//------------------------------// // Chapter 2 - This is how a dragon finds gems. // Story: Growing Up Dragon // by Hasty Revision //------------------------------// Deep in the heart of the Dragon Lands, inside a vaulted, gray-walled mountain cavern, a centuries old dragon lay upon a hoard of gold and gems that would have put even the wealthiest griffons from the heyday of their collapsed kingdom to shame. She was a long, slender creature, easily taller than a five story building when sitting upright, though her true size was difficult to guess while curled atop the largest of the golden heaps in her hoard. The light of the setting moon cast its pale rays on her deep ocher scales and the pronounced maroon crests that ran from the crown of her head all the way down to her shoulders. Her ear frills were particularly long in the spines, webbed with a pale yellow that matched her wings and underbelly, and lay relaxed in her slumber. The two white, upwardly curved horns which swept back from their roots just above and behind her frills almost glowed in the moonlight. The effect was nearly enough to draw an observer's eye away from the glint of the triple pairs of long fangs which stuck out over her bottom lip by the length of an average pony mare. She had been dozing for well over a day, and hadn't stirred so much as an inch in five hours save for the rise and fall of her side, not even when a tiny, orange head topped with an orchid pink crest poked up over the rim of the cave. Sharp cyan blue eyes studied the mature dragon warily as they had done many times over the past few hours. Their owner had been preparing for this moment for weeks, studying the sleeping pattern of the adult, picking out exactly which treasure to target, and steeling her nerves to make the attempt. A forked tongue ran over scaly lips at the sight of her chosen prize: a large, exquisitely dark and lustrous emerald. The adult was asleep, the cave was upwind, and the gem had slid all the way down to the floor of the cave, right between the adult's snout and elbow. This was the chance she'd been waiting for. With great care, the baby dragon eased herself up and over the lip of the cave and began to creep across the slight downward slope of the floor on all fours. She was small, round in head and belly like the wingless hatchling she was, and she moved with the exaggerated “stealth” of any child approaching a cookie jar. She edged her way along closer and closer to her goal, one dramatic step at a time. It took nearly a full minute for her to creep all the way up to within arm's reach of the gem. She glanced up at the sleeping adult, carefully studying her face for any sign of waking. Finding none, she rose to an upright position and slowly, delicately, took the gem in her claws. She looked up again, breath held tight, but the adult still did not stir. She turned and started tiptoeing away from the hoard, glancing back over her shoulder every few steps, getting giddier and giddier with each one. She was so close! She could just about taste the delicious gem already! She cast one last look back-- *WHAM!* The cavern floor shuddered under the impact of an enormous, ocher-scaled tail slamming down across her path. The pure, brute force of it knocked her flat on her own tail and sent the gem tumbling out of her claws. The adult's head and neck rose from the heap, gold and gems sparkling and clinking as they cascaded away under her shifting weight. Piercing cyan eyes bigger than the would-be-thief's entire body glared down from on high above an arsenal of bared teeth that put the Canterlot Guard's armory to shame. The baby dragon scrambled up on all fours and sprinted towards the tip of the maroon-finned tail blocking her path. She hadn't gotten three bounds before a cage of talons crashed down, punching deep into the solid rock with an almighty *crack* like thunder. She hit them at full tilt, bouncing off the adult's middle finger and tumbling back head over heels until she came to rest flat on her stomach, dazed and helpless. The enormous talons pulled free of the floor and swept overhead, hanging in the air over the stunned youth for just a moment before coming down again. Yet instead of a second thunderous impact with all four mighty talons, the thumb and third finger of the claw curled in. Talons that could rend steel like paper delicately pinched the tip of the hatchling's tail between their smooth sides to lift her high off the cavern floor. The would-be-thief's eyes went as round as the bits that littered the hoard below when the adult began to draw in a long, slow breath… …And blew a tiny flicker of flame no hotter than a match. “No!” the thief begged, “No no no nooah-hahahahaha!” The thief wriggled and kicked desperately as the tongue of flames tickled her belly just