Torch snored like five or six blast furnaces stacked on top of each other: that was one of the reasons Ember had dug her own sleeping cave on the other side of the mountain as soon as her claws had gotten strong enough. So it had been decades since she'd been inside her dad's cave after dark.
Arching her wings, she drifted higher and higher on the thermals he created from where he lay stretched out on his back across a good acre of precious objects. After his centuries as Dragon Lord, he'd gathered quite the impressive hoard, but none of the gold or jewels strewn around held any interest for Ember. Besides, touching even the smallest opal would've roused him, and that would've led to a loud and unhappy conversation, something Ember wasn't after at all.
No, what she was after was as much hers as his, so taking it shouldn't wake him up. What she was after, Torch had denied the existence of repeatedly with roars and shouts, gouts of flames and many a boulder smashed to rubble. What she was after allegedly lay in a hidden alcove tucked in the northwest corner of the cave's vaulted ceiling.
Not that she had any reason to believe it was really there. Except, well, after she'd become Dragon Lord, she'd made a point to go out and call on those of her subjects who were too old and too gigantic to come swear fealty to her in person. And in answer to the one question she'd asked at the end of each visit, they'd all referred her to a dragoness named Bonebreak.
"Oh, yes," the reply had come over and over again. "Bonebreak, definitely. She and Glazier were always charging around, getting into some sort of mischief or other."
Glazier. Ember's mother. She'd left as soon as she'd laid Ember's egg and, as far as Ember had been able to learn, had simply vanished without a single trace from the face of the planet.
Unless...
Shaking her head, Ember concentrated on the here and now, on navigating the gusting currents generated by her father snoring several furlongs below her. He produced a fair amount of light in the process, too, flames cresting when he breathed out and flickering when he breathed in. It was enough, at least, for her to see a shadow ahead at the spot where the northern and western walls met the ceiling, a shadow deeper than the ones cast by any of the many rocky outcroppings.
A hole, in other words. A hole large enough for her father to reach a claw into, she thought, if he ever wanted to remove what Bonebreak said he kept there despite all the swearing up and down he'd done Ember's whole life. "Stinking wyrm took everything!" he would bellow, Ember trying not to flinch as stone and air shook around her. "Fifteen hundred years we were together, and one day, she just packs up and leaves! Said I wasn't any fun anymore!" Three times, he'd collapsed their whole cave before Ember had learned not to ask about Glazier, so she'd ended up just taking him at his word that she was gone, and all her stuff with her.
Until— "One thing," Bonebreak had said, her pale golden body coiled like a massive serpent within the echoing vastness of her cave. "We got drunk together, your father and I, the night before you hatched, young Ember, three months to the day after she'd scarpered. Not that I ever fancied your pa, but, well, we'd both been left in the lurch, hadn't we? And Torch told me he still had one piece from her hoard." The old dragoness had cocked her head. "Do you know how she got the name Glazier?"
Ember did, but she'd said no to keep Bonebreak talking.
"Going around the whole world, finding weird sand, and using her breath to melt it into glass that she then sculpted into shapes." Bonebreak held up a claw as big as Ember's whole body. "That's what your father said he had hidden away: the last glass sphere Glazier ever made, he said."
Carefully in the fluky wind and the shifting light, Ember managed to hover in front of a rocky ledge, the hole at its base easily large enough for her to crawl into. And inside? The only sliver of her mother she was ever likely to find?
Grabbing the ledge, Ember hauled herself up and into the cave.
A week later, she was flying over so much green everywhere, it was just...unnatural!
Which was seriously the wrong word: Ember knew that. Blowing out a breath, she adjusted her wings to glide her closer over the lumpy treetops that bulged and bloated as far as she could see in every direction under the afternoon sun. All this growing stuff was every bit as natural as the lava and granite and obsidian she was used to back in the Dragonlands.
Creepy as a see-through eggshell, though...
Something wonderfully familiar tickled her snout, then, and Ember almost cheered. Apple Splash—or whatever that farmer's name was at the orchard where Ember had landed to ask for directions—had told her that her best bet would be to head east till she smelled smoke.
She banked and flapped toward the scent, the bulging pack strapped to her side shifting slightly. Squinting into the late afternoon glare, she could just make out a thin trickle of gray wavering up from the green into the blue. With another almost-cheer, she reached the smoke, took a deep breath of it, and dove through the trees.
Branches and leaves brushed against her gently, a caress that made her grit her teeth, fold her wings, and drop more quickly to the ground. Nothing here could hurt her—she was sure of that—but that didn't mean she much liked it touching her...
Mud squished around her claws when she landed, soft and damp and making her want to belch fire all over herself just to burn the stuff off and stop it from—
Another breath, and she focused on her mission. Because she was so close now, closer than she'd ever been before in her entire life, to maybe finding out something about what had happened to her mother.
The smoky scent was wafting from behind her; she looked over her shoulder and stared with wide eyes at the...tree? Building? A little of both?
Snorting steam from her nostrils, she turned and padded through the mud to the steps and the door. And as much as she wanted to barge in and demand this zebra's assistance, she knew that zebras were closer to ponies than they were to dragons. So the more ponylike approach of knocking on the door and waiting was probably—
The door clicked and swung open, the darkness beyond flickering with green. "Your Majesty has crossed the sea," a low but lilting voice said from somewhere inside, "and stops to visit humble me?"
Ember's eyes wanted to see the flickering as coming from a fire, but the color was all wrong. "Uh, yeah," she said, blinking in the hope that it would help, but it didn't. "And I'm really not in the mood for weirdness, all right? I need some help with something zebra related, and I remembered Spike talking about you when he told me the whole story about his molt." She folded her arms across her chest. "So can I come in and show you, or am I s'pposed to stand out here till I sink in this muck?"
