//------------------------------// // Chapter 5 // Story: Sharing the Nation // by Cast-Iron Caryatid //------------------------------// — ✶ — Twilight left Spike with Luna for the rest of the day before taking off in the direction of Cloudsdale. He wasn’t happy with the decision, but that morning in particular had made it clear that the arrangement they had for him to ride while she flew—which was to say, none—wasn’t satisfactory. In hindsight, she probably should have let him choose, but all the same, she really doubted that he actually wanted the sore muscles and close calls that a ride all the way to Cloudsdale would involve. At least, that was all assuming that Cloudsdale was still there after the Wonderbolts inevitably rejected the grandstanding demigoddess for being exactly that—not that Rainbow Dash wasn’t a team player, but neither did she exactly fit in… and Twilight doubted that the massive stormcloud on the horizon had been scheduled, so there was that. Hopefully there was something left of the city; otherwise, Rainbow Dash was going to have to figure out how to handle weather across all of Equestria real fast, and Twilight did not want Rainbow Dash as a weather goddess. If that happened, Twilight would have to let her be on the goddess council, for starters, and that just wasn’t going to happen. Okay, okay, calm down. Rainbow Dash would not destroy all of Cloudsdale, even if her heroes had crushed all of her hopes and dreams… just most of it, and almost probably not on purpose. It took Twilight a while to actually reach the storm clouds, let alone Cloudsdale itself. She wasn’t much of a flier, and without being able to disperse into a swirl of stars like she’d been able to do as a result of her improper manifestation, she was limited to the speed and lift her physical wings could give her, augmented by the occasional—and occasionally not-so occasional—short-range teleport. Teleporting, however, was itself limited by her ability to push her magic ahead of her, especially against the sunlight… or… no, she wasn’t going to get caught up in what it was called now that there was no sun. …Ringlight? Anyway, it took everything she had to fly through the storm clouds, teleporting each time she was nearly blown into the dark thunderheads… which is to say they were barely moving and not dangerous at all, but she had precisely zero experience flying through weather and it seemed dramatic at the time. She might be making a bigger deal of this than it actually deserved. Sure enough, even though she had a moment of panic when she continued to fail to find any sign of the city in the clouds, this was an error on her part as she eventually found it below the cloud layer she’d been fighting—down where everything was relatively calm, and fine if you ignored the great swirling mass of clouds overhead. She was never going to tell anyone about this. Not even Luna. …Probably not Luna, anyway. Well, she’d try, but Luna knew where she was ticklish. Of course, Cloudsdale being fine didn’t necessarily make her job any easier. Well, it made her job a lot easier because she wasn’t going to have to figure out what to do about billions of bits in damages, but what she meant was that Rainbow Dash probably wasn’t in Cloudsdale, so she was going to have to go back up into the stormy mess anyway. There was always a chance that the storm was just responding to Rainbow Dash down in the city, but Twilight doubted it. Most likely, she was up in the center of it all. Then again… whatever was going to happen had probably happened, and nothing was being struck by lightning just at the moment. Twilight hesitated, made a decision and headed down into the city first after all. More specifically, she headed to the Wonderbolts compound and looked for a certain iconic fiery mane that, ironically, now would have looked a little plain and lifeless next to the Celestia with actual fire for a mane. Spitfire had made herself easy enough to find by standing out by the compound’s main runway wearing her dress uniform plus sunglasses and frowning pensively up at the swirling storm clouds, though she was hardly alone in doing so. Twilight circled around to where Spitfire would see her on approach and glided down in front of her. “Princess,” Spitfire greeted, crisply saluting with no visible sign of disrespect, though Twilight doubted she was happy to see her… or that she was actually in the military mare’s chain of command, for that matter. The military was a side of the government that she’d never had any experience with, and anything she did think she knew had equal chances of having come from her mother, whose books had creative ideas about what happened in locker rooms and captains’ quarters, so she resolved to keep this short. “Captain,” she respectfully returned, followed by a glance up at the sky. “So, tell me, how badly did it go?” Spitfire raised an eyebrow at Twilight. “You mean when your hot-shot friend came barging into my office and started telling me how she was going to ‘revolutionize’ the Wonderbolts and pitched a hissy fit when I told her to get in line and