." 
The dragon's lip curled into a sneer, and a plume of black smoke thicker than the largest tree drifted up from it, curling only slightly.
Saying nothing else, Celestia lifted herself into the blackened, smoke-stained ruins tangled in the clouds above.  The dragon followed, bringing herself slowly aloft with several long, thrashing strokes of her gigantic, amethyst-colored wings.  Sand poured off her body, and still more burst upward from the earth with the mighty gusts her wings created.  All of it glistened and shimmered in the sunlight around her long, serpentine body as she climbed higher and higher into the sky.  Watching this, Derpy realized that the dragon, in and of her physical form, would have been astonishingly beautiful, but for the scowl that seemed to permanently mar her face.  Something about that pricked the pegasus' heart with a pang of sadness.
As she watched the dragon go, Derpy fought off the perverse urge to follow and watch what she knew would transpire.  She would only get in the way, and might well die for her trouble.  Instead, the thought came to her that Lockinkey might possibly still be alive.
She flew back to the coliseum, and was immediately distressed to see that the gusts of the dragon's wings had pushed the old stallion, alive or not, up against the wall from where he had previously lain, and dusted him with a thin layer of sand.  She flew quickly to him, and spoke his name.
"Lockinkey, are you... still here?" she asked.
"Of course," he said weakly. "I must remain here... until Milady Celestia releases me.  It is my duty -- the one thing that I must do in my whole lifetime."
"You keep saying things like that," said Derpy, her voice cracking as she stepped closer to him. "Did you ever think of just resigning?"
The old Stallion chuckled, and it gave way to a hacking cough.
"Every day," he said.
Derpy actually laughed, but her heart remained heavy; the old pony was dying, and she knew it, as did he.  She knelt beside him, and gently brushed the sand away from his face, chest, and shoulders with a wing.  The sun glinted off his armor, silvery now where once it had been gold.  As had the image of the dragon in the sky, this somehow gave Derpy Hooves a pang of sadness, but she chose not to consider it too deeply.
"I'll wait here with you until she gets back," said the gray pegasus.
"'The dragon or the horse?" asked the old warrior, and Derpy had finally decided that, ridiculous though he may look, this Lockinkey was most certainly a warrior.
"I don't know," sighed Derpy, "but I'll wait all the same."
There came then from the ruins high above a terrible cacophony, snatching Derpy's eyes towards the sky.  The blackened ruins seemed to erupt in bursts of green fire and golden light, and amid those there came occasionally brief glimpses of glimmering purple scales.  Buildings of blackened cloud shattered and burst into what seemed to be millions of fragments, and others drifted into one another, each impact shattering into pieces what must have been the work of centuries to create.  At last, there came a searing golden flash and a mighty, whining roar louder than the fiercest storm.  A moment later, Derpy caught a glimpse of a huge, shimmering purple body crashing through the blackened pillar of cloud from which sprouted the Scorched Wings.  They folded inward over the dragon's body as she plummeted, shedding fragments of filthy, smoke-fouled cloud, until at last they were no longer wings at all, but only a few ragged bits of vapor, slowly rolling with the impetus of Xindathrana's passage.
Derpy's eyes followed the immense creature's fall until her vision was blocked by the coliseum wall, and though she did not see Xindathrana strike the desert floor, she saw the great wave of sand that shot up and then washed outward over the desert before finding its way back to the ground.  It was three seconds later before she heard -- and felt -- the sound of the impact.  It poured over her so strongly that it lifted her slightly from her hooves and shook stones from the place where the dragon had struck the wall with her tail.
It was only a few minutes later that Celestia returned, lowering herself gently to stand over the little mare and the dying stallion.  Her lips were drawn into a thin line, and though no tears spilled from her eyes in Derpy's own sight, they were puffy and red, with two faint, gray streaks that traced from their corners to her jawline.
Lockinkey, still aware despite the invisible form of the pale pony hovering so near his soul, noticed her immediately.
"I am sorry, Milady," he said, gazing up at her. "I could not keep her safe.  I have failed in my one duty." 
"No," said Celestia, "you have not."
