Twilight discovers that, even with the collective research, intellect and intuition of the entire Equestrian archaeological community at her back, nothing beats the source material when it comes to archaeology.

Smoulder is more than happy to oblige.

Turns out the School of Friendship has a swim team leader board. Turns out Smolder is a pretty good swimmer. She wants to be the best though, for a reason more complicated than simple pride.

Now with a Youtube reading!

This fic is the product of another one of Nitro Indigo's text prompts. This one: Portray a pony with Naked Foal Syndrome. It ended up morphing into brief character study on Smolder, but that’s not a bad thing for a fic to be.

Smolder has a nightmare.

What confuses her is that it's of something she didn't think she was actually afraid of.

Featured 3/8/2019

Ever since Smolder revealed her affinity for the fashionable and cute to Ocellus, they've had secret tea parties where Smolder gets to indulge her interests and Ocellus gets to feel trusted. Symbiosis in action!

At their special Hearth's Warming secret tea, Ocellus notices that Smolder is acting strangely. She has no idea how deep the problem goes.

Written for Level Dasher for Jinglemas 2021

Silverstream learns an interesting fact about Smoulder's name. Naturally, she has to share!

Smoulder isn't too thrilled.

Preread by ChudoJogurt!

As featured by Equestria Daily! And again on Student Six Day!

Silverstream’s breath kinda smells like fish right now and that’s the only flaw I can pin on her. Her beak and claws are polished. Her mane has that wild...windswept...thing going on.

“What’s up?” she asks.

“You’re literally perfect,” I tell her. I put a little growl into my voice to make it clear that I’m seething in rage.

What do dragons think of hot peppers? Gallus wants to know.

By the end of the day, he'll wish he hadn't.

As someone who has spent much of his time around authority figures, Spike knows well how difficult it can be for them to just relax. And this is something Smolder learns too, when the two of them receive Dragon Lord Ember for an afternoon.

Dragons are a lot of things. Strong. Brave. Confident.

Smolder has all of these qualities in spades. For example, she needed strength, bravery, and confidence to ask the object of her crush to visit her in the Dragon Lands.

She just didn't expect Ocellus to be such a good dragon too, or why that would be such a problem.

Edited by my dear friends FamousLastWords, Not Enough Coffee, Ice Star, Semillon, Muggonny, and MissytheAngle

Cover art by Raikohillust!

Dragons are something of an enigma to Equestria. Those who do live within the borders are largely reclusive, either building their hoards or sleeping away the decades. So far as dragons who are active in everyday life in Ponyville go, Smolder represents a 100% increase in the population.

Twilight cannot let this opportunity slip her by. Enough time has passed for it to not be a diplomatic faux pas to sit Smolder down and grill her for much needed details on her species, not only for the sake of science, but for the benefit of the young dragon in her personal care. Naturally, the topic of death comes up.

Twilight handles that about as well as you might expect.

Discussion of death is largely academic and intended to be comedic but I've tagged it teen to be safe. No actual death or scenes of violence are shown so I didn't think the death tag itself was needed. It's also tagged for comedy as that was my intent, but only you can tell me if it's actually funny or not.

Now with sequel: Growing Up Dragon