sign up for the academy? I don’t care if she can do a dozen sonic rainbooms or whip up one hay of a storm; if she thinks she can just fly in here and instantly be hailed as Celestia’s gift to the ’bolts, she’s got another thing coming.” “That’s ridiculous,” Twilight told her with some snark. “Obviously she’d be my gift to the Wonderbolts—though I’d have wrapped her better if she’d talked to me first.” The humor quickly passed, and another glance up at the storm clouds got a sigh out of Twilight. “Well, it’s not as bad as I’d feared, but since I was picturing Cloudsdale scattered to the winds…” She rocked her hoof in a so-so motion. “That’s not saying much.” Spitfire lowered her sunglasses with her hoof to look at Twilight. “Uh, come again?” “I don’t suppose she claimed, in no particular order, to be immortal, the bearer of the constellation Draco, literally made of lightning and rainbows, the greatest pegasus who ever lived, on the goddess council, etc.?” “Some of that?” Spitfire admitted uneasily. “I wasn’t really listening that closely to be honest. Ma’am.” “Yes, well, she is absolutely not on the council,” Twilight said with some bite to her tone. Spitfire stood there, expecting something more that never came. “And…?” “Did I stutter?” Twilight bit back. Scowling, she looked Spitfire dead in the eyes. “Let me make this clear, captain; about a week ago, I created five immortal demigoddesses invested with the power of a thousand mortal mares. Good idea or not, there’s nothing I can do about it now… and you might just have broken one’s heart today. I can’t say you did anything wrong, but maybe the next time you have to let down an eager fan, a little tact wouldn’t hurt?” — ✶ — Teleportation, Twilight mused, was an excellent way to make a dramatic exit before things get awkward. She didn’t feel much better for having expressed her displeasure with Spitfire. It hadn’t been her place to do so, nor did she want it to be, though she doubted the military mare had been terribly ruffled by what had likely been a mild rebuke by her standards. Regardless, Twilight had other priorities, so she put the matter aside and focused on making her way to the center of the swirling storm clouds where she expected to find Rainbow Dash and what exactly she was going to say when she found her. ‘Sorry, Rainbow; I knew that giving you power would go badly, but I was feeling spiteful and wanted to make a point? On the bright side, Rarity as a demigoddess is working out way better than I ever expected on that front; why can’t you be more like her?’ Yeah, that would go over well. Unfortunately, finding Rainbow Dash turned out to be far too easy and she hadn’t come up with anything before she spotted her… and Pinkie Pie… and Fluttershy, in a manner of speaking, presuming storm systems weren’t the natural habitat of small yellow flying squirrels. Twilight hadn’t even known that flying squirrels could walk on clouds. Pinkie Pie’s presence, she wasn’t even going to question. The two ponies and the yellow squirrel were down at the center of what resembled an amphitheatre of clouds swirling around Rainbow Dash and hadn’t yet noticed her. Twilight took a deep breath to prepare herself. Well, this was it. Her friends were out there dealing with a problem she’d caused and she was going to help… or at least apologize. Screwing up her courage, she shifted herself forward and—got a facefull of large, yellow seagull. Twilight balked and sputtered, taking a moment to understand that the seagull was holding a wing over her mouth and shushing her. Backing off, Twilight yanked herself free from the seagull and spat the taste of feathers out of her mouth. While she was doing so, the seagull-Fluttershy landed on one of the clouds between Twilight and Rainbow Dash and made nervous little shooing motions with its wings. Twilight’s shoulders drooped. “You… don’t want me to help?” Seagull-Fluttershy flapped its wings to bring itself closer to Twilight again and… patted her on the head? The apparent consolation was then followed by another quick shooing motion as it glanced back towards the group of Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie and squirrel Fluttershy. She wasn’t going to lie; being rejected by a seagull was not going to be the highlight of her day. “…Fine,” she said, sulking. Listlessly, she pulled the letters for Rainbow and Pinkie out of her saddlebags and offered them to the seagull. “Do you want to just take them…?” The seagull shook its head and made a triangle with its wings, which Twilight took to mean she should leave them at Rainbow’s and Pinkie’s houses. Dejected, she stuffed the invitations back in her saddlebag and turned to leave. “At least let her know I’m sorry?” Seagull Fluttershy nodded its head and then, in a blink, all the yellow drained out of it. The plain white seagull acted as if nothing unusual had happened, turned its head with a quick jerk to look at something and flew off. Was there even any point to coming out here? Twilight’s flight back to Ponyville took a while. — ✒ — Spike was still feeling a little sour about being left behind