//------------------------------// // Chapter Nineteen 【Sunset】 // Story: A Sparkle-ling Perfection // by Cast-Iron Caryatid //------------------------------// ⁂ Between being born as a changeling and being born as a dragon, I had to say I preferred the latter, though I was a little concerned about the ability of my baby dragon brain to process the world in a sane and sensible manner. One moment, I was floating in empty silence of my personal hive mind shrinking and solidifying around me while I expressed my incredulity over being killed with a bread knife on repeat. My sensation of time seemed to slow and stretch as the biological processes of my unborn body took over, then the next thing I knew, I found myself breaking free of my shell. The thing was… my shell, as far as my infantile dragon brain was processing it, appeared to be the domed roof of the CSGU testing wing. More than that, instead of seeing what must have been a nest of baby blankets, the entire city of Canterlot seemed to spread out into the distance. Even the palace itself was barely a stone’s throw away—a mobile? All in all, it was the most surreal thing I’d ever seen. So much so, that in any other circumstance I’d have dismissed it as a dream, but having spent so long alone in my own mind waiting to be hatched, there was no doubt in my mind that what I was seeing was at least partially based in reality. In spite of my obviously fantastical interpretation of the world, there was a life and energy to it that screamed out to me that I was alive. I felt… good. Not only was it entirely unlike any sort of dream, but it wasn’t what I’d expected the experience of being in the body of an infant reptile to be like, either. Maybe my metabolism would catch up to me eventually, but right now, I felt like I was glowing with power. Actually, I was literally glowing with power. How odd. It actually reminded me of Celestia’s—suddenly, the entire world seemed to collapsed out from under me, both physically and metaphorically. The buildings and scenery shot up around me, growing first to their proper size, then slingshotting in the other direction into great white monoliths. At the same time, I felt all the energy I’d been bursting with drain out of me until all I was left with was a tiny candle burning deep inside of me. I blinked. I blinked again. Now I was sitting in a pile of straw, there was a hole in the ceiling, and Princess Celestia was telling Twilight that she had ‘a very special gift’ and inviting her to become her own personal protégé. I was about as confused as she was pretending to be, but by the moment of overwhelming relief that flashed over her expression before she started jumping around shouting “Yesyesyesyesyes!” I guessed things were going to plan? Small bits of marble rained around me and I sneezed. I looked up at the hole in the ceiling and my tiny infant brain finally made the connection. I guess my life as a dragon came with a free preview? I had to admit, not only were the enchantments that kept Canterlot standing impressive work, but even more impressive was the faith that ponies had in them. Maybe it was just me, having lost my parents in the way I did, but I found it hard to take my eyes off the hole in the ceiling, some part of me insisting that the rest of it would come down any minute while the princess talked to Twilight and her family. I was only listening to the conversation with half an ear, partially because I’d heard it all before and partially because half an ear was all I had. That… was something that was going to take some getting used to. An exploratory claw found some sort of frill on the side of my head, and that was it. The world seemed muted, and any attempt to focus my ears on the conversation came up blank. I wasn’t deaf by any means as I could still follow the conversation, but the loss was noticeable. My attention then naturally passed on to the appendage I was using to probe the side of my head, and the rest of my body. I was… a pudgy yellow, red and gold blob with claws on the end of each leg. A sense of déjà vu tickled in my memory as I wiggled the claws until a moment of panic overtook me as I remembered my brief experience on the other side of the mirror. My… hand… immediately went to my forehead and felt nothing there. I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to feel about that. It turned me up inside and my eyes began to water, but I refused to cry, infant body be damned. If I hadn’t already spent a while as a pegasus, I don’t think I would have handled it nearly as well. As it was, my sniffles attracted the attention of the rest of the room and I self-consciously realized that the first thing Princess Celestia had seen was me sucking on the end of my tail. When had that happened? “Oh my,” she exclaimed, and I wasn’t sure if her response was concerned or adoring as she lifted me up in the warm, golden light of her magic as she had