Twilight wasn’t sure what she had been expecting, but as she backed away from the castle to get a better look at the dragon towering over everyone there was only one thing going through her mind.
“I thought he’d be taller.”
“The armor is a nice touch,” Luna pointed out, though she was still of a mind to agree. “But yes, he is a bit of a runt for a dragon lord, isn’t he?”
“What do you mean?” Rainbow Dash shouted. “He’s huge!”
“His father is a volcanic mountain,” Twilight pointed out quite reasonably. “This so-called ‘dragon lord’ is just a moderately large lizard.”
Luna glanced skyward. “And yet you are bringing out the stars in the daylight to deal with him.”
“I’m doing more than that,” Twilight said as the sounds of stars crashing into the ground could be heard from all around and her magic began to flood the entire city. “But I’m less concerned with one well-fed reptile than I am about the crowd that outmasses him a hundred times over. Eesh, they aren’t happy about it, either. In fact, I might have just made it worse.”
“Does this mean that you are not going to be our designated yelling-at-people alicorn for the day?” Luna asked.
Twilight’s face went slack for a moment as she saw something through her stars, then she scowled. “Oh for—you have got to be kidding me!”
Luna cocked her head in question then shrugged. “I suppose it is their party, as they say,” she said, looking over to the Celestias, who were having their own hurried conversation.
“Not that,” Twilight said, waving the matter off and scowling, though Luna wasn’t wrong. “Sorry, apart from reinforcing the structural spells keeping the city together, it’s apparently also my job to keep the Cutie-Mark Crusaders alive, because one of them seems to be trying to get herself killed in a draconic mosh-pit.”
Luna wasn’t sure what to say about that, but Dragon Lord Torch was getting impatient. “Well?” he shouted from his perch atop the castle. “Answer me!”
“What is a mosh pit?” Luna asked as the Celestias took flight to address the dragon lord face-to-face.
“Imagine if you replaced all the grace and style of dancing with energy and aggression, piled a hundred ponies into a thirty-pony space and told them to go wild.”
“Ah,” Luna said, paused, then apologized. “My apologies. I had no idea that the way you danced was best performed in a group.”
Twilight was saved from responding to that by the Celestias finally addressing the dragon lord, the word “Who?” echoing across the courtyard.
Well, that was one way to answer, Twilight supposed. It wasn’t as if any of them actually had any idea—
“Me!” shouted the much less booming voice of ‘Tinder’ from next to Twilight. Huh. At some point she had missed being surrounded by dragons, possibly due to having already been surrounded by dragons from dozens of perspectives.
Wait, why was Scootaloo limping now? Twilight guessed that she must have missed something but at least the damn foolish filly was getting to safety now. She was having difficulty splitting her focus between all the things that needed her attention.
“Ember!” the dragon lord shouted upon seeing the dragon who Spike had introduced as Tinder. To the young dragoness’ visible displeasure, though, the dragon lord quickly turned back to the Celestias and accused them, “Your denials fall flat, little pony dragons. It was foolish of you to steal my kith and kin away with your siren’s song of magic.”
“Timing, Spike,” Twilight said with a facepalm and a groan. “You need better timing.”
“Nah,” Spike casually rebutted. “She’s got this.
With a vindictive smirk in place on her face, Ember lifted her hand up in front of herself as if to show off the ring that she was wearing. Now that Twilight was seeing it up close, she noted that it was old and impossibly intricate, almost as if it had been engraved by a dozen skilled craftsmice.
Not that craftsmice were a thing.
Just when Twilight expected something to happen, however, Ember hesitated and Twilight could just barely hear her say to herself, “Right. Smaller, not larger…”
Twilight wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but whatever the cause of Ember’s hesitation, it allowed the dragon lord the time to continue his gloating. “You should know better than to challenge the command of the dragon lord,” he said, retrieving what appeared to be a small purple toothpick from inside his thick metal breastplate. “Your weak allure is nothing next to the might of the bloodstone scepter!”
