Not for the first time that day, Trike felt a speck of worry gnawing through his reptilian brain.
The Dragon Lord was always right. He knew that much. Being right was the whole point of the Dragon Lord, because if a Dragon Lord was wrong, then every dragon was wrong to follow him. Or her. And that would be wrong. Dragons had to follow the Dragon Lord. This was about as much abstract thought as his brain could handle before it demanded that something get torched or smashed.
He was standing on the edge of the pony town, with its many, many flammable houses and its squishy little ponies. According to the Dragon Lord, the dragons should make peace with the ponies and no longer terrify them. Since the last pony he’d seen had been running into a house about three hours ago, he sensed he was not making much progress in that area.
He’d had a wooden placard in his claws. There’d been writing on it, but he’d forgotten what it said, and in any case he’d eaten the thing about an hour ago for a dare.
Overhead, the midday sun was clearly as bored as he was. He’d been watching it for ages and hadn’t seen it move an inch.
Trike switched his body off. It was a typical reptilian response to so much heat and stillness; already, the furnace inside his stomach was bubbling and trembling under the sheer heat he was absorbing. Hot flame was always good for a dragon. He missed the lava pits back home already; nothing quite relaxed him like a long dip in an oozing pool.
“Maybe it’s the ponies’ sleep time,” said Fornax to his right.
Gears hummed and whirred in his head while the thoughts eased into position. “Ponies don’t sleep.” More humming, more whirring. “Do they?”
“Dunno,” said Sapphire Shade to his left. “Once, I watched this village for a decade. They were always walking about when I looked.”
“Eh?” Trike swung his horned head round and focused on her. “What, all the time?”
“Except at nights,” she added quickly. “They went in their little houses at night.”
“Yes, but that could be snack time for them, I expect,” said Fornax. “Besides, you don’t go to sleep for a few hours. You’d never drop off right. Takes months just to drop off right, but you can get a lot of eating done in a night. Stands to reason.”
Trike looked at the placard Fornax was still holding. It said, in sloppy ink, “FRENDS”.
“I bet they don’t get your sign,” he said glumly.
Fornax’s spines bristled at this, accompanied by a low, rumbling growl. “Nothing wrong with my sign.”
“It’s spelled wrong, I’ll bet,” said Trike. “No wonder the ponies aren’t coming over. They dunno what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah,” said Sapphire. “Why’s there a ‘D’ at the end? I don’t hear a ‘D’ when I hear ‘friends’. You should scratch it out.”
Cracking like a whip, Fornax’s tail clobbered her across the rump. Guffaws met his swift if unsubtle offensive manoeuvre.
“Didn’t hurt,” she said smugly.
The Dragon Lord had said no fighting. No belching. No flaming. No… Trike wrinkled his brow with concentration… needless violets. He had no idea what flowers had to do with it. Maybe ponies got sick if they ate them.
“Now stop that, you two,” he rumbled. “Those ponies might be looking at us. They’re thinking; look at the dragons. They’re good for nothing but fighting and yelling and being scary and stuff. That’s not dragons anymore. The Dragon Lord said so.”
Both dragons hung their heads and coughed awkwardly. Still, Trike could see their clawed digits clenching and unclenching. It had been days since their last cache of gemstones, and the Dragon Lord had made them apologize to the diamond dogs afterwards.
“Do you think we should’ve gotten something?” said Sapphire at once.
“Like a gift?” Fornax rubbed his chin with a claw, scraping the scales with a sound like rusty nails rubbing against corrugated iron. “Could get a phoenix egg. That always cheers me up.”
Trike’s brain switched track, but the conversation had already gone a few lines ahead once his train of thought had stopped trying to derail itself with the effort.
“Phoenix eggs are dragon food,” he muttered, ignoring whatever they’d just said. “I’ve seen ponies eating mushy stuff.”
“Where was that?” said Sapphire.
Trike forced his memory out of the depths, an industrial effort hampered when he noticed the sun had indeed moved a foot across the sky since the last time he’d checked.
“On migration,” he said. “I passed a pony town. All the ponies ran into their houses. They had this thing in the street. These wooden block things, all covered in plants and brown squishy stuff. I tried one by eating it.”
Both of his colleagues hummed and nodded eagerly at this sterling example of a draconic tradition upheld.
