I went home empty-handed.
Moon Dancer had spent a while walking me through the process of rebirthing a changeling, but there wasn’t really anything that I’d forgotten. Most of the actual work required to make changes to a changeling was performed in the hive mind, planning things out and using the shared cognitive abilities of dozens of changelings to extrapolate the results. As far as actual physical representations of the process went, there were only a few, and I didn’t think that hoarding changeling amniotic fluid would cut it.
So I’d asked for some royal jelly; the catalyst that was used to make changeling queens. She’d refused. Vehemently. It was apparently exorbitantly expensive to produce. That didn’t make much sense to me, as I’d been told you could get a changeling queen just by disconnecting a regular one from the hive mind and feeding it after midnight or something, but apparently it wasn’t quite as simple as that. The royal jelly was still required in cases like that; it was just synthesized by the queen-to-be itself at the expense of excessive amounts of love if it couldn’t be provided in another way.
The fact that it was exorbitantly expensive only made me more certain that it was what I needed. Somehow, this was not a convincing argument.
It would also have raised some questions.
That was the real reason I went home empty-handed. Royal jelly aside, Moon Dancer had been willing to part with a few small things for the sake of my experiments including a gallon of her liquid magic slime, but I hadn’t really considered the fact that my hoard was under scrutiny until I was faced with a glowing green jar of the stuff. That… was a problem.
Moon Dancer hadn’t been impressed at the oversight, but I wasn’t a changeling any more; lying was no longer my first instinct, and the lies I did tell were about whether or not I’d brushed my teeth or snuck into the castle kitchens.
Celestia, but that made me sound boring.
When I first hatched, I’d wanted to have my maids replaced with changelings so I could relax and do whatever I wanted without giving myself away. I’d gotten too close to River Breeze and Violet Rose to still want that, but I’d expected living with Twilight to be a nice middle ground.
In some ways, it was. River Breeze and Violet Rose were still around fairly often when Twilight was in school or having lessons with the princess, but there were also larger portions of the day when we were completely unsupervised.
Unfortunately, Twilight had somehow gotten it in her head to fill that gap personally. Probably, the princess had given her a little speech about being responsible if she was going to live on her own, yadda yadda yadda, but the weird part was that she actually seemed to be taking it to heart for some reason. I knew that she’d gotten really attached to Princess Celestia, but actually listening to her lectures about responsibility was overdoing it.
“I heard you the first time, Twilight, and like I said the first time: I’m in the middle of reading about how ancient ponycian runes were used on their enchanted ships. I don’t think I want to bother hoarding anything with runes, but I can’t deny that adding language to enchanting really increases the potential complexity. I’ll go to bed when I’m done.”
“Wait, if that’s what you want, then shouldn’t you be looking into the language of the—”
“No, Twilight,” I snapped, glaring at her.
Twilight’s ears flattened as she frowned at me. “But—”
“No, Twilight,” I repeated. “I don’t care how useful it is. I am not going anywhere near Punic.”
Twilight was nonplussed. “But the caninites brought—”
“I said no. I refuse to have my magic tied to puns in any way, shape or form. End of discussion.”
Twilight pursed her lips like she’d just bitten into something sour. “Well, you can go to bed, then, because you’re just wasting your time,” she declared, stomping her hoof.
“Hrm…” I pretend to give it some thought. “Nah. I still have something I want to check about Zebra oral traditions after this anyway.”
Instead of receiving a response, my book and I were abruptly surrounded by the pink glow of Twilight’s magic and lifted up into the air, separately. The book snapped shut and floated over to the bookshelf while I was dragged off towards my room. “You didn’t even bookmark my place!” I shouted, tumbling weightlessly around. “Rude!”
I was beginning to suspect that getting anywhere with dragon magic was going to take a very long time. I’d enchanted light crystals and a few other things, but no matter what Moon Dancer and the changeling hive mind said, that had been a real accomplishment.
For the fourth time in a sitting, I blew a fine, wispy tendril of flame out of my mouth and watched it curl around the glass marble in my hands. Unlike with unicorn magic, there was no controlling it after the fact. All I could do was imbue the flame with my will and intent and see what happened.