“Oh no,” Spike said, going pale. “Ember, quick!” he shouted, but he was too late.
There was a blood red flash from the tiny scepter pinched in Torch’s claws and as one, every dragon in the city of Canterlot began to glow from within, and with a second flash, they all froze in place, motionless.
For the first time that day, Canterlot was silent.
The Celestias shared a look.
“Was that supposed to do something to us?” Candesca asked.
“What?!” Torch yelled. “But—”
He was interrupted by a pie to the face. Not a regularly-sized pie, either, but one proportional to the dragon lord’s stature and launched from clear across the city by Pinkie Pie with a trebuchet.
Who had given Pinkie Pie a trebuchet?
Oh, right. It probably came with the unlimited power, so that would be herself.
Whatever else Pinkie Pie’s intentions, the giant pie to the dragon lord’s face caused him to drop the bloodstone scepter. Ember wasted no time in lifting her hand up to her father and doing… something.
The ring flashed and the dragon lord… disappeared.
His armor did not.
The ponies and dragons in the courtyard all scattered as the massive breastplate and other accessories crashed first into the castle roof where he had been standing and then into the courtyard below, followed soon after by the tumbling pie tin still containing the remaining half of a banana cream pie.
Already airborne from dodging Torch’s armor, Twilight scanned the courtyard with her eyes and other senses to make sure no one had been hurt. “Does this count as Pinkie Pie making things worse or solving the whole thing?” Twilight asked Luna, who was hovering nearby.
“That… remains to be seen,” Luna said, directing her attention further out at the large masses of dragons who were looking bewildered and lost after the sudden disappearance of their lord. “After all, as you said, the dragon lord himself was never the issue.”
“Slag, go get that scepter!” Ember ordered, and the black dragoness flew off without hesitation.
“What about your dad?” Spike asked, eyeing the pile of banana cream and armor in the center of the courtyard.
Ember shook her head and said, “Forget him. He’s no longer important. Without the scepter, he can’t do anything, and that’s the worst thing you can do to him.”
“Well… alright, then, I guess.” If that's what she wanted, it wasn’t as if Spike wanted to go digging through a mound of banana cream searching for him. Spike couldn’t really imagine feeling that much spite for the person who had raised him, but then, he supposed from the few things that Ember had said about him, there might not have been much actual raising involved.
“One down, thousands more to go,” Carnelia reminded them. “The time will come to gloat, but it is not yet that time.”
“Right,” Ember said, looking up from the ring on her finger to the crowd of shocked dragons that were quickly recovering. “Spike. I can use the ring if all I’m going to do is yell at some dragons, right?”
“Err—”
“Yeah, I wasn’t actually asking,” she said as she took off and started to grow.
Spike was briefly apprehensive, but it was out of his hands now and all he could do was follow Drift and the others—sans Slag—up to the roof of one of the wings surrounding the courtyard and watch Ember grow larger.
It was Spike’s first time seeing the transformation properly and he was surprised by the fluidity of it. He was used to magic happening in bursts and flashes of light, but Ember’s transformation was not a regimented process with a set beginning or end. She could stop at any point… or she could keep growing and growing and growing.
Before long, Ember’s slow growth brought her to the size of the previous dragon lord only for her to keep growing. Spike rolled his eyes, but there was no harm in it. She’d at least pretended to ask if she could do this, so he was… less annoyed at her than usual. Finally, when she was fully double the size that her father had been and four times as imposing, she stopped and addressed the crowds of dragons.
“Dragons!” she all but roared, getting their attention. “For thousands of years, under my father and his father before him, our race has followed the rule of not the greatest or the most worthy, but that of the biggest asshole.”
Spike facepalmed, then frowned. Vulgarity aside, there was something strange about Ember’s voice. It didn’t sound like it was coming only from the immense dragon.
“But it wasn’t always like this,” she continued. “In ages long past, in the time before there were stars, a multitude of empires spanned this world we now call Equus. But was it Equestrians that ruled these Empires? No! It! Was! Not!