enough to send her into hysterics. “St-ahahaha-op!” The flames cut out and the adult pulled her head back enough for her victim to clearly see the smirk on her face when she spoke in a deep, reverberating voice that would have turned the legs of most creatures to jelly. “You should be glad your father isn't here. He'd have you roasting for hours for failing like this.” The baby glared at her mother, claw outstretched with her thumb and forefinger less than an inch apart. “I was this close!” she protested in a high-pitched and slightly rough voice. “Go back to sleep so I can try again!” Her mother chuckled and started to sit up on her haunches. Once her other arm was free, she dropped her child onto her waiting palm. “I was awake the entire time waiting for you to finally find your guts.” The baby folded her arms and sat down in the center of her mother's palm, grumbling unintelligibly under her breath. Another rumbling laugh rolled over her like distant thunder and she had to sprawl out for balance as the claw beneath her shifted. Her mother rose from the hoard onto her hind limbs, stretching and flexing her serpentine neck and tail. “Where are we going?” “You want gems that badly? Then I think it's time you learned how to find your own.” The baby's eyes lit up. “Really!?” Her mother crossed the gap that'd taken her baby a minute to cross in a single step, ducking her head and tucking in her wings to slip through the cave mouth. “Your brother was about the same age when your father taught him.” The adult's fingers curled protectively over her palm to keep her daughter securely in place as her wings unfurled. “We start by choosing a place to dig.” It was only a few hours after dawn, but already Smolder soared high over the White Tail woods. A light crosswind from the south east required minor course corrections here and there, but given that she was aiming for a small mountain, she was in no danger of losing her bearings. A curve of her tail and a dip of a wing, and she drifted right back onto the approach she'd planned out for the day's lesson. She smirked as Spike bobbed up just to eye level off to her left. He had to flap about five times for each of her own strokes; pretty good for someone just out of his first molt and well past the flight-magic surge that came with it. Her smirk widened at the memory of his reaction when she'd found him in that closet and explained the Molt. She could just imagine the look he'd get when she told him about the next molt. “How much further?” he called over. “We're about half way there,” she shouted back over a brief gust of wind. She banked a little closer to him and pointed to their destination. “We're going for the lower peak just to the left of the big one there.” “Why are we taking such a long route?” another voice called out over the wind as a larger purple form rose up on the far side of Spike. Smolder sighed and rolled her eyes. Headmare Twilight just HAD to tag along, didn't she? She was going to spend the whole day dragging everything out with questions and hovering over Spike like he was fresh out of the egg. How Spike wasn't cringing into a ball of embarrassment Smolder had no idea. It had to be a pony thing. “Uh, to keep us downwind when we get close, duh,” she answered. Spike nervously missed a beat and had to add several extra flaps to catch back up. “Uh, why do we have to worry about that?” “You wanted to know how dragons do things, right?” He nodded. “Well, this is how dragons do things. Most predators know a young dragon when they smell one, even without the molt smell. Once we're on the mountain, we're gonna have the high ground and be able to see anything coming from behind us. Staying downwind means we'll be able to smell anything coming from the other way before it can smell us.” Twilight and Spike shared a look. Smolder could only see the back of Spike's head but the Headmare looked worried. Typical. She was going to need to claw-hold the pony before she started freaking out again. “Relax, most big monsters don't usually climb up past the treeline. We shouldn't run into any diamond dogs up that high either.” Spike heaved a sigh. “That's a relief. I don't know if Twilight can whine like Rarity.” Smolder raised a brow ridge at the younger dragon. “Uh… what?” “A pack of them foalnapped Rarity once to try to make her use her magic to find gems for them. It turns out that diamond dogs can't stand high pitched sounds. By the time we rescued her, they were begging us to take her back.” Smolder scratched her head just behind her right ear frill. “Huh. I don't think any dragon would have thought of that.” The whole group had a chuckle about that while Smolder lead them on into the final leg of their journey over the rising foothills and up to the mountain peak itself. This lesson was one