It was a little surreal for Ember, being back in Ponyville.
Not that they were in the town proper, right now. She'd agreed to meet on the outskirts, and so she'd gotten her first look at the place in ages with a fly-over view. And while there's been some familiar sights during that look, it'd struck her how much it had grown in the intervening years.
Years were easy to let slip by for a dragon. The eldest of her people could casually nap for a century, and the ones who hadn't quite reached that point of their lives still tended to find time vanishing in a blink. Among fellow dragons, years felt like days, and among other species, it was all the more stark.
She'd had a long talk with Smolder after her graduation, about how a lot had happened during her time at school and yet it'd felt like she'd barely been there for any length of time at all. It'd seemed to be the first time that the young dragon had truly stared down the fact that their species' lifespan was so much more than most sapients, and that she would forever be working on a different timescale.
(Dragons were not truly immortal, but with the hibernations of the eldest helping to stretch their lifespans out more and more, even the true immortals had historically found them a hard problem to just outlive. Dragons could die of old age, and did, but the last one who had had done so years before Ember was even hatched.
Death tended to come to them in youth, and more violently. From opportunistic predators like rocs, from territorial rivals like grootslang... and from other dragons.)
Ember, having little to comfort Smolder with, had briefly turned into her father when she repeated the weak words he had once said to her.
You adjust.
That was what Ember had been doing a lot of these last several years. Adjusting. Her father had been talking about having his first long sleep, but he'd been putting it off, because, in his words, things were finally getting interesting in their lands and he wanted to see it for himself instead of napping through it.
(That was why the Dragon Lords eventually had to step down. When they became elders, they could not longer effectively reign, as they spent more time asleep than awake.
Her father had felt the changes happening, and chose to step down on his own terms, setting the challenge for his successor, rather than just vanishing into his cave and letting the other dragons descend upon each other in bloody chaos over the scepter.
She'd originally wondered why... but maybe on some level, the old brute had realized that a dragon like her, fierce and clever, who could overcome challenges instead of just win a fight, had been the right choice.)
He could only put it off for so long, however. Eventually...
Eventually she'd be on her own.
(She hoped the hundred years went by extra quickly.
But she'd never tell him that.)
These last several years had been going extra fast, with everything she'd needed to do. Her people had previously kept to themselves, only passing through other nations on migrations or when searching for a cave to sequester themselves in for their rests. Those times were long over, as the world was becoming ever more interconnected. Creatures who were used to seeing other sapient creatures at a distance or hearing about them in stories were now regularly seeing ponies, griffons, yaks, changelings, hippogriffs, kirin, donkeys, cattle, zebras, diamond dogs, abyssinians...
Ember had met her first kelpie just last year, and a creature made mostly of water strolling around by a volcano had been a surreal sight.
Trade had been opening up. Tourism. Ember had managed to seize the position she'd always wanted shortly before it ended up worlds more work. The simple law of "do what I say" was being expanded into a whole constitution. Codes of behaviour that had previously been informal and passed on orally were being written down and codified. She was starting to delegate to other dragons she could find who had more than two braincells to rub together, and considering creating formal positions and titles for them.
It was dizzying. It was moving way too fast. On the worst days, she wished she'd listened to her father and walked away from the Gauntlet entirely.
Then again, if she'd done that, she'd have never made friends with Spike.
It was funny. If her father had chosen to step down even a year or two sooner, he no doubt wouldn't have been there. Spike had been at the absolute minimum age to receive a summons. Only dragons who had reached the stage of their lives when they'd gained their wings were expected to attend gatherings, which was why it'd been surprising when he'd shown up. Turned out he'd been a bit of a later bloomer, and those who still hadn't completely accepted him would claim it was the pony influence stunting his growth.
It'd been a blessing in disguise, though, since his need of her wings had been one of the things pushing them to work together. Without Spike, she'd likely be listening to some brute who wanted mandatory burping contests or to steal pillows while the rest of the world left them behind.
Spike was the reason she was back here. She'd stopped personally accompanying dragon exchange students for their first day of school a long time ago, and Princess Twilight Sparkle ruled from Canterlot now, so it was the only reason she came back to Ponyville now. And for a long while, he hadn't been there, not for more than a couple of days at a time.
While she'd become a ruler, he'd become an ambassador. Many a previously isolated community had reacted with shock to a young dragon strolling into town, announcing himself a representative of Equestria, and yet he often made that shock work for him, turning it into a sense of intrigue and using it to get the creatures he met to listen to what he was saying. He'd been making friends all over, and more than once, the curious creatures who Ember had found gazing at the volcanoes in wonder had admitted to her that it'd been him who'd put the idea in their head.
After all, if Spike was so nice, clearly other dragons would be too, right?