“It was us!” she shouted and Spike tried to cover what passed for ears on a dragon at the sheer volume of it, but no amount of coverage helped. He wasn’t alone, either, though the crowd still all cheered when she reiterated with the deafening boom of, “Dragons!”
Spike had to admit, no matter her difficulties with ponies, Ember apparently knew how to work a crowd of dragons, at least. He should have expected that ‘be louder than everydragon else’ would be a core aspect of it. He was beginning to suspect that loudness wasn’t all that was going on, though.
“For longer than ponies have had magic, it was dragons that ruled this world.” The crowd cheered again and Ember let them, but she clearly wasn’t happy.
“It sounds great, doesn’t it?” she asked rhetorically. “The greatest race on Equus on top where we belong, all others bowing before us. That’s what you’re imagining, isn’t it?”
Now, the crowd was picking up on her contrary mood and looking uncertain. Spike, on the other hand, just wanted to know if Ember was ever going to let anyone else read that damn book. It really sounded interesting.
“We could do that,” she said, making a show of looking over the ocean of scales and wings arrayed out before her. “Look at us! We are legion! We stand here in the heart of Equestria, uncontested! There is no nation on this world that would not let us simply do as we please—and why? Because they can do nothing to stop us!”
“I realize that she’s just winding them up,” Drift quietly observed. “But I really don’t think the princesses appreciate her pointing that out.”
Spike had to agree. The Celestias both remained politely stoic, standing at attention as they watched from the roof across the courtyard from where Spike and the rest had gathered, but they definitely weren’t smiling.
“So tell me, then why is it called Equus?” Ember asked the crowd. “It hasn’t always been this way. This place, this world, used to be named not for the ponies that live on top of it, but for the dragons that make up the land itself. So why did that change?
“History. Society. Civilization,” she said, snarling each word like it was a curse. “Ask any dragon and they will tell you that these are weaknesses. Pony nonsense. But it is exactly these things that make an empire! Pony nonsense? No! We! Had! Them! First!
“Look at us! We are the kings of this world, but we are kings who do nothing! We laze about and allow the world to pass us by simply because we can. We build nothing when we could have kingdoms! We stagnate when we could be building marvels and legacies for all the world to remember!
“So why don’t we?” she asked them. “Why do we sit and use other people’s words and live in other people’s cities and enjoy other people’s food?
“It’s because letting yourself be ruled by the biggest asshole with a mind-controlling toothpick is a fucking stupid idea!”
Spike cringed. This definitely was a speech aimed at dragons, not for pony sensibilities. He supposed that was fine, though, if it worked.
Not that he imagined that Ember was going to give them any choice in the matter.
“No more! Dragon Lord Torch is dragon lord no longer. His age, his size and his power have all been stripped of him, never to return. Not in a hundred years, not in a thousand years. The scepter will be destroyed and the position of dragon lord… abolished.
“I will be taking his place, not as a dragon lord with a small stick, but as the empress and arbiter of a new empire… with this,” she said, raising up her hand once again, the back of her hand towards the crowd to show off the ring.
“Ah, the old, ‘the king is dead; long live the king,’ routine,” Kindle observed.
“This is the Ring of Ashmund,” she explained. “You’ve probably never heard of it.”
For some reason, Drift snickered at that, earning a curious look from Carnelia and Spike and a roll of the eyes from Kindle.
“But you’ve seen what it can do,” Ember continued. “Where the bloodstone scepter was able to control the minds of dragons, this controls the body. It was this, not the scepter, that was used to bring order and honor to the dragon empires, and it is with this that I will be remaking the dragon race.”
Before anyone had fully realized what Ember had just said, the ring lit with a light more blinding than the old sun.
“In the days of the old empire,” Ember oarated, speaking through the blinding light. “The Ring of Ashmund was used to reward those of great achievement with the stature and power that you have all come to take for granted, so as you feel yourself growing slowly smaller, you might think that I am punishing you.