countless times before I’d become a cantankerous, ungrateful bitch of a teenager. Now I was crying. The world closed up around me as my sniffles turned to sobs and I felt large white forelegs wrap around me. This… I… I couldn’t remember the last time she’d held me. Sometime while I was growing up it had just… stopped being what she did, and after everything that had happened, I’d felt in my bones that it would never happen again. I cried and I cried and I clung to her as hard as I could. There was a tiny, remote part of me that insisted I should feel guilty for pretending to be something I wasn’t, but I didn’t care. I was home. ⁂ Ah, narcolepsy, my old friend, how I missed you not at all. Dragons, it turned out, were no exception to the rule that infants spend at least sixteen hours of the day asleep, and the remaining eight invariably coincide with the adults trying to get some of their own. I was therefore a little grumpy when I was awoken by the cold metal of a stethoscope to find myself in a brightly lit and distinctly crowded hospital room and expressed my displeasure in as natural and instinctive a manner as my body presented me with. It involved teeth. Lots and lots of teeth. “Ah, hrm.” The doctor pursed his lips, levitating the severed end of his stethoscope up for his inspection as I chewed… and chewed and chewed and chewed. I was busy trying to drowsily snuggle myself down into whatever bedding I’d been placed on, not really concentrating on what my mouth was doing, but it did seem to be taking a while. The consistency reminded me of those cheap wax candies accompanied by a few bits that resembled gummies, but they were no match for me. “Doctor?” the voice of Princess Celestia prompted, voicing her curiosity. “Ah, yes, well,” the doctor prevaricated. “I’ve sent for any records we have on dragon physiology, but I’m not expecting much. ‘Hardy’ doesn’t begin to describe them, and I don’t believe we’ve ever had one in our care. I can’t say much without knowing what I should be looking for, but her breathing and heart rate are low, but stable; no sign of arrhythmia. Temperature is wildly beyond what would be normal for a pony, but as I don’t see any accompanying signs of inflammation, I’m going to assume it’s within her normal range… and I suppose I might as well mark her down as ready for solid foods, as well.” “Quite,” the princess agreed with a light chuckle. “And what do the naming spells say?” If I had ears, they’d have perked up. This, was kind of an important moment and I didn’t want to miss it. The light was still excessively bright, but I fought myself to wakefulness. It was unfortunate that that wakefulness brought with it a terrible realization. Naming spells had nothing to do with the body and everything to do with the soul. Wide awake, I took in my surroundings, trying to come up with some way to stop this, but short of outright attacking the doctor, I came up blank, and even if I’d wanted to do that, I couldn’t actually seem to locate him. Between Twilight’s family, Princess Celestia and a nurse, by the door, there would barely be enough space to fit another pony in the room. “No response,” the doctor said, allowing me to track the voice back to… uh… well, the only stallion in the room. The one with the remains of the stethoscope around his neck. Twilight’s father. Right. He was some sort of pediatrician, wasn’t he? Look, I was an infant dragon who’d just been hatched. Give me some slack, okay? It took a moment for my little infant brain to actually catch up to what Night Light had said. No response? I… I do have a soul, right? “They’re rather delicate spells, and I expect even as a newborn, this one is resistant enough to magic that we won’t get anything useful out of them. Why not let little Twilight do the honors?” Oh. Oh, that was brilliant. Right, of course. Night Light was a changeling, so of course they’d have this all handled. I gave him a closer look, and he gave me the impression of a gentleman professional, which was something of a relief. Could it be that we finally had a decent father figure for the family? Wait, let Twilight Sparkle do what, now? “Spike!” Twilight shouted. “Imma call her Spike, like her tail!” Oh tartarus no. No way was I going to let that overgrown cicada stick me with a name like that! “I don’t think she likes it,” Princess Celestia observed, coming to my rescue. “Nor do I think that will be necessary, my little pony. It just so happens that I know the old draconic version of the spell, which I’ll cast in just a moment, with the doctor’s permission?” Night Light stood stock still for a brief moment, and while I would never again be able to feel it, I could easily imagine the panic that would be running through the hive mind right about now. It would be very similar to my own, I expected. Night Light’s hesitation only lasted a moment, unfortunately, as there was only one possible answer. “Of course, your