The chuckle that emerged made Ember think of water trickling over rocks, a sound that always got her smiling. "Before this sinking might occur," the voice said, "you'll enter, please, and we'll confer." Something popped inside, and the light crackled over from emerald to regular reds and yellows.
Shrugging, Ember gave just enough of a flap to carry herself through the door and into the house-tree-thing.
The size of the place struck her first, so small that she felt the need to draw her wings tighter against her back. Crowded wasn't a strong enough word: the shelves full of bottles, beakers, books, and bundles; the fire pit and bubbling cauldron taking up a fair percentage of the floor in the middle of the room; three or four tables loaded with glassware, weird rocks, little statues and who knew what else; chairs, a cot, and the zebra herself.
She was standing behind the cauldron, the table beside her stacked with precisely chopped cubes of plants or something. Giving a bow, the zebra spoke in the voice Ember had heard a couple times already: "I bid you welcome, Dragon Lord. You've come to ask about your hoard?"
"How—?" Ember stared, then let her crest scales fold. "Look, if you know why I'm here, let's just cut to the chase, all right? I know you magical types always love being spooky and mysterious, but I don't have a lot of time, so—"
"Relax, I beg. I simply guessed about the cause that draws you west." The zebra—Zecora was her name, Ember remembered from Spike's story—touched her chest with a hoof. "For dragons' hearts and hoards entwine. In love and strife, they both align."
The rhythm of her words, the warm scents and soothing light of the place, they all made the tightness in Ember's shoulders loosen with a snap she could almost hear. "Love and strife," she repeated, sitting with a sigh. "You got that right. See—"
And that was the exact moment that it hit Ember: she was going to have to tell this complete stranger all about the itchy and awful pustule that throbbed in the middle of her gut. Not a pain, of course, since dragons didn't do pain, and certainly not a heartache for the exact same reason. But...
Taking a breath, Ember forced the words out. "My mom, I...I never knew her. She and Dad broke up right after she laid my egg, and it's like she just vanished. I don't...she didn't...there isn't—" It took her another breath before she could go on. "I haven't found anycreature anywhere who'se seen her in thirty years, and whenever I've tried asking my dad, he starts shouting and smashing stuff." Her gut got itchier and more awful, so she had to stop again and do some swallowing.
Zecora's words slid as smoothly as a pyroclastic flow into the silence. "The Dragon Lord commands her nation: can't you force the information?"
Ember coughed a laugh. "Yeah, well, see, my whole thing as Dragon Lord is not using the Bloodstone Scepter all the time." She crooked a claw at Zecora. "I'll deny this if you ever repeat it, but I've learned a lot from Spike and these ponies about the best ways to wield power. And when you get dragons doing stuff because they want to instead of because you're making them, the results are so much better, I could hardly believe it when I first saw it."
The zebra was nodding. "A dragon's hoard can reach beyond, can form a transcendental bond detached from space and matter both. It leads to greater mental growth."
"Exactly!" Ember had stopped trying to explain her weird theories pretty quickly after becoming Dragon Lord because all they got her was blinking eyes and blank looks. So she couldn't help leaning forward a little to find somecreature who maybe got it. "I want them to claim ownership of the idea itself, let that become a part of their hoards, because then they'll—" Shaking her head, she forced herself to swallow the idea. "But that's not what I'm here about. See..." Undoing the clasp, she slung off the pack she'd carried all the way from the Dragonlands. "When my mother left, she packed up everything she had and took it with her."
"Forgive my interruption, do." Zecora spread her front hooves. "She didn't take, I notice, you..."
As hard she tried, Ember couldn't hide her wince. "That's kind of the other reason I'm not using the Scepter to pry the story out of anyone." She focused her attention on unbuckling her pack. "Everydragon I've talked to, they all agree that Mom was a real free spirit, a wanderer and a warrior and an artist. She tried to talk Dad out of becoming Dragon Lord, they said, because she didn't think it would suit either of them very well. And then to have her fly off as soon as she lays my egg?"
The itchiness and awfulness were back in full force, but something about the atmosphere here made Ember want to say out loud a thought she'd been actively squashing for as long as she'd been able to think. "She only took the things she wanted." The words came out as a cracking sort of whisper, but they did come out. "What Mom left behind was me and apparently this." She dug into her pack and pulled it out.
The glass was so clear, so flawless and pure, the thing looked as fragile as a soap bubble, but Ember needed both hands to hold it due to its size and its weight. It was a nearly perfect sphere, too, and gazing at her distorted reflection in it, Ember tried to get her mind back to business. "I'm no expert, but I've always loved the crisp tang of silicates, y'know? And just a taste of this one..."
She bent down and touched her tongue to it, the balance of salt and spice making her sure all over again. "The sand in it came from Zebrabwe. Most of the magic's got a weird vibe that I'll bet is zebra, too, but the residual magic left over from the fire that melted it? That's from a dragon, and it feels so much like mine, I'm sure it was my mom's..."
Zecora was staring at the sphere, her eyes wide. "It's ringing odd, familiar bells. My mentor spoke of locking spells..."
"Locking?" Ember looked from Zecora to the sphere and back again. "Locking what?"
The zebra was stroking her snout with a hoof. "Recalling vaguely spheres of glass, I need to dig through this morass." She nodded toward one of the overflowing bookcases, then bent down before straightening with a black marble bowl in her teeth. She trotted over and put the bowl on one of the tables beside Ember in a spot that Ember was sure had been covered with unrolled scrolls a moment ago.