by Twilight when lunch came around and she still hadn’t come back. No, he probably wouldn’t have enjoyed flying on her back all the way to Cloudsdale to head off Rainbow Dash being Rainbow Dash, but she could have at least made that his choice. He wasn’t a baby anymore! Or so he told himself. To be honest, his indignation fell a little flat no matter which direction he looked at it from. From what he’d been able to get out of Ember, dragons were never really supervised, but they were generally expected not to wander off from their parents until they had their wings—and even Ember didn’t have hers yet. Even more damning, though, was what the matter looked like if you considered him a proper adult. This was, after all, his real, honest-to-Celestia job, here. It was actually entirely reasonable for Twilight to leave him someplace where he could be useful while she ran off to deal with a personal emergency, and complaining about it would be childish. It’s not like it was even any actual imposition, as no matter what Luna came up with for him to help with, it was still in an entirely different class than the comfortable but dull nine-to-five grind he’d been doing for the mayor. Really, the only actual valid complaint he could come close to was that Luna hadn’t yet realized that it was lunch time, and the only reason he hadn’t said anything yet was because he didn’t want to be rude and interrupt her. “Curious,” Luna said, glancing out the large window of the office she’d been borrowing from Rarity as she signed the cover of a report and put down her fountain pen. “I would have expected Twilight to have returned by now. Are you hungry?” Spike was in the middle of praising Celestia, recognizing the obvious conflict and properly praising Luna when his stomach got tired of waiting for him to respond and did so for him with an audible “Grrblgrr.” — ✶ — The crater that Celestia had made of the Everfree had filled into a lake, but not enough to disguise what it was. The rim of the crater was a rounded slope that quickly became a sheer, hundred-hoof drop of smooth, black, technically-not-volcanic rock down to crystal clear water. Outward from the crater, the black rock continued, turning fissured and craggy until it became burnt dirt and vegetation, dead vegetation, merely wilted vegetation and so on. The transition from one to the other was remarkably quick for the sheer size of the devastation—for Celestia’s sunfire, anyway. If it had been Twilight or Luna, they wouldn’t have singed a single tree beyond what had been completely vaporized, but that was just the nature of their respective existences. In spite of it being the site of the most incredible destruction that Equestria had likely seen since its founding, it was actually quite peaceful. Twilight had been meaning to come out here and test some things with her magic, but it was a nice place to sit down and rest for a moment, too. She tried not to concern herself too much with what had happened. It wasn’t that she wanted to be callous, but overthinking things had always been her biggest fault and she never wanted to feel so lost as she had when she was in the downward spiral. Rainbow Dash would bounce back, Twilight was pretty sure. Rainbow was resilient; she was the type of pony who would freak out about the future rather than agonize over the past. She wouldn’t let being ‘too awesome for the Wonderbolts’ get her down for long. It still didn’t make Twilight feel any better. Out of all the questionable decisions she’d made that she could second and third guess, this was one she didn’t really need to. She’d been actively spiteful when she’d made the choice to turn her friends into demigoddesses; she’d known perfectly well that it was likely to turn sour for at least half of them and she’d wanted that to happen so she could throw it in Luna’s face. She… did believe what she’d said to Applejack—that putting them on something of the same level as her would help them all relate to each other—but… well, like Luna had said just last night; they could make anything happen if they just gave it some forethought. Identify the problems and correct for them beforehoof. Or, in other words, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Funny how parables, proverbs and pithy sayings only seemed obvious in hindsight. Twilight knew she shouldn’t dwell on what could have been, but she had to ask herself—what would she have done to prevent this situation with Rainbow Dash, other than just get her to go through the wonderbolt academy? Honestly, getting her to just do the academy properly was a pretty good answer, and she tried to leave it at that—really, she did—but she had a hard time convincing herself that it would last. One option, she supposed, would have been to leave Rainbow Dash immortal, but take Draco back so she’d be on more even grounding with the Wonderbolts, but Twilight couldn’t see her accepting that without going through a wake up call like she’d received today, and Twilight was trying to think of ways that could have been avoided. The other option, she supposed, would have been for Twilight