“You are wrong.
“I will not be passing out years and inches like treats. A dragon is already tougher and deadlier than nearly any other creature its size, so what is the point in growing larger than can be accommodated for? What is the purpose in needing twenty pigs and their weight in gold to feel sated? What good is there to living forever when it’s with your eyes closed and your name forgotten?
Ember finally lowered her hand, the light of her ring dying to a glowing orange band on her finger, and in the wake of her power was left… a much less massive crowd. Roofs that had once been crowded with two or three dragons fighting each other for space now had room for a Pinkie Pie party with an entire mariachi band. The dragons left behind were now close to pony-sized, similar to Spike and the rest, but with more variety and little to no changes to the handful of younger dragons.
“Like it or not, we live on Equus. We lost the right to call it anything else when we left behind an entire age of history for barbarism and ignorance. I wish we had something to show for the thousands of years it’s been since the last dragon empire fell, but we don’t. I wish we could build ourselves up from nothing without leaning on the ponies for help, but experience is against us. If you want to try, I won’t stop you.
“I’m not like my father. I won’t force anydragon to follow me. If you want to go out into the wilds and build your own empire, go ahead. I wish you luck.
“But if you’re going to stay with me here in Equestria and beyond, I’ve given you the chance to do it properly. You might not like the sound of that, but I’ve seen it happen down in Ponyville; dragons taking jobs and being productive, and you know what they get for it? Acceptance! They have restaurants serving meat, full of dragons enjoying themselves! Does that sound like dragons becoming like ponies? No! But when was the last time any of you had a rack of honey-roasted ribs? Is the life of a feckless vagrant what you want, or is it what you’ve settled for for lack of steakhouses that can fit your chubby asses through the door?
“And, well, if you don’t like it? Then tough. You didn’t do anything to earn being born as a dragon, so you’re just going to have to accept that being born as a dragon just means something else now.
“You know what I didn’t change, though? The ability for every last one of you to do magic! If you really want something to lord over your fellow dragons, put some Tartarus-damned work into it and bring back a form of power with actual dignity to it! Use that to get ahead of everyone else, it’s only the most powerful force in the world!
“Tread carefully, though. I may not be my father, but I’m also not going to stand by and let a few dissenters ruin things for the rest of us, and I’ve been told that the ponies would prefer it if dragons were the size of chickens.”
“Well, that happened,” Spike said, the echo of Ember’s threat still hanging in the air.
“Do you think she really got everydragon with that?” Drift wondered, flapping her wings to get a little more height to scan the rooftops with. “Because that’d mean there are going to be a lot of confused dragons who didn’t show up today.”
“I don’t think there will be,” Spike said, thinking. “Did you notice how it didn’t matter if you covered your ears?”
“You mean everydragon heard that?” Drift asked. “How would that even work?”
“Well… she said the ring controls dragons bodies, right?” Spike suggested, though he had to admit it sounded far-fetched. The rest looked dubious, too, but they didn’t really have a better explanation for it.
“How do you expect the princesses to respond, Spike?” Carnelia asked, in her slightly hissing accent.
Spike squinted over at the alicorns, still on the other side of the courtyard, but all he could really tell was that the Celestias were whispering to each other while Twilight and Luna kept to themselves.
“I think it went alright?” Spike said. “Though if Ember thinks she’s done talking for the day, she has no idea…”
“Well… that was a thing that happened,” Twilight observed, having landed on one of the castle roofs while Tinder… or rather, Ember, was making her speech. “Do you think she got all the dragons with that?”
Luna hmmed. “If it is anything like the bloodstone scepter, then quite possibly. I was not aware of the scepter’s ability to take complete control of dragons, but it has long been used to call them from across Equus. It is a good thing we have secured it.”
“Well, technically we haven’t,” Twilight pointed out. “Empress Ember’s empire has.”