"You place it here; I'll look and think." Zecora turned away, reared back onto her hind legs, pulled a tall, white clay bottle from a shelf, set it on the table beside the sphere, peeled the seal from around the lid with her teeth, and plucked the stopper out. The air immediately filled with a lovely peppery scent that made Ember's stomach rumble. "And while you wait, accept a drink?"
Ember couldn't nod fast enough: just the aroma of the clear liquid pouring into a cup got her eyes watering. Settling the sphere into the black bowl—it fit perfectly, she was a little surprised to see—she took the cup with a nod, dipped her tongue in, and was immediately rewarded with heat that slithered up to fill her whole head. With a little moan, she swigged back a full mouthful, the stuff boiling exquisitely down her throat and melting the cold lump in her middle. "What is this?"
"A pepper brew I make myself." Chuckling, Zecora was climbing partway up another bookcase, grabbing volumes and dropping them to the floor. "It sits for years upon the shelf. For seldom have I guests inclined to sit and, taking sips, unwind."
It stirred Ember's innards just exactly the right way, and she puffed a little smoke ring with the gases it created. "You obviously need more dragon friends." She drained the cup and smacked her lips.
Taking the top book in her teeth, Zecora carried it to another sudden clear spot on one of the other tables, then came over and poured another cup of the stuff. "As friends we are, I'll ask you please to help yourself and take your ease." She squinted at the sphere, took a drink, shuddered, then gave the sphere another squint. "There's something here I once was taught, but recollect? I just cannot." Sighing, she gave a small smile and headed back over to her books.
"OK." Ember picked up the bottle and filled her cup. "Let me know if there's anything I can do to help."
Zecora paused in the act of opening the first book. "Your mother's past: you're now aware. Unless it's painful, might you share?"
"You mean the stories I heard about her? Sure." Ember took a swallow of the stuff to help keep that awful itchiness at bay and began to talk.
As she told the stories, though, a different sort of itchiness started creeping over her. Listening to those giant dragons back in their caves reminisce about the good old days had been one thing, but now that she was actually thinking about what they'd told her—
"Hey," she finally said, finishing off the fourth or fifth cup of the pepper stuff while Zecora closed the fourth or fifth book she'd consulted, "is it just me, or does every one of these stories talk about my mom killing and eating some ponies or zebras or griffons or somecreature like that?"
Zecora's ears dipped, but she didn't turn from her next book. "In truth, I did detect a theme. It seems—to say the least—extreme."
The itchiness forced Ember to get up. If the place had been big enough, she would've taken wing to clear her head and get her thoughts in order, but as it was, she could only start pacing up and down beside the table with the sphere on it. "I mean, yes, everything they told me happened hundreds and hundreds of years ago, but burning towns? Stealing stuff? Hunting folks like you and Spike's friends?" She stopped and stared at the sphere. "I know my dad kind of put a stop to that when he became Dragon Lord, and, well, the one thing he's ever said about Mom was that she left after telling him he wasn't fun anymore..."
The zebra slapped her book. "Eureka! Locking spells! The sphere!" She spun and pointed a hoof. "A Fallen Star we're holding here!"
"A what?" Ember blinked at her, then scowled. "No, it's a glass sphere my mom made." She puffed out the tiniest bit of fire. "Her fire melted some sand from Zebrabwe and—"
"Forgive me, please: it's just a name." Zecora tapped the book. "A dragon makes the glass with flame. A shaman takes it, blends a brew, and mixes something rare and new. Combining magics near and far, they call what forms a Fallen Star." She stepped forward, her eyes wide on the sphere. "I never thought I'd ever see the strictest form of magic key."
Ember blinked, trying to pull her thoughts back to the actual situation. "A key? To what?"
Moving faster than Ember would've dared in the confines of the room, Zecora started scooping up bottles and jars in the crooks of her legs, moving them to the table beside the sphere, then dashing back for more. "Inscribed upon the outer shell, the sphere itself is sure to tell: if not the 'what,' at least the 'where' to guide our journey going there."
"You mean—" Ember caught her breath. "This might be the key to my mom's cave or something?"
With a little rattle, Zecora stopped, set down the bottles she was holding, and touched her chin. "A zebra made this Fallen Star. So how'd it come to you? Bizarre..."
"My dad had it hidden away." Ember looked at the sphere. "But if a zebra shaman used my mom's glass, why does my dad have it thirty years after they supposedly split up?"
"Perhaps he keeps his visits hidden? Thinks them shameful? Wrong? Forbidden?"
Puffing steam through her nostrils, Ember barely stopped herself from stomping a foot: with all this stuff everywhere, she'd likely cause multiple avalanches. "We'll only know when we get there." She waved at the Fallen Star. "Do whatever you have to."
Zecora nodded, her hooves already at work tapping powders and liquids into a small bowl.
Ember didn't even try watching, her mind turning over and over. Given all the stories about how her mom treated non-dragons—terrorizing was really the only word Ember could think to use—how likely did it seem that she would have a magical zebra friend to give her an enchanted lock for her cave? "There's got to be something we're missing," she muttered.
"Indeed, but not for long, I think." Zecora ground a leaf between her hooves, the powder drifting into the bowl, and with a flash, the lumpy green mixture became a black liquid. "For now we pour the magic ink." She slid the bowl onto the flat of her hoof, lifted it, and tipped the contents slowly onto the Star.
The black stuff touched the surface—and vanished completely.
"Uhhh," Ember began, but then black marks started fading into being around the middle of the sphere, marks that Ember didn't recognize at all. "Some ancient zebra language?"
"The modern script we use today." Bending closer, Zecora squinted at it. "It's thirty years she's been away?"
"My mom? Well, yeah, but—" Ember shook her head. "What's it say?"