to do for the Wonderbolts what she had done for her friends. She was pretty sure that was as terrible of an idea as it sounded. Actually, Twilight wondered how Rainbow Dash would have reacted to the suggestion of empowering the Wonderbolts. The Wonderbolts meant something to her, after all. They were something she’d strived to emulate. Would she want them given power any more than they wanted a pony who had been given it? Neither depowering Rainbow Dash, empowering the Wonderbolts or just letting them try to work together as they were was that great of a solution, she admitted. It was tough, but she supposed that sometimes the answer was to just talk to a pony and manage their expectations before it leads to problems… or at least not default to handing out power like it was cotton candy. Actually, what would the Celestias have done? Probably pin a medal on Rainbow Dash and give her a title and a position that wouldn’t actually make her part of the Wonderbolts, but more of a special reservist that could still fly with them from time to time. Huh, that actually wouldn’t have been a terrible idea. In fact, it was so not-terrible that it might still work if they handled it right. Oh, it would reek of nepotism, sure, but that ship had sailed—loudly and publically—and they’d get the Celestias to put the proper spin on it… and even then, it wouldn’t be any time soon. The Wonderbolts would need some time to cool off and Rainbow Dash would have to make a name for herself as a public figure in the meantime—but it was a way forward, if Rainbow Dash wanted it. She’d just… maybe wait a little while before actually proposing it to Rainbow Dash, if the way Fluttershy had turned her away was any indication. It hadn’t felt good being told in seagull semaphore that her presence would only make things worse. She couldn’t have known that Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy would be there, so it wasn’t like she could have made any other choice at the time, but it still seemed like freaking out and flying to Cloudsdale had been not just a waste, but backsliding into the same mentality of freaking out that had caused so many problems before. To be fair to herself, though—she had created demigoddesses. A little freaking out when they run into trouble wasn’t entirely unreasonable. Well, the day was shot, the palace demolition would go on without her and Spike was with Luna. She figured she might as well distract herself from the events of the day and try to get something productive done. She’d wanted to talk to Pinkie Pie about rocks before actually doing anything with earth pony magic, but she was beginning to wonder if she’d ever be able to pin that mare down, so why not? She was already out here; what harm could there be in a little trial and error? — ✒ — “Woah, did you feel that?” Spike asked, frowning at the small hitch in what he’d been copying down. Luna looked up from what she was reading. “Feel what, young Spike?” Spike took the opportunity to sit up and stretch his back. “The tower shook a little; I think it was a small earthquake.” Luna thought about it and shook her head. “Neigh, I cannot say one way or the other if I felt such an event, but the seat that the fair Rarity has procured for me is quite the marvel, so my lack of ability to corroborate is not surprising,” she said, rolling herself over so that Spike could see the plush office chair upholstered in walnut and indigo crushed velvet. “It even has wheels!” Spike stared at the two-thousand-year-old goddess playing around with her office chair. He was attempting to formulate a response when his thoughts were interrupted by the revelation that it could spin, too. “Whee!” He wanted one. — ✶ — Ow. Splash. Gasp. Splish-splash. Splash. Ow. The last time that Twilight had found herself taking an unplanned swim in a still, glassy lake like this, it had turned out to be her initial chance connection to her celestial body of stars. It had been, all joking aside, a truly magical experience. This was not that. Technically, any response to pushing magic through her hooves could be called a success, but in this case, success was wet. Wet and painful. Funny thing; it turns out that if an alicorn channels magic through her hooves with no particular direction or intent, magic comes out of their hooves with no particular direction or intent. This, she decided just now—and she would never allow anypony to tell her otherwise—was why the bottoms of a pony’s legs were called the cannons. Twilight slowly pony-paddled back to shore only to realize, as she was faced with a sheer wall of glassy black rock, that there was no shore. With a pained groan, she flopped backwards into the water and just floated there for a moment as she worked up the will to fly back up to the edge of the crater. When she was halfway ready and half resigned to just float around the lake on her back until nightfall, she suddenly remembered she could teleport. Two seconds later, she also remembered that her legs were hurt—specifically, she remembered this when she attempted to use them for their intended purpose and they