“Is that all it takes to create an empire?” Luna asked. “Just to say it out loud?”
“Isn’t that how it’s always worked?” Twilight asked back.
“Well, yes,” Luna admitted. “But if you’ll recall, I had to sign papers for yours.”
“Sure, but I don’t have an empire,” Twilight argued. “Empires are a different animal altogether.”
“Fair,” Luna allowed. “Though in truth, neither does she.”
Twilight frowned. “I’m not sure if having a normal country and calling it an empire and its leader an Empress is better or worse than having a Librararchy and Archlibrarian. I feel like it’s worse on account of it being wrong.”
Twilight and Luna were interrupted in their banter by the looming figure of Empress Ember suddenly bending down and leaping off of the castle, setting off a minor panic below before she was abruptly her normal size again. On closer inspection, she seemed to be in a hurry, dropping down to a black figure on the opposite side of the courtyard directly below where Spike and the others had been watching the speech.
“We should probably go see what that is,” Twilight said, to which Luna nodded and the both of them took off to glide down to the commotion below.
“He bit me!” Slag was shouting as Twilight got closer. The muscled young dragoness was seated against one of the walls bordering the courtyard and holding her tail. “That vicious little bugger nearly bit my tail off!”
“…Slag?” Spike said somewhat warily, looking around the area as he floated down from above.
“What?!” she snapped as more of the dragons reached the scene. Twilight didn’t blame her. She hadn’t been exaggerating; there was a hoof-sized chunk missing from her tail about halfway down that was bleeding quite badly.
“Oh geeze,” Spike said, cringing when he saw the blood. “Sorry, I—sorry,” he apologized, looking anywhere but at the blood. “But you had the scepter, right?”
“Yeah,” Slag grunted through her teeth as Fluttershy pushed her way into the crowd and Twilight began forming a small bubble shield and filling it with magic. “Yeah,” Slag repeated. “It’s right… here?”
It was not right there.
“Oh spit.”
Ember’s hackles raised on hearing those words. “Find him!” she shouted, leaping back into the sky almost before she’d even landed. Her form stretched and twisted with each flap she took until she was long and thin with a wingspan as large as the courtyard she’d just taken off from. She wasn’t as large as she had been during her speech, but she could definitely fly.
Kindle and Drift followed soon after, while Carnelia hesitated a moment longer to reassure herself that Slag was being taken care of.
Spike had something else on his mind. Twilight, Luna and the Celestias had all heard what was happening and Fluttershy was taking care of Slag, but where were the rest of Twilight’s friends?
Stretching his wings, Spike launched himself up into the air and searched, not just for Torch and the scepter, but anyone who could help. He immediately wrote off Pinkie Pie since she’d been across the city with a trebuchet five minutes ago, meaning she could be anywhere in Equestria right now. Rarity, similarly, had been missing since before Torch had shown up and to be honest, wouldn’t be very much use in a search.
Applejack was easy enough to find leaning against the wall in the courtyard below where the alicorns had been, but Rainbow Dash, who Spike was really looking for, was nowhere to be found.
Spike hurried his landing next to Applejack and stumbled down to all fours before he could stand up again. “Applejack! Where’s Rainbow Dash?”
“Huh?” Applejack grunted, clearly unaware of what was going on.
Spike quickly looked behind himself and confirmed that Torch’s armor made it impossible to see Slag from there.
“Sorry, Dash was watching up with the princesses,” Applejack explained, stepping away from the wall and stretching. “What’s going on?”
“Torch got the drop on Slag and made off with the scepter,” Spike quickly explained. “We’re looking for him, but…”
Applejack halted in her steps at that. “By ‘Torch,’ you mean…” She gestured with her eyes up to where the dragon lord had originally made his entrance on top of Canterlot Castle. “Of course you do.”
“Torch doesn’t matter,” Spike told her. “But we need that scepter back. It’s… really not something we want someone else to have.”
“Ah never would’a guessed,” Applejack said in a rare moment of snark. “The phrase ‘mind-controlling toothpick’ sounds so harmless.”