majesty,” he responded, quickly bowing and backing away. I got the peculiar impression that he was placing himself closer to the door in case he was going to have to make a run for it. Having been distracted by Night Light, I flinched away when a flash from Celestia’s horn startled me and I had to blink my eyes clear. Wow. That was a lot of power for a naming spell. Was my magical resistance that high, or was the spell intended for full-grown dragons? Hopefully it was the former, because if the changelings pulled a runner, I wanted to be right behind them. I glanced down at my stubby legs. Yeah, that wasn’t actually going to happen. Cornered and lacking any real options, I prepared myself for Princess Celestia’s declaration and the inevitable subsequent anger. I wasn’t sure if trying to pass myself off as somedragon else in an attempt to infiltrate the royal family was actually a crime, but I got the feeling that the princess was going to be very, very disappointed in me. “My little ponies, may I introduce to you…” Princess Celestia hesitated, taking a sharp breath. “Iskloreat Valignat Ixenvorel.” I blinked. The changelings blinked. Princess Celestia had her lips pressed together, not in consternation or anger, but something entirely different. She… She looked… Her eyes had started to water and her breath grew shallow. Nopony said anything and I tried to look like a dumb, innocent foal, though I’m not sure if she could actually see me clearly through the… the… tears. “I—I’m sorry, my little ponies,” she said, turning quickly away and ducking out of the room. “I’m afraid I need to… go. Something has come up.” The silence lasted for several minutes, nopony seeming to believe what they’d just seen. All except for Twilight, that is, who seemed to be crossing her eyes as if trying to touch the bridge of her nose with her tongue. “Isk-ixen-what?” she blurted out, breaking the silence. “Imma just call you ‘Spike.’” ⁂ It wasn’t long before the royal guard arrived. My tiny heart threatened to jump out of my scaly chest at the sight of the gold armor, but in this case, the potentially-collective noun was singular, representing only a scrawny recruit who’d been sent to inform Twilight Sparkle and her parents that the princess would be occupied for the rest of the day, but the timetable they’d discussed for moving Twilight into the palace would remain unchanged. As for me, I would obviously be spending at least a few days in postnatal care here at the hospital, after which I would apparently be joining her. I was frankly a little lost as to the convoluted chain of events that would’ve had to have taken place for me to be hatched during what had evidently been Twilight’s entrance exam for Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns, let alone the legal gymnastics involved in having me declared the legal child of a ten year old filly and remanded into the care of the crown until she was of an age to take care of me, but so long as everything was working out, I was adamant not to worry about it. Of course, even if something did go wrong, I’d still have to force myself not to worry about it. Mental capacity aside, I was an infant and the near future promised to be very, very boring. As it was, I counted myself very lucky that my infant lizard brain actually seemed to be functioning alongside my teenaged soul, but then, I’d formed a sort of hive mind to hold me when I moved into the egg. Presumably, if the container was too small to hold me, then the rest of me would still be running on that virtual hardware. Okay, to be honest, I just pulled that out of my supple, scaly ass, but it sounded like something that could happen. Once the princess’ message had been delivered, I was taken out of the exam room and placed in isolation, which amounted to a glass box in a cubicle amongst a whole lot of other glass boxes in cubicles. It wasn’t that anypony suspected anything wrong, Night Light explained to his ‘wife’, ‘daughter’ and the nurse, but I did have claws and they had plenty of room here, so better safe than sorry when they didn’t know how much of a climber I would be. I tried to give him a flat look, considering I could damn well be counted on to behave and he knew it, but given the cooing from the nurse, I don’t think that I succeeded. In hindsight, once I’d been fed a bottle of milk and left behind, I decided that isolation was probably actually preferable to getting left in a room with a bunch of crying babies. I might be one now, but I wasn’t going to… I… I… I made Princess Celestia cry. It might sound callous, but I didn’t even think she was still capable of it. Sad? Sure. Melancholy? All the tartarus-damned time. Wistfully staring at the moon like it stole her cake but she couldn’t bring herself to yell at it? Only when she didn’t think anypony was looking. What was the point again? Right. Celestia. Crying. Why did the first sign of love she’d shown me in the