immediately buckled under her. She really, really missed all the benefits of manifesting directly from the stars, like being able to remanifest during the day and refresh her body to a pristine condition. It wasn’t that she lacked power when manifest properly, it just wasn’t available to her in the same way. Technically, she did have less, yes, but it was comparing a river to a lake—or a library to a publisher—it was hardly the same thing at all. Properly manifest, all Twilight was, was starlight; she didn’t actually produce any magic. Instead, her body and regalia—that is, her shoes, the peytral around her neck and the crown on her head—were all solid manifestations of the light she produced, with enough magic inherent in them for most situations. The regalia in particular was expressly for that purpose, being, as it was, not a natural part of the manifestation, but something that Luna and Celelstia had come up with and refined to the current configuration that had stood the test of time. It was still all just a limited pool of starlight, though. If she demanifested… Well, starlight was starlight, and being light, it tended to escape—and do so very quickly. Even if she could catch and bend some of it around, she’d end up with less than she started with, if any. In order to remanifest herself in any useful manner, she would need an actual source of starlight to do it with, which wasn’t an option right now. Taking a deep breath and holding it, Twilight gingerly attempted to stand, using her wings to ease herself up, but she was no natural-born pegasus with an entire life of muscle memory and hardly had the precise control she would have needed to do it properly. The sharp pain that shot up her legs the moment she dropped just a little too much, putting weight on them, quickly put paid to that idea. Twilight winced in pain as she rolled over onto her side and got her legs out from underneath her. It was a relief, but they still ached and burned. Her hooves, she noted, were perfectly fine, protected by the shoes of her regalia, but her cannons were burnt and, more importantly, she had almost certainly sprained and cracked more joints and bones in her legs than she cared to count. It wasn’t something she’d ever have associated with alicorns, but Twilight had gotten somewhat used to pain since becoming one. Even when she’d been able to remanifest, it still hurt to be injured or blasted apart, and yet it seemed to happen fairly regularly. Admittedly, that was mostly because of other alicorns. Fortunately for Twilight’s ongoing relationship with the mare who had been the leading cause of her demanifestations, there was a certain… distance to the pain that kept it bearable. That distance being about a hundred kilometers, give or take, plus whatever spatial shennanigans it took to reach the umbra during the day. Still, while it was late in the day, dusk was hours off, and she would rather not lay here in pain for the entire time. She chewed at her bottom lip, considering her options. No one would notice if she brought out just a few little stars, right? There’d be no harm in it; maybe she could even make it a regular thing… Yeah, she didn’t actually believe that for a second. You know what? The ground was kind of comfortable after all. Wait—hold on—back up. Twilight had been staring at the design of her shoe when it hit her—she couldn’t demanifest and put herself back together, but her regalia was ostensibly separate from her, wasn’t it? Admittedly, it was more a part of her than any normal armor or jewelry and the crown in particular seemed to simply remain on her head as a matter of course, but they weren’t actually attached or anything; she did take them off for bed, after all. Would it be possible to sacrifice one piece of her regalia and capture some of the starlight into her body? She didn’t see why not. Even if she lost ninety-nine percent of it, the recaptured one percent should be enough to fill in the damaged parts of her legs. She wasn’t, of course, going to be stupid enough to use her shoes for it right after they’d saved her from even more pain than what she’d managed to inflict on herself. Instead, she took off her crown, which she took to be the least useful piece of her regalia. If this worked, she might consider adding more individual pieces to her ensemble, it would just be too useful not to. Enough dithering, though. It was time to try it out. … It was curious that her regalia had manifested as a black metal when she was fairly certain that, unlike Luna and Astri whose moons had a dark side that nonetheless produced magic, it was only her stars that did so, not the black of night between them. Okay, okay, none of that, Twilight scolded herself. She just needed to unravel—but it was then she realized that Astri’s moon had been a moon… as in—a moon like Luna’s with patches of dark and light, not a massive burning star, so how did that work? She tried to come up with an explanation, but nothing jumped out at her, and now she had a headache, too. Come to think of it, she hadn’t actually eaten today. It was amazing what somepony