of the first things she'd decided on when she'd officially agreed to teaching Spike about being a dragon. After all, it didn't get much more basic than food. If a dragon wanted to grow up strong, then they'd better know how to find gems. “Okay, step one: Picking a place to dig.” She pointed to the slopes slowly rising to meet them as they passed over the foothills. The angle was pretty moderate, not too sheer, but not exactly made for an easy stroll. The whole surface was covered in loose, pale rocks in subtle shades of off-white piled up on light brown sandy dirt. “You're gonna want to go above the treeline on a surface dig when you're starting out. Like I said, fewer monsters that way. But you can't just go landing anywhere. See all those rocks?” “Yeah?” “That sorta loose ground is easy to dig but one wrong move and you can set off a humongous landslide that'll squish you like an egg. We're gonna stay away from really steep spots on a slope like this, but we gotta dig carefully and we gotta land light.” Her searching eyes finally caught the splash of blue on the rocks that she'd been looking for. “Follow me.” Smolder angled herself into a slow dive, keeping half an eye on Spike and Twilight to make sure they weren't doing anything stupid. It was probably a good thing she'd taught Spike how to land without smashing his face into the ground before taking him up into the mountains. She pulled up into a hover a good five times or so her height from the ground to wait for the others to catch up. “See this big rock here? All that blue stuff on the side? That's blue beryl. If you can see some small crystals like that at the surface then there's a pretty good chance there are some big gems underneath them. That's the sorta thing you gotta look for with this kind of gem hunting.” “Should I always look for blue beryl?” “You're looking for anything that stands out. Turns out that, for this mountain, that's blue beryl. Do a couple circles over an area and look for any spot that looks different. We're gonna start digging here.” One of her ear frills twitched as it caught a faint tinkle of magic in the air. She rounded on the headmare. “Hey! No pony magic. We're doing this like dragons.” Twilight sheepishly put the small rock she'd picked up back down. Spike came to her rescue by flapping over to break Smolder's line of sight. “So, how do we start?” Smolder rolled her eyes and let herself descend to the rocks. “Step two: Prepare the dig site. The first thing we do is move some of the loose rocks out of the way to make ourselves a ledge to stand on. Right now you're one bad step away from a twisted ankle or a crushed toe. Check everything before you shove it down the slope. You find anything that doesn't look like a plain old rock, let me know.” Spike was actually a pretty quick learner for a dragon who'd spent his whole life getting pampered by ponies. He didn't hesitate to get his claws dirty and he worked hard and fast. So much so that Smolder had to tell him several times to slow down and pace himself. She planned to have him digging most of the day, after all. The headmare was another story. It took about five minutes for it to become painfully clear that she had no idea what she was doing without her magic. She clumsily shifted rocks around with her forehooves, trying to inspect them carefully before rolling them down the slope. She failed miserably more often than not, allowing rock after rock to tumble away unchecked. The first, and only, time Smolder had intervened was to tell her not to chase down anything she dropped unless it was obviously a gem. Otherwise, she was content to let the pony rough it for a while. It took the three of them about ten minutes to clear away all the loose rocks and soil from an area just big enough for about five ponies to stand side by side with about a hoof between them. The end product was a patch of cold dirt at the base of a short wall of rock full of dirt-packed cracks and crevices. “Alright, either of you find anything interesting so far?” Twilight sighed and shook her head ruefully, then cast a longing look down the slope at the patch of ground where all her unchecked rocks lay. “Well…” Spike began a little uncertainly, “I didn't find anything in the loose rocks but,” he pointed a talon at a glint of blue on the freshly exposed rock. “I think there's some beryl here. Should I start digging?” Smolder raised a claw to stop him. “Hold up, we're not done clearing the area. We've got a place to stand, now we need to make sure nothing's gonna cave our heads in.” She stepped back to the edge of the new flat spot they'd carved out of the loose ground so she could eye up the exposed freshly exposed rock. Her eyes settled on a large, roughly triangular boulder perched at the top, smack in middle of their dig site. She