The Princess' teeth clenched tight, and she took a deep breath through her nose.  Though Derpy was sure that Celestia would not have liked for it to have been heard, there was the distinct, rattling hiss of sniffle behind it.
"The dragon is once again asleep," said the Princess,  "and I do not believe she shall ever again awaken," she said, looking down into the weary old stallion's eyes.
"Then... do I have... Milady's leave?" asked Lockinkey, taking long moments to breathe between each short burst of words.
"Yes," said Celestia. "You have my leave."
When she looked down, Lockinkey's eyes were open but empty, and from time to time for the rest of her life, Derpy Hooves would find herself wondering whether he had still been alive to hear those words spoken.
> Maybe
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


Chapter 7

Maybe



The alicorn and the pegasus stood beside a great cairn of stones in the center of the coliseum.  Celestia had gathered them from the damaged section of the old structure with her magic, and had raised them over Lockinkey's body in a conical pile.  Eventually, the desert sand would pour back into this place, of course, and Lockinkey's grave would be hidden, just as the sleeping dragon had been.  Derpy Hooves did not know how to feel about that.  It did not seem appropriate to her to bury him in the place from which he had sought Celestia's release, but he had said himself that he was unsure how to return to the world outside when it had changed so much since first he had taken this post.
In truth, there was no place else for him.
"You do understand that you can never tell Spike or Twilight Sparkle about this, don't you?" asked Celestia.
Derpy sniffled and wiped at her nose.  The sun was gone from the sky, now, though Derpy did not recall when, exactly, Celestia had lowered it.  The desert night was colder than Derpy had expected, but it was tolerable.
"You do understand?" Celestia said, repeating herself, which caused Derpy to realize that she had not answered.
She still said nothing, but she nodded, and that seemed to satisfy the big, white mare.
"Are you ever gonna tell them?" Derpy asked suddenly.  The question had been on her mind for some time, and she could no longer restrain it.
"Absolutely not," said Celestia. "If they do not know of this, it is a burden they do not have to carry."
"What about me?" asked Derpy. "I still have to carry it."
"You seem accustomed to carrying burdens," said Celestia. "I'm sure you will bear up under it well enough."
"And what about you?" the pegasus asked, looking up at Celestia.
"It may sound strange," said the alicorn, "but to me, this marks the laying down of one of my burdens, but only with the knowledge that I will find a new one to carry in its place soon enough."
"I guess you're pretty used to it, too, huh?  Carrying burdens?"
"More or less," said Celestia.
"What would you do if I did tell Spike or Twi... Princess Twilight?" she asked.
Celestia said nothing for a moment, then sighed.
"Nothing," she finally said. "There's really nothing I could do in good conscious against somepony who had merely told a truth that they genuinely believed needed to be told."  She sighed. "But does it, Derpy Hooves?" she asked, turning her eyes away from the pile of stones, and into those of the pegasus.  "Does this truth really need to be told?"
"Well, what if Spike..."
"Turns out like his... Like Xindy?" asked Celestia, and then she corrected herself: "Xindathrana?"
"Yeah," said Derpy. "I mean, she made him to be something as bad as what she was, didn't she?"
"Worse," said Celestia; "She intended for him to be much, much worse, and believe me, Derpy, I have considered the possibility."
"Well, doesn't Twilight deserve to know?"
"Twilight would love him anyway," said Celestia, "even if his becoming an engine of destruction were an inevitable certainty.  She would fight it.  She would research nothing else and think about nothing else.  She would lose years' worth of sleep looking for a way to stop it, and she might not even succeed."
"And Spike?" asked Derpy. "Wouldn't it be better if he knew?"
"How?" asked Celestia.  "He would only be afraid.  All the time, for the rest of the happy days he could have known, he would be afraid -- all the time... all of it."
"I guess you don't really ever know if a kid's gonna turn out good or bad, do you?" asked Derpy.
"You can give them the full sum of yourself as you are," said Celestia, looking towards the place where the huge dragon had fallen, "but no."
"Well, what about mine?" asked Derpy.
"She seems alright for the time being," said Celestia, and for the first time since Derpy had first seen her that day, she smiled.