could get used to in only a month or so of goddesshood. Not being able to refresh her body really sucked… and—no! Enough! She forced herself to get on with demanifesting her crown and think about the curiosity of Astri’s moon later. She didn’t know why she was even stalling for this. It wasn’t as if it could actually go too wrong. She wasn’t going to bring her stars out in the day, so if she failed, she’d just let her body demanifest until dusk, then come back and grab her saddlebags, with the invitations for Rainbow Dash and Pinkie Pie. Her very wet saddlebags. Oops. Why—why hadn’t she taken them off in the several hours she’d been sitting around on the craterside? She did her very best not to ascribe this, too, to her not manifesting directly out of stars, but the fact of the matter was, that Luna had taught her how to carry objects and ponies in the darkness of her demanifest form, so if the shoe fits… and her shoes fit very, very well, both literally and figuratively. Once again, though, that was a problem for later. Gently, carefully, Twilight finally managed to get herself to focus on her crown and the feeling of demanifestation. She wanted it to be as slow as possible so she could capture as much of the starlight as possible and refresh the damaged parts of her legs. That didn’t happen. Not only did the demanifestation spread exponentially, ripples of light consuming her crown in seconds, but the demanifestation spread—exponentially—and very quickly all that was left on the craterside was a pair of wet saddlebags. The stars swore. — ✒ — Spike left Rarity’s tower with a pinch on the cheek from its owner and a nod of thanks from Luna, who was deep in her preparations for her dusk court. Twilight hadn’t shown up for the entire rest of the day, and while he wanted to say that it wasn’t like her… eh, it kind of was, especially nowadays. He did suppose that she had a good reason this time, but then again, she usually did anyway. Hopefully the situation with Rainbow Dash had gone well. He knew what it was like for something he’d wanted for a long time to turn out to just… not make sense anymore. Rarity was like that, for him. He liked her. He liked her a lot—flaws and all—and maybe that meant that he even loved her. It was weird that she was basically a dress waving around a pony-shaped doll now, but… he’d seen weirder. He’d even managed to spend some time with her today after she’d come back to deal with the official side of the Celestias’ coronation. She’d left ‘Cinders’ back at the boutique, so he’d been able to help her with the paperwork for a while, which was nice, and when all was said and done and she’d gone back to work on suits and dresses, he’d come to the conclusion that nothing had changed. That was a bad thing, in case that wasn’t clear. He’d already come to the conclusion a while back that Rarity saw him as what he technically was; a ‘baby’ dragon. It didn’t matter to her that he was mature, educated and self-sufficient for his age—all entirely Twilight’s fault, both positive and negative—Rarity just couldn’t see him that way, so he’d given up on her, knowing that she never would during her lifespan. When she’d become immortal, he’d thought that it would fix things—and he had to remind himself that it still might—but the concept of waiting it out wasn’t something he could wrap his head around yet. Hopefully Rainbow Dash would have an easier time figuring out where she was going to go from here. Spike stopped by the palace demolition site on the way home and picked up some more rubble—err—dinner. He wasn’t the only dragon doing so, but they were saving the rest of the thrones for him, and thus, for Ember. He didn’t get it, but Ember insisted she could taste the narcissism. Spike preferred actual gemstones, but the black geodes were pretty good too even if nopony he’d talked to actually knew what they were. The clear crystals were some kind of quartz, mostly good as filler like hay or rice; it was impressive that somepony had managed to get it so optically clear, but it was nothing special aside from the sheer quantity that had been brought in. He picked some up anyway. Naturally, heading home with a bag of rocks, his thoughts turned to Ember, her apparent change of heart and the book she’d had. He wasn’t stupid; he doubted she’d had that book when she’d invited herself into his life, but he also doubted it’d been in the library, and they weren’t likely to both be true unless she’d mail ordered it, and… yeah, no. Spike supposed he could believe that she’d had it, but only recently gotten bored enough to actually read it since the only thing he was sure of was that she hadn’t so much as cracked the spine until that morning—or sometime last night, more likely, considering how little sleep she seemed to have gotten. Now that she had started to read it, her perspective seemed to have taken a heavy blow, and she hadn’t even tried to hide it. Well, she might disagree, but no matter her other flaws, the fact was that she didn’t have a dishonest bone in her body. He guessed that must come from growing up easily overlooked and