Or at least… that was the only thing that worked that I’d discovered. What books existed were written by and for ponies—or changelings—and dragons… well, what could you expect? They hoarded knowledge just as much as anything else of value.
I could relate, but it was still annoying.
I waited with bated breath as the flame sank into the marble, half out of anticipation and half to avoid disrupting the process with another breath, even if I didn’t intentionally put any magic into it.
The flames spiraled down into the center of the marble and sparked a small, green ember that glowed with a gentle light, and… that was it. That was all it was supposed to do.
It was the wrong color, though. Too seafoam-y when I’d been trying for more of a lime green. I popped it in my mouth and pulled out another marble to try again.
I felt like kind of an idiot.
“Hey, Twilight,” I called across the room from where I’d been working on shaping a hollow glass sphere with my fire. Dragons were the best glassblowers. “You’re getting plenty of love from the princess, right?”
“Of course, Spike,” she confirmed. “I am her most faithful student.”
My mouth twisted at the reminder. “You know, I can’t believe she actually calls you that. It’s super rude when I’m standing right there.”
“Did you have a point, Spike?” she asked, emphasizing the horrible name she’d saddled me with as a sign that she was growing irritated. “I’m trying to read this new study on the properties of unicorn keratin. I’d kill to have the same work done on changeling horns and chitin so I could compare them, but I don’t have the equipment.”
“Right,” I said, dismissing the subject. It actually sounded pretty interesting, but I had to remind myself that it wasn’t relevant to me any longer and part of that was not letting myself get distracted by it. “Yeah, so if you’re all flush with love and magic, would you mind coughing up a bunch so I can hoard it?”
Twilight let out a groan and craned her neck to look back at me. “How much?”
I picked up the hollow glass ball that I’d been working on and held it up above my head, which it was easily larger than. “A gallon. Gallon and a half, maybe. I’ve got a couple of old crystal balls glowing green in my hoard already. Violet won’t notice if this one’s got magic changeling goop inside it instead.”
“Fine,” she says, drawing the word out in something that’s just barely not a whine. “Isn’t that a waste, though? Aren’t you past hoarding things that glow? You should have some better things, even if they aren’t things you’ve made.”
“They’re real crystal, so they hold magic pretty well,” I explained. “Nowhere near the density of actual crystalized magic, but they’re not terrible. You’re right, though, that they’re not ideal, especially with the connection to scrying that I’m not interested in. The point is to replace them with these.” I tapped the glass sphere in front of me with my claw.
“And hoarding things that do nothing but store magic is worthwhile?”
I scratched the back of my neck as I considered how to answer. “I’m still developing my sense for it. They don’t seem to have much physical effect, though, and there’s something there magically, so it’s not a bad thing.”
Twilight shook her head. “Sometimes I agree with the hive mind that this whole dragon thing is a long shot, then I remember that you’ve somehow worked it so you can fill your hoard up with magic that comes from you having a hoard in the first place. It’s ridiculous!”
I put on a thoughtful pose. “I’m pretty sure Cadance would say that love works the same way.”
Twilight froze, her face slowly twisting in bewilderment. “I… can actually see that, now that you mention it. The hive mind is trying not to think about it.”
Basking in the multicolored glow of my hoard was magical—literally. It had been a year since I’d been allowed to start it and it was a sizeable pile now, a large percentage of it in the form of glowing green spheres full of liquid changeling magic.
I still wasn’t sure if it was actually doing anything, largely because I still wasn’t sure what it was I was looking for it to do. Replicating pony magic was hit and miss, but it was a process I could work at if given enough time and information. Some things just weren’t appropriate for the prepare-and-release method I’d come up with for dragon magic, while others hadn’t been broken down enough by theorists for me to figure out the pertinent details. Changeling magic was enough of the latter that I couldn’t even guess about the former.