"Could you keep an eye on her for me?" asked Derpy. "I mean her especially?  I know you look out for all your students, but she's..."
"A little bit crazy?" asked Celestia.
"Oh, so you have been watching her?" asked Derpy.
"When I've been able," said Celestia.
"Thanks," said Derpy.
The two sat in silence for a few moments, both their eyes turned to Lockinkey's grave.  Finally, Celestia broke the silence.
"Well," she said, "You have to fly home, my little pony.  Everypony thinks I'm in bed with a fever.  If I just teleport you back to Canterlot, you may be seen coming out of my chamber.  It will raise eyebrows that I will then have to lie, finagle, and bribe back down."
She drew a deep breath, and cleared her throat.
"I do not want to risk Equestria ever knowing about this.  They will make it a story of how I saved them from Xindathrana, the Hope Murderer.  They will write ballads and books and call me again their heroine and beloved savior.  I do not want those things to come of this.  For once, insomuch as I can, I want to be... permitted... to forget."
"I understand," said Derpy, and then she quietly added an, "I guess."
"Go home, Derpy Hooves, and hug your daughter," said the alicorn. "I would fly with you as far as I could, but I am not leaving this place quite yet."
"Huh?" Derpy grunted. "Why not?"
"I have more stones to gather," said Celestia; "large ones, and many of them."
Having said this, she turned and leapt into the air, headed in the direction where the dragon had fallen.

Derpy arrived back in Ponyville mid-morning.  As such strange days tended to do, her weird adventure had left her exhausted in body, mind, and heart.  She bumbled towards her apartment and her bed, resolved that she would be taking Tuesday off, with or without Boxxy's permission.  She didn't even care if he fired her.
"Better than working a hundred years at a job I don't even like," she mumbled to herself. "What did I even wanna do when I was little?"
She thought for a moment.
I guess I wanted to be a dancer, she thought.  Too late for that, I guess, but whatever.  Right now, I just wanna go home, and see my...
"Family," she said aloud, surprised that it had been the word she had chosen.  She could have said "daughter." She could have said "boyfriend," but "family" had been the word her mind had chosen.
"Weird," she said, hanging her head as she trudged forward, "but I'll take it."
Her ears caught the sound of somepony calling her name.
"Miss Hooves!"
She stopped, and lifted her head.  To her surprise, a tiny, orange pegasus on a blue scooter ground to a stop dead in front of her.
"Hi, Scootaloo," said the gray mare, doing her best to smile, in spite of her all-encompassing weariness. "What's up?"
"Oh, I just wanted to know if they ever got that weird, old music box to wherever it was supposed to go."
Derpy pressed her eyelids together as tightly as she could, and gave her head a quick, sharp shake.
"You wanna know what?" she asked.
"Well, I found it in this old trunk of my dad's, and there was this note with it that said it needed to be fixed and gotten back to the address on the box.  It looked really important, and it had lots of little jewels on it.  So I took it to Rarity.  She said she'd take care of it.  Did she ever bring it by the EPS or anything?"
"Uh..." was all that Derpy got out for a moment.
She turned her eyes down to the little pegasus, and stared for a moment.  The resemblance to Lockinkey was undeniable, but Scootaloo seemed uncomfortable at being so closely scrutinized, which spurred Derpy to speak.
"Yeah!" she said suddenly. "I'm sorry, Scootaloo.  I'm a little tired.  But yeah, she brought it by."
"Did it get delivered?" asked Scootaloo, an edge of urgency in her voice. "I just got this feeling like it was really, really, really important, for some reason."
"It got where it needed to go, Scootaloo," said Derpy. "I promise.  They were... really glad to get it back."
"Okay, thanks," said the filly. "I feel way better about that, now."
The orange filly put a hoof to the ground, meaning to give herself a push forward, but Derpy spoke before she could get moving.
"Hey, Scootaloo."
She looked up at Derpy.
"Yeah?"
"What do you wanna be when you grow up?"
"I dunno," shrugged the filly. "I don't even have my cutie mark yet."
Derpy realized suddenly that Lockinkey's cutie mark had been covered by his armor.  She had never even seen it, and now she never would.