"Directions leading somewhere near." Zecora shrugged. "At least within the hemisphere. A spot along the Badlands' coast." She looked up at Ember. "A trip of several days at most."
"Uhhh," was all Ember could say again. A trip all the way around to zebra country on the other side of the world, she realized, she'd been able to think about because she hadn't really thought it would ever happen. She was the Dragon Lord, after all: she couldn't take a couple weeks off to go all the way to Zebrabwe. But the Badlands' coast? She'd flown along the whole stretch of it on her way here. "Maybe..." She had to clear her throat before she could go on. "Maybe I should head back to the Dragonlands and think a little more about this, huh?"
Zecora's eyebrows went up, and she straightened from where she'd been hunched beside the Fallen Star.
"Yeah," Ember went on, every bit of the coldness returning to her middle. "I mean, Mom's made it pretty clear that she doesn't want to be bothered, and—" And if she was still alive, one of the thoughts that she'd been ignoring for so long whispered from the coldness, she would've shown up when you were made Dragon Lord. And Torch always reacted so badly whenever you asked about her because he's the reason she's no longer alive.
"No!" Flinging her claws up to cover her ears, she felt her elbows knocking things over. Zecora's gasps hit her even with her ears muffled, but she didn't care, unfurling her wings and hurling herself through the doorway into the evening darkness of the woods.
Not that there was much more space out here: one flap, and she smashed headfirst into a tree or something hard enough to ring her like a bell. Vines seemed curl around her, and only by lashing out with with all four sets of claws, her wings, and her tail was she able to slice herself free. The echoing clang of her impact dizzied her, though, fuddled her sense of direction, and her leap for the sky becoming a crash into the mud, the sticky wetness slapping enough sense into her to make her stop struggling and go limp.
"Avoiding truth's a hazard, Ember," she heard Zecora say above the quiet buzzing of insects in the night around her. "Come: you're not alone, remember."
She raised her head, her vision smeary, she told herself, from the mud rather than any other reason, and saw Zecora standing on the steps of her tree-house. "We'll get you clean and get some sleep," the zebra said, "before we take tomorrow's leap."
Clambering to her feet, Ember shook her head. "I won't be able to sleep." She took a breath, centered herself, let her navigation sense tell her which way was southeast, and looked at the treetops in that direction. "If we fly all night, we can reach the Hayseed Swamp by dawn, and the coast of the Badlands is just south of that." She swallowed. "I have to know, Zecora. I don't want to know, but I have to."
Zecora nodded. "I have a travel kit I'll pack." A smile pulled at her snout. "It's potions plus a little snack."
Ember couldn't help a smile of her own. "And a bottle of your pepper brew." She brushed at the mud clinging to her scales. "After that clean up you mentioned..."
The night was both too long and not long enough: Ember had no idea how that could work, but it was the only way she could think to describe it. Hour flowed into hour as smoothly and slowly as basaltic lava, but Ember found herself wishing everything would grind even slower to give her more time before they reached their destination.
Except that she needed to get there, needed to see whatever was waiting. The strain of not letting her imagination run wild was pretty draining...
She looked down at Zecora, dozing now in the sling they'd strapped to Ember's chest, the Fallen Star safe in its pouch again. The zebra's improvised harness had made the flight pretty easy, all told, and she and Zecora had spent the first several hours just talking about nothing—comparing pony, zebra, and dragon constellations, for instance, and sharing notes on how best to grow hot peppers.
But Ember had noticed Zecora trying to hide her yawns after a while, and she'd told her to go ahead and get some sleep if she could.
"I quite enjoy the conversation," Zecora had replied, "should you need the stimulation."
After a few more bouts of reassurance, the zebra's breathing had finally deepened, and Ember had tried to give herself over to the sheer joy of night flying: the silken darkness, the drowsy breezes, the silent but ever-watchful stars...
Her worries, of course, had stopped her from slipping completely into the experience, but she'd gotten far enough in so that, by the time the graying of the eastern horizon set her to blinking, she felt partially refreshed.
A glance below showed her the lumpy green of the Hayseed Swamp, and by the time the sun was actually lighting the sky to her right, Ember could see the Badlands in the distance to her left and the low mountains of the coastal range starting to rise just ahead. "Zecora?" she said, not so loud—she hoped—that she alarmed the zebra. "What's our heading from here?"
Zecora stirred in the harness and gave a little groan. "Another demonstration that, for zebras, life is best when flat."
Ember had to laugh. "You have no idea how tempted I am to do a barrel roll right now."
"Although I'm sure the lure is great, I'll thank you not to demonstrate." More shifting, and Zecora pointed a hoof toward the mountains. "Between the mountainside and sea and lower down we'll want to be."
"Got it." Ember started a slow descent. "Any landmarks we should be keeping an eye out for?"
"The Star describes an angled bay: it stretches south, then turns away and reaches near the mountains' slope." Zecora had copied the markings encircling the Star's equator on a scroll while Ember had been in the bath before they'd left last night: she'd thought—and Ember had definitely agreed—that fumbling around with a glass sphere almost as big as her head while hanging from straps attached to a flying dragon was maybe not the best idea. "We'll find our target there, I hope."
"Got it," Ember said again, her attention on the coastline unrolling below them. Plenty of bays crinkled among the low hills that eventually grew into the mountains to their left, but only one ahead seemed large enough to match the description. "That one, you think?" She crooked a claw at it.
A bit of silence from below, then, "A predatory nature's sign: your eyes are sharper far than mine."
"Ah." Ember felt her cheeks heat up. She'd gotten so used to just talking to Zecora that she'd forgotten this was a creature her people—her mother, for instance—had once preyed upon. "Hang on, then. I'm taking us in." Setting her wings to work and stretching like a javelin, she picked up speed, slicing through the air toward the particular wrinkle in the coastline.