“Yeah, well, do what you can and let Rainbow Dash know if you see her,” Spike said, spreading his wings to take flight again. “Hopefully she’s already looking.”
It took longer than it should have for Twilight to get the whole story about what had happened. The eventual consensus was that Torch had crawled out of the banana cream at the end of Ember’s speech and immediately made a bid for the scepter while everyone was distracted. This seemed obvious in hindsight, but Slag had only caught a glimpse of him running off, and everyone who had actually understood the situation had quickly flown off.
That didn’t mean that Twilight and the rest of the alicorns hadn’t participated in the search, however, just that it took a little longer to get them organized.
Rather than take wing, Twilight had searched through the light of the stars that she had seeded the city with, though the interference from the daylight made it more difficult than it would have otherwise been. As she searched, she repaired the damage that had been done to the city, cleaning up and removing places where a small dragon with an uncomfortably powerful artifact could hide in the process. One by one, she also returned her stars to the sky and by the time she was done, it was fairly clear that Torch had made good his escape.
According to Ember, who had come back quite impressed with Rainbow Dash after several passes around the mountain, she had taken his wings when she had de-aged him, but she also admitted with spitting distaste that that didn’t mean much when he had the bloodstone scepter. Twilight wasn’t happy with the idea that somedragon in the crowd had been commandeered to be used like a cart for his escape, but there wasn’t much that any of them could do about it right now.
The Celestias, too, came back empty-hoofed, having the same limitations as Twilight in only being able to focus on one thing at a time. Out of all of them, only Fluttershy had the ability to look through more than one set of eyes at once, and while her range was painfully large, it didn’t span the entire valley.
Torch was long gone.
Twilight let out a heavy sigh as she went about putting the last of her stars away.
“You’ve already expressed your displeasure with the ex-dragon lord’s escape,” Luna said. “Something else on your mind?”
Twilight plucked back one of her stars just as it was rising up into the sky. “I’m a little disappointed with myself,” she admitted. “I made a split-second decision to bring down the stars, and I think I helped, but it wasn’t nearly as useful as I’d imagined it’d be. Half the damage I just cleaned up was in the form of craters that I made.”
“You don’t sound that torn up about it,” Luna observed, to which Twilight shrugged.
“Damage can be repaired, especially with a star… or… two…?” Twilight drifted off in the middle of her sentence as she just realized something. “Okay, this is completely unrelated to anything that happened today, but I suddenly feel like an idiot.”
“You are anything but,” Luna consoled.
Twilight shook her head. “It’s just… you do remember me complaining about the limits of manifesting from starlight, right? Back when I blew myself up and demanifested myself experimenting with earth pony magic?”
Luna looked at Twilight, then looked at the star she was holding. “Ah.”
“Yes, ‘ah,’” Twilight said. “I don’t even need to integrate it into my manifestation, just…” Rather than explain it, Twilight brought the star closer and used its light to remanifest her peytral around it. “There. Voila. All the starlight I need. Still think I’m not an idiot?”
Luna answered by way of a wing over Twilight’s back. “If anything, I think the events of today have made clear that one cannot think of everything.”
“I know what you mean,” Twilight agreed. “In fact, now that you mention it, I feel like there’s something else I’m missing.”
“There’s plenty about what happened that we are going to need to discuss, but I can’t think of anything that’s urgent,” Luna said. “There may still be a coronation, but it won’t be today. We will need a few days at least to coax the ponies out of their homes for such an event, which is to say nothing of dealing with a city full of previously-stout dragons that are feeling confused and vulnerable.”
Twilight waved those things off, since it was something else that was on the tip of her tongue, and that’s when she remembered.
Scootaloo and the Cutie Mark Crusaders.
“This isn’t what I meant when I said we had to go deal with them,” Twilight deadpanned, standing underneath a banner reading:
Happy Cuteceñera
Cutie Mark Crusaders!