(Thankfully, that was true now. Mostly. There were some holdouts determined to cling to the old ways and refuse to listen to a Dragon Lord who was so small, and she was sure certain sleeping elders, when they woke, would have opinions on all of these changes, none of them good.
She didn't know how she was going to handle those elders without her father.)
She and Spike had seen each other a few times in the last few years, but only a few. Fleeting chats at diplomatic functions, when they couldn't put their roles down no matter how much they wanted to. She'd been stuck at home so often, him away from home so often, and letters weren't quite the same. Things were finally, finally settling down some, and now she was standing in grass instead of on volcanic stone, having carved out a few days just for her and her first ever friend.
He looked so dorky standing there with a picnic basket in his claws and that big smile. She couldn't help but smile right back. "Please tell me there's real food in there and not pony food."
Spike waved his claws. "Don't worry about it, it's a lot easier to find the good stuff here now. I made sure to put in extra sapphires, since I know you like those."
Ember gave him a friendly smack on the shoulder. "Attadrake. My mouth's watering already. Let's go find a good spot."
It hadn't been hard to pick one, not when the crest of the nearby hill had the best view, letting them look out at the sea of trees from the nearby orchard. And beyond the orchard was the town itself, one that had to be twice as big as it'd been when she'd last seen it. With blanket spread out and basket open, Ember took in the view as she munched on a sapphire-encrusted cupcake and Spike pulled out a submarine sandwich filled with several kinds of quartz.
With how much he'd grown, she wasn't surprised he had an appetite. The little runt she'd met all those years ago was long gone. The lack of wings had long been rectified, and he was much taller and broader than she'd ever expected him to get.
Not that Ember herself hadn't gotten taller. Well, most would instead say that she'd gotten longer. She was never going to have the boulder-like physique of her father, and instead had taken after her mother, a titanic serpent of a dragoness. She was longer in the neck, torso, and tail now, her limbs having stayed roughly the same. She was starting to instinctively coil her body when at rest, but at least for now, it was still relatively comfortable to sit upright.
Spike, meanwhile, was almost more like a minotaur than a dragon in his body plan. Whenever he got to a size when he'd need his foreclaws to move as much as his back ones, it was probably going to take a very long time, longer than it would for her.
"So I was thinking, when we're done lunch, I could show you what Ponyville's done with Twilight's old castle. It's a museum now, dedicated to our adventures. There's even a painting someone did of us based on when we ran the Gauntlet of Fire together! And then after that we could..."
As much as he'd changed physically, though, he still was the most talkative dragon she'd ever met. His voice had deepened, though, and grown much smoother, so she hardly minded listening to him. Really, she could listen to Spike talk all day.
Ember blinked.
"...Don't think you've ever seen the fruit bat sanctuary. Mac's daughters have really been working on improving it..."
She looked at Spike, but the words were sliding off her scales like drops of lava. Thinking about how he'd grown, that was pretty normal. Dragons always sized each other up like that when they met after an absence. The instinct was for gauging rivals, but even family and friends did it.
That thought, however, had not been precisely friendly.
When they'd met, Ember had been in late adolescence. He'd been a little kid, too little to be there, and she'd reacted accordingly. Only in hindsight had she realized that he was setting off a protective instinct in her, because his small size and lack of wings had made him look like a hatchling. He was a lot smarter than some hatchling, though, and it'd been easy to form a friendship with a dragon she felt she could actually talk to.
Neither of them were kids anymore. Years had moved fast, and now, sitting next to her, was an adult dragon. Dragons took centuries to stop growing physically larger, but that was partly due to the effect amassing a treasure hoard had on their forms and magic.
(There was the question of how that was going to work now that dragons were being generous.
Trading and sharing instead of hoarding.
How big would she get? Would it be big enough?)
As far as actually maturing, both of them were done. In fact, if someone took their respective ages, measured physical maturity, compared it to their lifespans... they were in the exact same life stage now.
"...And then we can have dinner at this new place that opened up a couple years ago. The family that runs it are changelings and..."
The little runt had caught up in a big way.
Big in many, many ways... no doubt including ways she hadn't seen yet...
Ember clenched her jaw, razor-like teeth locking together.
No. We are not doing this now.
Or ever.
It's Spike for magma's sake.
Her brain realized that, that this was her first and best friend and that noticing that he'd become ridiculously handsome was weird of her.
Her heart, and several things further south, didn't care.
"So what do you think?"
Ember blinked furiously, well aware that she'd been staring at his pale green pectorals for several minutes. Then her long tail curled around her hip, draped over her thigh, and slammed down between her legs like a trap door snapping shut.
She forced a smile. "Sounds... great!"
Elders save her, she was going to die.