Only a gasp or two came from her passenger, though when she pulled up a few wind-blown moments later above the sandbars where the ocean flowed into the bay, she could hear hard panting below her. "You OK?" She glanced down, the zebra's black and white stripes seeming much closer to being a uniform gray than before.
"Adventure's great, excitement grand." Her ears tight against her head, Zecora's usually smooth voice wobbled just a bit. "But still, I'd really like to land..."
"We're almost there, I'll bet." Ember wheeled them west and settled into a gentle glide. "The bay here runs a couple miles south, then like you said, it turns and stretches almost to the base of the range." She crooked a claw at the mountains that separated the coast from the Badlands.
"It's there our target's said to lie...unless our map has gone awry."
"Yeah." The cold tightness was back in Ember's chest, though having Zecora pressed up against it, she found, helped a lot. She didn't even want to think about trying to do all this on her own...
Knowing the course the bay took, Ember cut overland toward the area where it petered out at the foot of the mountains rather than following it the whole way, and even at her reduced speed, they reached the spot after not too many minutes. And the sight of it made things even colder and tighter inside her. "A town," she muttered. "I mean, it used to be..."
The grid of the streets stood out easily enough, but rubble lay strewn across the whole place: charred stone, melted glass, shattered tilework in a patchwork of tangled colors scattered over an area maybe a half mile square.
"Observe the bayshore." Zecora pointed a hoof at the marshy water that lapped along one side of the site. "Stones for docks, but all that's left are tumbled rocks."
Ember nodded. The pilings still stuck up to show where the docks had been, but nothing else remained. Unless... Ember peered closer at the semi-stagnant water, could just make out blocky shapes beneath the surface.
Whoever'd destroyed and burned the town had been big enough to tear the docks to pieces, then dump those pieces into the bay...
"Let's land," Ember said, her throat drier than she thought it had ever been.
She felt Zecora's mane brush her chest when the zebra nodded, and she quickly took them to a spot outside the wreckage, hovered till Zecora could undo the harness and drop the half a legspan to the ground, then settled silently beside her.
The mountains loomed on the other side of the former town, the edge of the burned area almost pressed up against a rocky cliff that rose a couple furlongs into the morning blue before bending away to join the rest of the range. But as much as Ember wanted to look upward, she forced her neck to bend, forced her gaze down over the ruins. "What happened here?" she asked, refusing to listen to the tiny whispers inside her.
Zecora was bending low to the ground, scraping the red soil with a hoof. "Perhaps you'll see the sand is strange?" She pointed away from the town. "Observe the shifting color range."
Ember let herself turn, the red dirt all around the town fading to a more grayish yellow the further away her gaze traveled. And she was also catching glints in both the red and the yellow, places where the sunlight was reflecting off chunks of—
Spreading her wings, she flapped to the nearest shining place in the red soil, grabbed it, found it to be a claw-sized lump of what she'd been afraid it was going to be. "Glass," she said, not looking over her shoulder at Zecora. Holding it up, silently begging her tongue to tell her it wasn't, she gave it a lick, and could barely stop her throat from closing at the taste. "My mom's glass. Made with Zebrabwe sand..."
Behind her, she heard Zecora's hoof still scraping. "The history I've read describes the ways of certain zebra tribes: they bring along their native sand when building homes and claiming land."
Yelling wouldn't help the situation at all, Ember knew. "So what happened here?" she asked again, continuing to resist the urge to shout with a blast that would've shattered rocks. "Was my mom attacking them? Defending them? And why would she do either one?" She waved her arms and couldn't keep her next words from coming out loud enough to echo along the whole cliff face ahead of her. "There's nothing out here! Nothing!"
The echoes died slowly, Ember staring at the ruined village and not wanting to think. The scrape-scrape-scrape behind her kept going, though, and she finally spun to see what in the name of fire and brimstone Zecora was doing.
The zebra had dug six shallow holes that outlined a perfect hexagon in the sand. Into these holes, she was pouring a few drops of liquid from several vials she'd evidently pulled from her pack, now on the ground beside her. "I hesitate to raise the notion," she said, her focus entirely on her work. "Still, perhaps a certain potion..." Rummaging through her bag, she produced a tiny dried flower; she plucked one petal with her teeth, and when she dropped it into the nearest hole, all six of them puffed out little clouds of purple smoke.
The smoke didn't dissipate, though, hanging in the air maybe half a leglength above them.
Zecora's grim expression made Ember wonder if it was supposed to do that or not. "I've modified the spell in scope." She dug a weird sort of flask out of the sack: a wide-bottomed cone with a long cylindrical spout sticking up from the top. Carefully, she stretched her neck over the smoke, the clouds not moving from their spots above the holes, and set the flask in the center of the hexagon. "The danger should be less, I hope," she finished, her attention still on the whole weird little whatever-it-was she'd built.
"Danger?" Ember's neck ridges shivered. "What're you—?"
She stopped as Zecora squatted and blew on the nearest purple cloud, sending it drifting toward the flask. Moving quickly around the figure, she blew on all six of the clouds till they'd mooshed together into one that hovered over the flask's open mouth. Scooting back, she made a popping noise with her lips, and the cloud crackled into a purple liquid, every drop of it raining down into the flask and filling the whole cone-shaped bottom part.
Straightening, Zecora wiped her forehead, Ember now noticing the sweat that had gathered there. "The potion's strength can fry the brain and drive the common mind insane. An alicorn can see it through, and so, I think, my Lord, can you."