dismissed by parents that were thousands of times your size. The point was, he really wanted to know what could possibly be in that book that it could change a stubborn dragon like her so quickly. From what she’d been telling him, it seemed to cover a bunch of things, all centered around some old dragon empire that included ponies, zebras, griffons, hippogriffs, hippocampi and every other intelligent species he could name—and some he’d never heard of. He wondered if it could really be called a dragon empire if it had all of that, but supposed that when you’re a species of colossal fire-breathing lizards, things just tend to revolve around you. Was it any wonder that Ember had such a problem with what she liked to call ‘giant, overbearing rockheads’? He had to admit, she probably knew what it was like to have everyone in her life constantly babying her just as much as he did, if not more. Wait—no. Back up and unthink that right now, he scolded himself. He did not just empathize with her, damn it! Except he kind of had. — ✒ — To Spike’s pleased surprise, Ember did not ambush him at the door to claim his bounty of slain chair to feast upon. This surprise quickly evaporated when he realized, of course, that it was because she would be reading The Book. Come to think of it, it didn’t have a title on the cover—just that jeweled dragon head—and she hadn’t ever referred to it by name, either. It wasn’t unheard of for old, one-of-a-kind books to not actually have a title if they weren’t intended for publication, he knew, so maybe it was one of those. He considered suggesting that they call it the draconomicon, but she wouldn’t get it, so what would be the point? He found her in the basement right where he’d left her that morning, bringing with him dinner prepared in an actual bowl for once. He’d even left some in the pantry this time so she could be introduced to the magic of snacking outside of mealtimes. He was both absolutely certain that she would become enamored with the idea and highly doubtful that it would convince her to actually ration her food. He suddenly wasn’t sure if it was a good idea after all. It turned out, however, that Spike’s assumption had been wrong. Ember was not reading. She was asleep, curled up and clutching The Book protectively to her chest. It was kind of adorable, mostly on account of her not being awake to ruin it. He set the bowl down next to her on the literal bed of rubble that was spilling out into the room not too far from the bottom of the stairs. She’d made this little nest by burrowing through one of the walls and into the stone beyond, dragon-raised dragons evidently not used to wooden construction which—to be fair—had a tendency to catch on fire pretty easily. That was actually why they’d come down here earlier that morning. Ember had demanded that he show her how to do dragon magic, but all they’d succeeded in doing was adding a few scorch marks in the area and warming up her bed. Evidently, after he’d left, she’d gone back to reading and her lack of sleep the night before had caught up to her. He stood there and considered the whole situation: her, The Book and her declarations that the dragons she knew were ‘clearly doing it wrong,’ and that ‘someone should do something about that.’ Eventually, he started to feel weird just standing there watching her, so he… sat down and continued to watch her sleep instead. He wasn’t worried that she would wake up and see him since she had no sense of pony propriety or any idea why it would normally be considered creepy. In fact, he was able to see his expectations play out as she eventually woke up, spotted him, spotted the bowl and had eyes only for the latter, instantly brightening as she grabbed it and started shoving handfuls into her face. “You—are—the—besht,” she told him in between mouthfuls of crystal. Spike spent a moment just enjoying being appreciated, then sighed. He’d been thinking and thinking and thinking. He wasn’t normally the kind of dragon who spent a whole lot of time deliberating, but this was serious and he’d finally come to a decision. It wasn’t the decision he thought he’d make, either. In fact, he’d been adamantly against it from the start and only just recently started to see the possibilities. Even now, it wasn’t the most palatable of options, but he thought that Luna, at least, would understand. She knew more than most how he felt about his chances with Rarity. Twilight… might or might not understand. She’d gotten much more casual about certain things since becoming an alicorn, but she still might object on principle if she found out on her own. Spike might be able to bring her around if he explained it and Luna would almost certainly be able to, but in the end it didn’t really matter anyway, since Ember didn’t want anyone to know about her presence—full stop, no exceptions. “Ember,” he said, getting her attention; she stopped chewing and gave a curious look, cheeks full of crystal. There was no point in beating around the bush, so he decided to just say it. “I’m sick and tired of being seen as a baby; let’s steal the Ring of Ashmund.”