past year and a half have to hurt so much? ⁂ With as boring as being a newborn infant was, my newfound ability to sleep through most of the day was a blessing in disguise. Sure, it meant that I was that much more likely to get woken up in the middle of sleeping, which always managed to put me in a foul mood, but there was only so much I could do in a glass box. But eat and… uhh… huh. Come to think of it, of all the necessary biological processes I was used to, eating was the only one I actually seemed to require. I guess when your entire magical physiology is based around consumption, your body naturally evolves a really efficient system. Right. That was the first and last time I was ever going to think about that. The isolation ward went entirely unused during my entire stay at the hospital, which was just fine with me. I saw Night Light a few times a day, usually to feed me and take notes. I couldn’t help but I was being treated more like an adorable pet than an infant under his care, but I couldn’t be entirely sure, as he was difficult to read. I’d tried talking to him while we were alone in order to feel him out, but to my complete bafflement, all I’d been able to vocalize was slurred baby talk, which got me a pat on the head. I’ll be honest. When I’d realized that I couldn’t talk, the fire in my stomach had become a pit as my mind immediately recalled the time the changelings had made me an albino instead of buying a box of hair dye. Now, admittedly, the whole bleaching and dying thing had turned out to be a huge pain in the ass when we’d actually done it, but it still wasn’t any excuse to give me a debilitating disease without so much as asking. Would the changelings give me some sort of intentional brain damage to prevent me from breaking my cover and force me to learn to speak entirely from scratch? In a heartbeat, probably, but a little critical thought calmed my nerves when I realized that I hadn’t actually brought any of my brain with me to begin with. Muscle memory was stored in the brain, but apparently not part of the soul. That… made logical sense, I supposed, but it still came as a bit of a shock. The more I experienced being an actual infant, the more I realize just how many shortcuts I’d been able to take as a changeling. Frankly, I was still a little jealous over all the things that changelings could do, which was annoying but also a bit of a relief. Hopefully that meant that those feelings hadn’t been artificially induced while I was a nymph. I was going to pretend it was that simple, anyway. Okay, I wasn’t jealous of the entire changeling package. There had been a reason I’d chosen to stay the course and become a dragon, after all, and no amount of temporary setbacks were going to change that. Still, I was going to miss the feeling of magic coursing through my chitin. Oh, don’t get me wrong. Scales were better in almost every respect. There had been something unnerving about having a solid carapace, and I didn’t miss it. The silky feeling of scales sliding on scales was almost as novel as the bliss of magic on chitin. But only almost. These were the sort of thoughts I came up with when my doctor-slash-grandfather all but abandoned me in an empty room of a hospital. I got the feeling that dragons didn’t actually need much in the way of postnatal care, though, and while the changelings would be the ones to know, I still felt rather neglected. It was a familiar feeling. ⁂ On the third day, I awoke to find myself being wheeled back out into one of the examination rooms by one of the nurses. I think it was the third day, anyway. It was hard to keep track of the passage of time when kept in a dark room and sleeping off and on through most of the day. My glass box had been replaced with one of the standard infant beds, and while my previous accomodations had been ventilated, it was still nice to be out in the open again. I wasn’t sure if that made me a lousy dragon or not, considering my kind’s tendency to hole up in caves, but I’d spent some of the most innocently enjoyable time in my life as a pegasus very recently, and I would be very much looking forward to the day when I would eventually regain that freedom. I was surprised to be welcomed in the examination room by almost the entire family. Twilight Velvet was absent this time, but in her place stood Moon Dancer, who was looking at me with not a little wide-eyed wonder. I felt a tingle of pride at that because, you know, I was a dragon and that really was all kinds of awesome, but it was tempered by the fact that I’d seen other fillies give that same look to plain, ordinary, uninteresting mammal babies. Oh, and Princess Celestia was there too, along with a pair of the castle’s maids. I was a little surprised that nopony brought Cadance, but the elder princess’ presence had stolen all my attention. Acting had not been my forté before I became a changeling and I doubted being turned into