Ember couldn't stop a swallow. "What's it do?" she asked, then forced a grin. "Your rhyming's rubbing off on me."
That got a bit of a smile from Zecora, but only a bit. "It answers questions, clears away the shadows born from yesterday." She took another step away from the bottle. "I've narrowed down the spell's degree to closely focus what you'll see: the date and time when last your mother trod this space, and nothing other."
Looking from Zecora to the flask and back, Ember didn't even have to think. "So I just drink it?"
Zecora shook her head. "Before you drink, you'll concentrate your magic flame to activate the potion's spell and scald it white." She gestured to the bottle. "Approach and breathe, so pure and bright."
With another swallow, Ember shrugged. "All right, but don't blame me if I slag this thing." Bracing herself, she pulled in the dry, salty air, stoked her inner spark, and blew a gust of fire at the bottle.
Instead of melting, the bottle just sat there. In fact, the fire swirled impossibly around the thing for several seconds before some force seemed to grab the flames and drag them in through the top, every last lick vanishing without the purple stuff inside so much as sloshing.
Blinking, Ember stared at it, and she heard Zecora give a little grunt. "Again! I didn't bring enough to mix a second batch of stuff!"
Unease prickling her scales, Ember nodded, took a deeper breath, and let it fly, clenching her stomach to add force to the stream.
It didn't help, the fire spinning into something like a tornado and disappearing once more down the bottle's neck.
"Increase the magic!" Zecora called. "Please! You must! Or else the potion dries to dust!"
With a stomp of her foot, Ember sucked in the biggest breath she could and threw herself forward, wings back, fists clenched, and throat stretched. Blasting the bottle, she could feel power draining out of her along with the air and fire, could feel her innards seizing up like lava turning to stone after leaving a volcano. She wouldn't stop, though, falling to her knees and continuing to hurl breath and magic at the stupid little thing until—
A tiny crackling noise tickled her ears as the last of her fire poured forth, and panting, she watched the flask quiver, the purple fluid inside fading to a milky white.
Zecora whooped. "Success at last! Now drink it quick! I'm sure your flames have done the trick!"
Scrambling forward, Ember grabbed the bottle—not even warm—swigged the stuff down—it flowed like water but strangely had no taste at all as far as she could tell—
And everything in front of her burst into flames, the pale morning sunlight replaced by the dark of night. The stink of meat charred beyond anything edible struck her snout, but the moaning, whimpering cries in her ears were infinitely worse.
A blink let her focus, showed her what had to be the town in the act of burning, four-legged bodies strewn amid the fiery wreckage. Then something reared up beyond the village, rising from the space between the buildings and the mountain, a space that seemed larger somehow than what Ember had just been looking at on the current site.
But all thought of differences between then and now vanished as she gazed on the huge serpentine figure, shining like jade in the firelight. "Fools!" the massive dragon roared. "I warned you this morning to leave this place, but you chose to ignore me!" The dragon turned partway to point a foreclaw at a large hole halfway up the mountainside, a hole that Ember absolutely knew wasn't there any more. "I'm moving into that cave, and I don't want all you squirmy little vermin lousing the place up!" She spun to face the village again. "So don't blame this on me!" Drawing back her neck, she unleashed another gout of flame over the still-burning remains.
Ember couldn't look away. The curve of the dragon's head and neck, the set of her shoulders and arms, the shape of her eyes and sneer: Ember knew them from her own reflection. And when the dragon bit off her fire, cocked her head, bent down, and straightened again with a chunk of red-hot slag in her claws, there couldn't be any doubt.
Glazier. Her mother. Killing all these zebras, destroying their town, and now calmly rolling a glass ball between her palms.
Wanting to scream, wanting to fight, wanting to do something, Ember sat frozen. 'Shadows born from yesterday,' Zecora had said, which meant that this had all already happened thirty years ago after Glazier had left—
"Accrue the blame?" a voice croaked off to Ember's left, and the fire at that end of the village suddenly seemed to freeze. "I think you will. You've acted rashly, courting ill." The frozen fire cracked, and the pieces of it swirled into a flaming sphere surrounding a shape that Ember could see now moving on all fours through the smoke.
With a steaming sigh, Glazier kept rolling her glass. "Of all the wearisome affairs, you shamans cause the greatest shares." Her teeth flashed like massive steel spikes when she grinned. "You can have that one for free!"
The fire-wrapped figure stepped from the wreckage, and Ember saw that it was an old zebra, his mane a flow of ash drifting along the back of his head. "You want this cave, I understand," he said, his voice like claws scraping slate. He raised a forehoof, and tiny bolts of black lightning began sparking up from it. "It's yours, but not the way you planned. By dealing death, you seal your doom: we'll all together share this tomb."
This time, Glazier rolled her eyes. "I swear! You magical types are worse when you're dead!" She set the completed sphere down in the sand at her feet, the thing like a pea in her claws, and aimed a glare at the shaman. "So let me just finish you off, and I can get back to getting my hoard settled properly in its—"
The shaman gave a wordless cry, reared back on his hind legs, and thrust his front legs toward Glazier, the black lightning gushing forth from him like water from a broken dam. It struck Glazier everywhere all at once, her eyes going wide, and slammed her backwards, the bolts of lightning stretching into huge thorny vines that sliced through her scales and lashed downward, rooting her to the mountainside.
"What the—?" she managed to gasp, but then the blackness binding her burst across her whole body, cracking her hide. She roared, and then...
She just shattered, her roar cutting off. A mass of black dust shot up into the night sky, and in the red and orange light of the burning village, only her bones lay stretched along the rocky slope, her skull resting just outside the cave.
Ember wasn't sure if she was breathing anymore. Golden and crystalline sparkles glowed inside the cave. Glazier's hoard, no doubt, but what—? Where—? Why—?