Even something as integral to changeling life as the disguise spell was actually a complete mystery to them, which had caused me no end of frustration. There was actually a good chance that it would work for me if I could figure it out. True, I didn’t have chitin, but I did have scales, and unlike a unicorn, my magic came from somewhere in my chest below my heart. True, my scales were resistant to magic, but so was chitin until you broke the flow of magic running through it. I hadn’t yet found a way to test if my own resistance was active, like changelings, or passive, like lodestones. You’d think that it would be as easy as testing shed scales, but they seemed to retain a sympathetic charge of magic regardless.
As for anything more complicated… I just didn’t know. Dragon magic was good for changing one thing into another. In a rare moment, Princess Celestia had taken me aside and shown me a spell that could burn something and send the smoke somewhere else where it would reconstitute itself. It was a perfect example of the sort of thing that dragon magic in general worked well for, even if I could only manage a scroll.
Oh, and I was Twilight Sparkle’s mailbox now. So there was that. The damn things manifested in my inner fire, too. Training myself not to burp the cursed things out wasn’t a process that anyone had enjoyed.
Still, the more I discovered about dragon magic, the more it seemed to line up with changeling magic in eerily similar ways. Hopefully it wasn’t in a complementary-but-opposite ‘two sides of the same coin’ way… but even if it was, I wish I at least knew.
It was a day like any other that I got the biggest shock of my short, short lizard life. River Breeze had just shown up to the tower and told me that we were going shopping. This wasn’t an unusual occurrence just to get me out and about from time to time. Quite often it meant that the castle was going to be hosting foreign dignitaries that either needed something specific during their stay, or, more likely, were willing to throw their weight around to get the crown to pay for their excesses.
I was understandably curious, and after washing up, the two of us headed out. We met Violet Rose near the castle entrance, and I finally asked what was going on.
The answer was not what I’d been expecting. “What do you mean I need to get a graduation present for Twilight? She’s not… I mean, it hasn’t been that long, has it?”
“You were hatched over the summer break when she was ten, Spike.” River Breeze reminded me. “You’re nearly eight years old, now, and that means she’s eighteen. I’m pretty sure that fact came up at her last birthday party.”
“Yeah, but…” It actually hadn’t. Changelings didn’t really do birthday parties, so whenever hers came up, she’d just go home and spend the night in the lab.
Twilight… was an adult? It was hard to wrap my head around. I’d been fourteen when I met her, and even though she was ten, I’d seen her as a sort of peer. I guess, since then, I’d always thought of her as being that age. She certainly hadn’t matured much… though I guess she pouted less nowadays, and she’d certainly gotten more organized and responsible.
Buck. Had she grown up? I looked down at my chubby hands and pudgy body and wondered when I’d gotten used to them. I’d grown a hoof or two taller since I’d started hoarding three years ago, but I was still… basically just a baby dragon.
“Aw, cheer up!” River Breeze insisted, hoofing me off to Violet Rose so that she could properly look at me. “It’s not like she’s going anywhere, you know. She’s only graduating high school. She might go to university or she might just step up her studies with the princess, but either way, I’m sure you’ll be with her the entire way!”
Well, yes. Whether I wanted to or not. Not that I really minded our arrangement any more. It was comfortable, though I did kind of miss living in a full house with two parents, three other kids and Cadance coming over every other day. Cadance was… around, but Twilight and Moon Dancer had ceased needing foalsitting years ago and I had my own caregivers. In hindsight, I don’t think that Princess Celestia ever told Cadance about my name, or she probably would have been all over me.
“I… guess you have a point,” I said, though it probably wasn’t the point that she’d intended. “I mean, can you imagine Twilight living on her own? She’s barely capable of buying groceries!”
“Oh, don’t be like that,” River Breeze chided. “She’s perfectly capable of doing her own shopping.”
“What she can’t do is cook,” Violet Rose interjected, killing the conversation. That, at least, couldn’t be refuted.
“So,” River Breeze piped up. “Where should we be heading? Got any ideas for what you want to get for Twilight?”
I gave her a look that said, ‘Really?’ “It’s Twilight, so… book?”