A smile crept up Trike’s face as though he were eating the confectionary there and then. “Lovely stuff. Tasted like quartz, but better. More… I dunno. Nicer. Made me feel happy.”
“Wow,” breathed Fornax. “How come you never mentioned this before?”
“I did.” Trike winced at old blows reigniting across his rump. “Other dragons just laughed and kicked me.”
All three of them peered across the stretch to the rooftops and chimneystacks. Despite the sinking sun, there was still no sign of a pony coming to forge the connections of a new and exciting future between species. Occasionally, Sapphire belched a gust of flames, prompting thoughtful critical feedback from Fornax along the lines of “My granny could do better than that.”
When the sun was approaching the horizon, Trike noticed a much uglier thought rising up like a mouldy rock in the middle of a ruby bowl.
“I don’t think they’re coming out again,” he said.
“Should we head back?” said Sapphire. “Either we’re meeting ponies, or I’m getting a nap.”
“Maybe we’re supposed to go say hello to them?” said Fornax.
Before he could stop himself, Trike burst out into belly laughs that echoed back from the distant mountains and hit him across the inner ears. The Dragon Lord was never wrong!
“Sometimes, you’re so stupid, Fornax,” he said.
Fornax didn’t even hide the snarl this time; scaly lips wrinkled, revealing sabre-like fangs that vibrated through sheer outrage. “Say that again.”
“The Dragon Lord said we gotta make friends with the ponies,” said Trike, forcing the smugness out of his voice; he’d seen Fornax punch more than one uppity dragon into the middle of next year. “But she said only if they want to.”
“So what?” snapped Fornax. “We want to. There’s nothing wrong with saying hello.”
“But,” piped in Sapphire, “only if they want to.”
“Yeah.” Trike hunched his back and stretched his wings; dragon or no dragon, sitting in one place for so long was giving him cramps. “And if someone wants something, then they go get it. They go get it when they know where it is, right?”
Reluctantly, Fornax nodded, yet his fangs were bared with the effort of conceding this much. “Yeah, but that’s dragons, isn’t it?”
“Pony wants food,” said Sapphire, “then pony goes and gets food. Really, Fornax. You gotta stop thinking dragons are the only ones who do anything. That’s…” She struggled around the unfamiliar words of the Dragon Lord. “Draco… centric. Thinking ponies don’t think like we do all the time. That’s in the past, yeah?”
Trike grinned in a “there you are, then” way, and only felt slightly guilty when Fornax growled back. In truth, he hadn’t understood much of the speech, but Sapphire was clearly on his side.
“So,” he continued triumphantly, “we make friends with the ponies, but the ponies gotta go and get friends. So they come to us first. That makes sense.”
Fornax groaned and settled back into a lounging position. “All right, all right. I was only saying. All this pony stuff is hard, you know?”
“And boring.” Sapphire flexed her tail and watched the spines rise and fall in the air. “Could do with a tail wrestle if it’ll pass the time, really.”
“Eh, I don’t feel like it,” said Trike. “Later, maybe.”
Once more, they watched the sun crossing the sky. They knew it was moving by now. They just had to catch it in the act sometime. Besides, no one wanted to be the first to look away.
By the time it had set, the trio were blinking afterimages out of their eyes.
“Draw,” said Fornax at once.
“If you say so,” muttered Sapphire. “So, Trike. How long do we have to wait? I could do with a flap around the sky for a bit. You know. Do that loop-the-loop-and-skydive-and-tornado-trip thing I’ve been working on.”
Trike felt a sudden surge of generosity, and in any case was too stiff to put up much of an argument. “Sure. We can keep watch. Give us a turn in a bit, though.”
The two male dragons watched her zooming up into the sky with interest. Dragons so rarely got the chance to watch each other’s aerobatics, and Sapphire wasn’t bad-looking by their standards. Usually, they guarded their tricks like they guarded their treasure.
“What a world we live in,” said Fornax. He glanced back at the lit windows of the cottage. “So how long do you reckon we have to wait until they come make friends with us?”
Trike stared past the bobbing silhouette to the night sky. No poet’s soul would’ve survived long in the chest of a wild dragon, but on a night like this he could feel old childhood words come crawling back. Silvery sheen… twinkly gems of the night… the endless beauty of the void… Then his brain gave up, and he started thinking about gemstones.
“Not long,” he rumbled with a smile. “Ponies are soft-hearted and give in easily. I think we got a couple of centuries at most.”