Movement caught her eyes from the base of the mountain, and Ember followed the curve of her mother's spinal column past ribs and pelvis and leg bones to the zebra shaman, the fire swirling even thicker around him, the tip of his hoof scratching symbols into the sphere Glazier had formed just before she'd...she'd...
The shaman's harsh breathing kept getting louder and louder, his white stripes seeming to surge in brightness while his black ones collapsed deeper into darkness. Finally, he gave one more wordless cry, kicked the sphere away, and the whole mountainside above him shivered, roiled, boiled, and buckled. Ember took a step forward knowing there was nothing she could do, and a whole new cliff face leaped up around Glazier's bones, washed over her and the cave like some sort of cold, dead lava, and slammed into place, burying every trace of Ember's mother and her hoard.
The zebra fell, then, hit the ground, and burst into a storm of ashes. Both white and black, they cascaded upward, spread, drifted down and settled, absorbed into the general carnage.
For an endless instant, Ember stood looking at the flames guttering lower and lower around the village—
And then she was blinking at the scene under a morning sky, all the ashes long since blown away, the scorch marks on the stones weathered and worn, faded after thirty years of rain and sun and wind. She could still hear the zebra shaman's raspy breathing, though—except, she realized quickly, the sound was scraping up from her own throat, her face soaking wet, her fists stretched out in front of her and clenched so hard, her claws felt like daggers stabbing her palms.
"Remember, Ember, where you are," a gentle voice was chanting over and over somewhere behind her. "Return from visions old and far."
Are? Far? "Star!" Ember shouted, everything crashing into place. "You said it was the key to a locking spell!" She tore the glass sphere from the pouch still strapped to her side and leaped upward, slashed her wings at the air to carry her over the massacre site, landed at the spot where she'd seen the old zebra shaman a few seconds and several decades ago. "Which means there's gotta be a mark or a hole or a crack or—"
A shallow circular indentation in the rock at the base of the cliff, strangely empty of the dirt and sand that covered the rest of the ground all around. Without letting herself think, Ember fell to her knees and slammed the Fallen Star into the dent.
Instantly, a tremor shook everything nearby. Hoping both that it was true and that it wasn't, Ember looked at the solid stone wall beside her and saw it ripple. Then with a rumble so low she felt it in her bones more than she heard it, a crack split the rock a few paces from where she knelt. The crack ran unnaturally straight and true right up the several furlongs of the cliff face, and then the two sides slowly began pulling away from each other, a giant curtain of earth drawing away to reveal—
The bones shone white and perfect in the morning light, not a one of them disturbed, Ember was sure, the skeleton stretching in a sinuous coil up the formerly hidden side of the mountain to the cave that had been the cause of everything way back then.
No. Ember couldn't let herself get away with thinking that. The cave hadn't been the cause.
With a shuffle, Zecora moved into the corner of Ember's peripheral vision. "Condolences. I must assume your mother's body we exhume?"
"She—" Ember had to clear her throat. "She wanted to live in the cave, but the zebras were already here. So she...killed them all, Zecora, just...just killed them. Their shaman, though, he...he did something before he died, and—"
"And I got here," a deep voice that she didn't quite recognize rumbled quietly behind her, "a couple hours after that."
Whirling, Ember stared and blinked at her father, towering up from the red and yellow sand on the other side of the town's ruins.
And while a part of her wanted to yell questions about how a massive, lumbering brute like him could possibly have snuck up on her, the rest of her couldn't help feeling a chill at how he somehow looked smaller than usual squatting there, his eyes downcast and focused on nothing. "I felt it," he went on, his tone so strange, Ember's spine ridges flattened. "When she died, I mean. I raced here quick as I could, but it was too late. The smell told me zebras, and finding your mother's sphere lying there, well, I remembered those Fallen Star things zebra shamans make from our glass. So I used it, opened the hill, and—" His eyes pulled shut.
A breeze brushed past, and Ember watched Torch suck in a shaky breath. "She wouldn't believe me, wouldn't ever believe me when I told her the little mammals and whatnot were getting stronger, more magical, that the world was changing. 'We're dragons,' she'd always say. 'Nothing changes unless we let it.'"
He faced her again, his scales more ashen than blue. "When Celestia exiled Luna, the sheer power those two blasted out made the air taste crunchy for weeks afterwards. That was the first time I ever saw Glazier scared, actually, and when I went to old Lord Magma and said it might be a good idea to issue an edict that dragons shouldn't attack ponies anymore, she stood right there and agreed with me. She didn't like it, of course, but she couldn't deny what we'd all felt. And when I took over from Magma five or six centuries after that, she supported me pulling away and limiting contact, closing the borders except for the Great Migration. Or at least, I thought she did..."
Ember didn't want to look at him, didn't want to look at Zecora, didn't want to look at the town her mother had murdered because of a stupid cave, didn't want much to look at anything, really.
But she forced herself to turn back to the silent, sprawling skeleton. "You were right, Dad," she said after another long moment. "Pretty much everything you did: you were right."
His half-sigh, half-chuckle wafted hot air over Ember. "I'm glad one of us thinks so."
With a swallow, Ember bent down and plucked the Fallen Star from its little hole. "I'm sorry I never knew her." She didn't even try to pitch her voice above the rumbling clatter of the cliff face drawing closed again to cover her mother's remains. "But what she did here, it...it—" The idea sprang fully formed into her head; she turned and held the sphere out to Zecora. "Can you trace the zebra magic on this? Or maybe—" She spun, her gaze going to the red dirt. "The sand! We can find out where it came from!"
Zecora was nodding. "We'll isolate its elements and trace it back in confidence."