a dragon had improved matters any, so just about all that was between me and some very awkward questions was a collection of baby sounds and the sheer improbability that I could be anything but exactly what I looked like. And what I looked like was adorable. Whether she was just incapable of sensing duplicity in a three-day-old baby or she saw right through me and had simply chosen not to say anything, things proceeded from there in as predictably mundane a manner as could be expected. I was weighed, measured, fed and examined and I sat through it all while doing my best impression of a particularly dim iguana. Night Light, too, displayed a particular lack of basic pattern recognition when he lost a second stethoscope to the yawning pit that was my stomach. That was for leaving me on a liquid diet for the last three days. My expectation of hospital food had been pretty low to begin with, but I was beyond ready for some solid food, damn it. At least this time he didn’t see any point in trying to salvage the bit I couldn’t get my claws on, so I got to gnaw on the rubber tube for a while like it was a gummy worm. “I think that’s everything,” Night Light announced to the room at large, though his attention was on the princess and the two maids who each had a stack of papers on the care and feeding of ravenous lizards. The older unicorn gave a stoic nod, while the younger pegasus was busy keeping a nervous eye on me with the distinct impression that she was going to be checking to ensure that her health plan covered burns, skin-grafts and prosthetics. At least someone was taking me seriously. I made sure to show my appreciation with a wide, toothy smile, eliciting a quiet “Eep!” from my new favorite maid. While I was distracting myself with my own special version of peek-a-boo, the group as a whole was making their way out of the examination room. Night Light led us to the admissions area of the maternity wing and handed my discharge papers to the attendant on staff. “You’re sure this is what you want, pumpkin?” he asked, turning to Twilight Sparkle and managing to give off every impression of a doting father while still keeping an eye on Princess Celestia. “I’m sure we could come to an arrangement with the princess that wouldn’t require you to live in the palace. I know how happy you were to have Moon Dancer as a sister, and I’d hate to separate you two. Think of all the memories you’ve made in the last few months with her and Princess Cadance.” Twilight Sparkle shook her head. “It’ll be fine, dad. It’s not like we’re never going to see each other again. I’ll still be attending most of my classes at Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns with Moon Dancer; it’s just better if Celestia is nearby until I can get these magic surges under control. Besides, Moon Dancer will probably enjoy a little time studying on her own. We’ve spent so much time together that I bet it’ll be like I’m right there with her.” “If you’re sure…” he said, looking unconvinced as he took one copy of the completed discharge papers from the attendant and handed them to the stuffier of the two maids. Receiving a curt nod from her, he turned back to his ‘daughter’, bent over and gave her a hug. “Don’t be a stranger, dear. I’m sure the princess won’t mind if you spend a weekend at home once in a while.” “Of course,” Princess Celestia graciously responded. “While it is traditional for my students to join me in the castle due to my unpredictable schedule, I always encourage them to hold on to those that are important to them. I know that Princess Cadance would be more than willing to watch over Moon Dancer should she ever wish to spend some time with Twilight in in the castle, though I expect both of them will be seeing plenty of her regardless.” I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. Fortunately, I don’t think anypony saw me do it. Why the changelings in the room felt the need to speak in allusions and metaphors under Princess Celestia’s nose when they had a perfectly good hive mind, I wasn’t sure, but at least they were having fun. I hadn’t considered what it would actually mean for the household situation if Twilight Sparkle became the princess’ student, but I guess they’d pretty much covered things in that hoofful of oblique innuendo. I was kind of impressed, actually. “Yes, well, we can only hope, but I’m afraid I’m well aware what she’ll choose if she’s given a choice between us and the castle library,” Night Light admitted with fond chagrin, gracing his ‘daughter’ with a rueful smile. “Be good for the princess, kid.” “Daaaaaaaaaad!” Twilight Sparkle whined, pouting and stomping her hooves. “I am not a goat!” “Are you sure?” he teased her. “I’m positive I’ve seen you absolutely devour every book I’ve ever bought you. You’d think a filly would get indigestion.” Even knowing it was as real as a zebra duchy, Twilight Sparkle’s blush was absolutely adorable.