"Well," said Derpy, "when you figure it out, you go do exactly what you wanna do for at least a hundred years, okay?"
"That's a long time," said Scootaloo.
"Yeah, it is," said Derpy.
"Well," said Scootaloo, "I gotta go find Applebloom and Sweetie Belle.  We were gonna try a dance class, and it starts today."
"Really, now?" said Derpy. "I think you'll do well at that."
"Thanks!" said Scootaloo, and off she went, buzzing all the way.
Derpy turned and continued walking towards home.
"So, that's it, huh?" she asked nopony in particular, as she crossed the bridge that led into the park. "I'm glad all this is over.  I don't think I could stand..."
A peculiar sight cut her off in mid-thought.  Princess Twilight and Spike the dragon lay together under the shade of an oak tree on a low, grassy hill, the former lying on her belly, legs folded and reading a book, the latter lying across her back, asleep.
Derpy stopped near the pair, and just as she had with Scootaloo, she stared at them without even realizing what she was doing.
"Oh, hi," said Twilight, noticing her standing there.
The sudden acknowledgment of her presence caused Derpy to shake off the haze of sleepiness that had settled over her.
"Hi, Princess," said the pegasus.
"'Twilight' is still good enough, Derpy," said the alicorn.
Derpy just gave a faint, sideways nod, and then turned her eyes towards the dragon.
So tiny, she thought.
"Spike looks... uh..."
"Adorable?" asked Twilight, and she jostled the dragon slightly with her wings, causing him to scratch at his belly, and change his position slightly.
"I was gonna say tired," said the pegasus, "but yeah; pretty adorable.  You studying today?"
"No," said Twilight. "Just rereading an old novel I found under my bed this morning.  Should be done with it by lunch, and maybe this guy'll finally decide he wants to wake up and do something by then."
"So, you've got plans for the day, then?" asked Derpy.
"Not really," said Twilight. "I just got so sick of being busy all the time that I decided the two of us should just take a day off.  Spike got really excited about it, but look at him, now."
"Did he get enough... sleep, last night?" asked Derpy, the thought of a sleeping dragon giving her a moment's pause.
"Plenty," said Twilight, "but Scootaloo was here earlier, and Spike played with her for awhile."
"Oh really?" asked Derpy, "Just like a normal kid, huh?"
"Yeah, I didn't believe it, either," said Twilight, and she laughed faintly to herself. "I think she wore him out."
Derpy wondered for a moment at all the implications of that; of what it could mean that those two individuals, given their ancestry, could play together as normal children in a park.  She wondered for a moment how that would change if they had any inkling of what she knew to be true.  Then, she wondered if it would change, at all.
She hoped not.
"Well, I hope they had fun," was all that Derpy Hooves could find it in her to say.
"I think they did," said Twilight. "Scootaloo's a pretty energetic little filly.  As soon as she left, he came over here and did this."
The alicorn gestured at the dragon sprawled across her own body, and Derpy felt somehow comforted by the image -- as if it was really possible that Twilight Sparkle had unknowingly found a way to render all of the darkness that had been poured into him null and void.
"Maybe that's all he really wants to do," said Derpy.
"Sure looks like it," said Twilight.
"That's kinda what I wanna do right now, myself," said the pegasus.
"Well, it's Saturday," said Twilight. "Go get at it."
"I think I will," said Derpy. "You two have a great day."
Maybe all he really needed was a good mom, she thought, and she shifted her weight to turn towards home once more.
But what if that's not enough? came another thought, and she stopped.
"Twilight," she said, hesitantly.
"Yes?" responded the alicorn, raising her eyes once more from her book.
Derpy stared for a few moments more at the dragon sprawled across the Princess' back in peaceful slumber, and then waved a hoof dismissively.
"It's nothing, really," she said, shaking her head gently. "I'll tell you later, maybe."
Derpy said no more as Twilight Sparkle turned her eyes once again to the pages of her book.  She only turned and strode toward Tack Street, her apartment, her shower, her bed, and most importantly, her family.
"Maybe," she mumbled to herself.


finem