Her father's grunt was the first thing she'd heard from him since his arrival that actually sounded like him. "And what good's that going to do?"
"A lot." Flexing her wings, Ember set the sphere into the sand and zipped up to hover in front of Torch's snout. "'Cause that's the one thing you should've done that you didn't, Dad: you should've told me about her. Not when I was a kid, sure, but if I was old enough to become Dragon Lord, I was definitely old enough to handle the truth." She let herself drop back to the ground beside Zecora, her gaze once more on the wreckage. "And all the families of the zebras who came here? They've had to live with the question of what happened to their loved ones for way too long."
Torch's shadow shifted across the ruins. "So you'll...what? Give them an apology and some gems?"
Ember opened her mouth to agree, but a thought struck her, made her turn to Zecora. "The apology, definitely. But gems? That sounds a little weird, like...like we're trying to pay them for their dead relatives."
Again, Zecora was nodding. "We'll bring the news and let them know we've come for more than empty show. Express regret, and what amends they ask you make, well, that depends. The customs vary place to place, so let them tell us face to face."
"Wait." Ember held up her claws. "When you say 'we'..." Despite everything, she couldn't stop a smile. "You mean...you and me?"
"I'm sure I'd help you set the tone." Zecora bowed her head. "Unless you'd rather go alone."
"Are you kidding?" Still not quite sure about this whole hugging thing that Spike was so into, Ember reached out and rested a foreclaw on Zecora's withers. "Me going without you would be a total disaster, so...thanks." She pulled back. "That's what you say, right? When a friend offers to keep a terrible job from getting worse?"
Another nod. "'You're welcome' comes the friend's reply...although she dreads the way you fly."
The warmth in Ember's middle, she knew, had nothing to do with the fire always burning there, but she forced her mind back to business, stooping to pick up the Fallen Star again. "I'll hang onto this, Dad. The zebras might want to see—" The thought wanted to choke her up, but a hard swallow pushed the sensation down. "See proof that Mom's really dead." She looked up at her father, ready to argue if he disagreed.
But he was just sitting there, staring away from the cliff, away from the ruined town, out across the mile or two of sand and scrubgrass between here and the sea.
Things started tightening in Ember's throat again, and she set down the Star, flew up, and touched the wide, scaly expanse of her father's face. "I want to say thanks to you, too, Dad."
He jerked away from her, swung a wrinkled brow toward her. "Me? For what?"
"For being you." It occurred to Ember that, even if dragons did do hugs, she wouldn't be big enough to give him a real one for another couple centuries. "And for letting me become me."
He snorted, and Ember could practically see him pulling his grouchiness back into place. "Like I had any choice." Shifting, he looked past her, and when Ember followed his gaze, her gut tightened to see that he was focusing on Zecora. "A willful little brat," Torch said, his tone and volume getting closer to what Ember was used to. "Right out of the egg, she was always pushy, so you watch yourself, shaman! Give her a chance, and she'll stomp all over you!"
Zecora touched a hoof to her chest and bowed. "I thank you, sir, for sound advice. I'm sure I'll need it once or twice."
"Hey!" Ember folded her arms and gave Zecora a phony scowl. "I'm the most reasonable dragon you'll ever meet!" The words made her wince as soon as she'd said them considering where they were and everything that had happened here; Ember took a breath and slowly rotated in her hover to face Torch again. "You go on back to the Dragon Lands, Dad. I'll stop off there before I—I mean, before we—head off to Zebrabwe."
Torch nodded slowly. "Yes, Your Lordship," he said, and Ember realized with a start that he hadn't just been nodding. He'd been bowing.
Her throat did some more of that annoying clench thing, so she couldn't give him any sort of breezy reply before he'd spread his massive wings and leaped almost soundlessly into the air. The backwash of his flap barely rustled the sand below them, and he quickly soared upward, away, shrinking to a dot in the southern sky.
She really needed to ask him how he did that...
Shaking her head, she let herself sink back to where Zecora was scooping sand into several of her little vials. "A chemical analysis," Zecora was saying, "will show us where to start with this. A little luck, and soon we'll know the place to which we're bound to go."
"Yeah." Ember reached down, hefted the Fallen Star in both hands, and looked at her reflection, once more stretching weirdly over the glass surface. With a sigh, she lowered the sphere into the pack still strapped to her side and nodded toward the rest of the flying rig piled in the sand on the other side of the ruins. "Let's get you harnessed up again and head back to your place."
Zecora cocked her head. "I might suggest you get some rest. In need of sleep, you're not your best."
Very deliberately not looking at the cliff face behind her, Ember started down the former town's center street. "I couldn't. Not here. Maybe in a couple hours if I start feeling it, we can find a place to settle in for the day, but—"
"Forgive me, please," Zecora said softly, her hooves crunching the sand as she kept pace beside Ember. "The truth we found has made this spot uncertain ground."
Wordlessly, Ember nodded. Wordlessly, they gathered up all Zecora's paraphernalia, and wordlessly, they reassembled the arrangement of cloth that bound Zecora to Ember's chest and midsection. Ember hovered in place till Zecora had all the knots retied, then slowly and wordlessly, she rose into the air, the zebra's weight once again perfectly distributed.
Heading north, the mountains to her left and the ocean to her right, she glanced back at the ruined town and the enchanted cliff above it just once, everything so jumbled up inside her, she didn't know what to think.
From below her, though, that gentle, lilting voice rose up: "We work to leave the past behind. Forgotten? No. But realigned..."
Ember sucked in a breath, let it swirl through her inner fire, then blew a long gust of smoke into the clear morning air. "Yeah," she said. "Let's go start doing that."