“Doesn’t she already have all the books she could ever want, though?” River Breeze asked, walking backwards so she could talk to me while Violet Rose took us in the direction of Canterlot’s upscale market quarter.
I shrugged. “Kinda, but it’s Twilight. She wouldn’t even care if you gave her constant-weight enchanted saddlebags, because she just reads a book from cover to cover and drops it on the floor for me to return or reshelve.”
“Yeesh,” River breeze remarked.
Violet Rose, on the other hand, frowned. “That is inappropriate. It’s fine for you to help her, but if it’s enabling behavior like that, then perhaps somepony should talk to her about it. She certainly doesn’t behave like that in the royal archives.”
“Nah, don’t worry about it,” I said, waving it off. “It’s not like you’re thinking. Working or reading, I’ve usually got all my stuff spread out on the floor anyway, so her dropping her books off on a table somewhere would only make more work.”
“I see,” Violet Rose said, acknowledging my justification, but not necessarily agreeing.
“Yeah, that’s not really better,” River Breeze clarified. “You’re basically a ward of the princess and you live on the castle grounds. You should have a desk that works for you.”
I shrugged, unconcerned. “Maybe if I can ever get a shrinking spell to work. Otherwise, books are just too big for anything built to my size. My arm span is barely a book span, which doesn’t make working from a seat easy.”
“Levitation spell still no good?” River Breeze asked.
I shook my head. “It’s never going to happen unless I figure out an entirely different way to use magic. I can cast a spell that makes things float, but I can’t control them afterwards.”
“Wouldn’t that be good enough, though?” River Breeze asked. “Just have a bunch of books and things floating around you?”
“Ehh.” I scratched at my arm uneasily. “It’s also that not burning stuff with the magic is fiddly, especially things like paper.”
“A horseshoe shaped desk would allow you to work properly and with the proper decorum,” Violet Rose countered.
“Things are fine how they are,” I insisted. “Weren’t we supposed to be talking about what to get Twilight for her graduation?”
“You say that like you’re not just going to pick up the first interesting book that’s been published recently enough for her not to have read it yet,” River Breeze observed.
“That… is pretty much what I was going to do, yeah,” I admitted without shame.
“Alternatively,” Violet Rose spoke up. “You could gift her a book, but select one on a subject she is unfamiliar with.”
“What, like ‘How to win friends and influence ponies’?” I asked.
Violet Rose hesitated. “…I can neither confirm nor deny my opinions on the suitability of that book for the young miss Sparkle.”
“I can!” River Breeze chirped. “I just shouldn’t.”
Hrm. There might be something to that idea.
As a stroke of luck, Princess Celestia had expressed interest in the graduation party, meaning Twilight had had no choice but to not only allow one to be thrown, but also participate.
I would call it a small affair considering only a few ponies outside of Twilight’s family had been invited, but it would be disingenuous to do so when there was a cake the size of a buffalo in the middle of the banquet hall, and it wasn’t alone.
I wasn’t sure if the kitchen staff had gotten bored, or if it was just the fact that Princess Celestia was attending.
Fortunately, there was real food at the table, too. There was a tray full of sapphires, amethysts and the occasional spinel, all enchanted with a variety of artistic effects for snacking, plus some kind of golden scepter for a proper meal.
Oh, and there were salads and little plates of palace food for the ponies. Was it any wonder that Princess Celestia always gorged herself on cake?
Food aside, it wasn’t a terrible event, even if it was kind of insulting to Twilight. I mean, in all honestly, she probably could have tested out of Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns years ago if she’d actually been allowed to, but the princess had wanted her to have the experience, so what accomplishment were we actually celebrating?
On second thought, the fact that Twilight hadn’t managed to get herself expelled on account of her mouth was probably a minor miracle, so I guess we could be celebrating that. I wonder if she ever cursed Princess Celestia out over the hive mind like she always did Queen Chrysalis?
Hrm. Unfortunately, I couldn’t think of any way to get the princess temporarily connected to the hive mind. Too bad.