hopped into the air and hovered next to it, eyeing it critically before she gave it a gentle shove that set lose a trickle of sandy dirt around its base. “Okay, this sucker's gotta go. We start digging and it's probably going to fall on us.” The Headmare pulled herself away from her pile of discards and gave her student an appraising look. “Wow, Smolder, I'm impressed! I had no idea you were so safety conscious.” Smolder landed next to the rock and motioned Spike to land on the other side. “Eh, this is all basic stuff. My mom started teaching me this when I was six.” Spike flapped up and landed on the opposite side of the lose rock. “Your mom had you digging up gems when you were only six?” “Nah, that's just when she taught me how to find them in the wild. Dragon parents mix gems into big piles of dirt and gravel on the floor of their cave for their hatchlings to dig through.” Twilight held a dusty hoof up to her chin thoughtfully. “I had no idea digging for gems was such an important part of dragon culture.” Smolder braced her claws against the rock, testing her grip and footing for the best angles to approach. “Digging, hunting, fishing, foraging, any dragon with decent parents learns all about them before the Molt.” After a moments consideration of the way the headmare was cringing she added an offclaw comment of, “No offense. If it makes you feel better, most parents never teach their kids to read, so you've got 'em beat there.” “What!?” Smolder shrugged. “It's not like we have books in the Dragon Lands. Heh, one good sneeze and you can kiss your whole library goodbye!” “What!? But-- you-- what!?” “Hey, Spike, get over here, next to me.” Spike needed no urging to move so that the boulder was between him and their distraught chaperone. “Okay, you push here, no, here. Higher up. There. On three, we push. One… two… three!” The two dragons strained against the boulder with all their might. The loose, rocky soil shifted under their feet, forcing them to tread in place until they found purchase. “Almost… got… it… hrrrah!” The ground just under the boulder gave away. The tall, angular stone tilted drunkenly until it reached the point of no return. Twilight yelped and took to the air, the sound of tumbling and grinding stone jarring her out of her frenzied thoughts regarding the draconic educational system just in time to avoid a battering from tumbling gravel. The dislodged boulder thudded down onto their cleared work area and slid a further three yards down the slope before settling into a new rut for the next few hundred years. “Aaand done,” Smolder said, straightening up and dusting off her claws. “Now we dig.” Smolder could still remember that first dig under the shadow of her mother on top of that craggy mountain. Hours of sifting and digging, and blowing fire on her claws to keep them warm in the chilly air of the early spring morning. It was hard work and she was well and truly tired when she'd finally struck lucky. It wasn't a rare gem or anything, just a common yellow topaz. Not the darkest or best looking or even very big. But when she'd shoved that rough hunk of crystal into her mouth, it'd been the greatest thing she'd ever tasted. When Spike held up that first aquamarine of the day, she could see that same joy in his eyes that she'd felt. Sure, he went digging with Professor Rarity all the time, but those were her digs and her gems that she found. This gem was Spike's gem. And when he stopped short of taking his first bite, mumbling something about waiting for lunch, she told him the same thing her own mother had told her, in exactly the same words. “Always eat your first find the moment you dig it up. That way, no matter what happens later, you won't face it on an empty stomach.” She sat down next to him and put a claw on his shoulder. “A dragon's life is hard. If you spend your time hoarding all your treasures for later, then there's a good chance you'll never get to enjoy them. Take some today, enjoy some today, and regret nothing tomorrow.” Spike looked down at his gem for a long time after she finished. Probably thinking about what great advice that was. Smolder had never forgotten it after she'd heard it, that's for sure, and she'd lived her life by it ever since. Spike must have got it too because, when he finally took a bite, he took the time to really savor it. He chewed slowly, eyes shut, and breathing deep so he could taste every last shard of that gem. Smolder smirked proudly. Then the expression on the headmare's face caught her eye. She'd put one hoof against her chest and she was just smiling at her and Spike. It actually kinda reminded her of how her-- Smolder scrambled back to her spot and dug her talons into the ground again. There was still a lot of digging to do if SHE was gonna have any gems for lunch.