I popped another spinel into my mouth and took in all the ponies and not-ponies that had come. It really was a small party for the banquet room, but there were a few interesting attendees, including Shining Armor and Cadance, who I hadn’t seen for a while and were talking with Princess Celestia.
Cadance, I knew, had been traveling around Equestria for a couple of years now on… I guess you’d call it a publicity tour, spending a few months in each city ‘connecting with the populace’ and that sort of thing. It was really entirely the sort of thing I could imagine her doing… though there was also a small, vindictive part of me that liked to point out that even miss prissy princess herself had trouble standing out in Princess Celestia’s shadow.
Not that I was bitter or anything.
Shining Armor, on the other hoof, I hadn’t heard anything specific about, but I expected that he’d have managed to swing bodyguard duty for Cadance, even if it had required there be a few disappearances in the guard. Whatever he’d been doing, it had apparently been very good for his career. I knew nothing about military ranks, but his dress uniform was looking pretty shiny. Possibly, there had been more disappearances than I’d first assumed.
No. That wasn’t fair. I shouldn’t make assumptions. I’d never actually seen or heard proof of the changelings getting rid of ponies like that, especially if it meant they could play out some convoluted plan involving a rubber duck, a length of silk rope and seven bottles of vodka.
It really was a wonder they’d managed to remain secret for so long.
As for the rest of the guests, they were as you’d expect. Twilight’s ‘parents’ were off in a corner, mostly keeping to themselves. I’d talked to them even less than I had Moon Dancer in recent years, but we got along. For some reason Twilight had been heartbroken when I’d given her my approval for the Night Light that had taken over the position while I was incubating. It was weird, because he’d only ever been nice to me, and he’d gotten even nicer since she’d admitted her frustration with the fact.
Moon Dancer was hovering nearby, not quite with her adoptive parents, but close enough to not attract any attention for being all alone. Her friends, I guess, hadn’t been invited, which surprised me only in that Twilight had gotten away with it. True, Twilight only occasionally existed on the periphery of the group, but inviting them would have looked good for the princess.
River Breeze and Violet Rose had also come, but in their case it was mostly for my sake. They hadn’t even brought gifts, the cheapskates. That was fine, though. My gift was better than anypony else’s.
"Slumber 101: All You Ever Wanted to Know About Slumber Parties But Were Afraid to Ask," Twilight recited by rote, then looked up from the book with a fixed smile on her face. “This is… great… Spike, but it’s a little odd for a graduation present, isn’t it? Graduations are supposed to be about growing up and looking ahead, but slumber parties are…”
“Well, I think it’s a wonderful gift, Twilight,” Princess Celestia observed, beaming with her usual serenity. “I think we could all use a reminder from time to time that becoming an adult doesn’t mean that you have to leave behind the things that you enjoy, and that one of life’s greatest joys is to have good friends that you can rely on no matter what stages your life takes you through.”
Suddenly everyone was nodding in agreement, while Twilight was holding the book to her chest and looking up at Princess Celestia with stars in her eyes, and possibly the beginnings of tears.
“Actually,” I said, coughing to get everyone’s attention and putting on my most adorable, sincerely earnest expression. “I thought the same thing at first—that it was childish—but I was completely wrong! It’s super comprehensive, and even goes into some college level material! For some reason, that and the chapters on ‘experimentation’ are enchanted so only adults can see them, though, so I couldn’t actually check to see if they were any good. I hope they’re as thorough as the rest of the book!”
It took Twilight and the rest a moment to parse what I’d said, and confusion was slowly replaced by a dawning realization. Slowly, Twilight opened the book to somewhere near the back, then slammed it shut, blushing like mad.
Everypony gradually turned to look at me, completely lost as to what they could say to my wide, hopeful grin that wouldn’t spoil the mood or my supposed innocence. As a point of fact, my soul was indisputably past Equestria’s age of majority, and those chapters had been very educational.
It was only when she spat her drink down Twilight’s neck that anypony realized that Princess Celestia had snuck up behind her most faithful student to get a most enlightening peek.
Very educational indeed.
Best. Graduation present. Ever.