//------------------------------//
// Chapter 25 
// Story: Sharing the Nation 
// by Cast-Iron Caryatid 
//------------------------------//


 — Spike —


Spike was honestly impressed that Ember hadn't started out with her newfound skill in magic by trying to recreate the lava fountain. Nevertheless, he immediately set to pinching the bridge of his snout, expecting a headache from the currently two-story-tall dragoness. "Explain."

Ember had her arms crossed as she considered Spike from on high. Glancing at the newest gargoyle she'd created, she sighed and swatted at it, sending it crashing down into the pile with the rest of them.

"Fine," she grumbled, and began to shrink back to her normal size, or what passed for it nowadays anyway. Spike was still getting used to seeing the pseudo-adult forms of Ember's cohort, let alone having one himself, and he supposed he wasn't alone in that since it was roughly how every dragon in the world looked now, plus or minus some natural variation.

Come to think of it, it had been more than a day since that had happened and they'd spent most of it cooped up inside in one building or another. How were the dragons all taking it? And if Ember was going to put herself in the position of Empress of the dragon race, did that mean that she needed to make herself available to the public like Twilight and Luna?

Or, well, just Luna, now, since Twilight broke down and told them all to go buck themselves.

...

Yeah, no. Ember doing the talking would end up the same way eventually, if not sooner. 'Empress' Ember had already made one global announcement via the Ring of Ashmund; they didn't need to give her an excuse to make any more.

"So, it's like this," Ember said, then spat a ball of salmon-colored fire that turned into a kiwi-sized emerald skull right in front of his face.

Spike startled, then scrambled to catch the thing, which he managed. The emerald skull looked kind of melted on one side, but it was a fair bit better than the stone gargoyles there was a pile of in the middle of the room. Spike waited, turning the skull over in his claws out of idle curiosity, but it soon became clear that the only thing forthcoming was the smug look on Ember's face.

"This," he said, holding up the skull as if it were looking back at her, "is not an explanation."

"Oh, come on!" Ember said, throwing up her arms in exclamation. "It's awesome is what it is!"

Spike took another look at the emerald skull, then looked straight back to Ember. "I think Rainbow Dash would say it's 'rad,' actually."

"Well, maybe I should show it to her, then!" Emerald countered, getting huffy. "At least it sounds like she has some taste."

Spike blinked and reconsidered the emerald in his claws. "You know, speaking of taste, I don't think anypony has even considered what any of the demigods can actually eat. Or the Celestias. Are the Celestias getting their heavy metals? I know they talked about hiring dragons for guards and things, but no one said anything about cooks."

Ember snatched the emerald skull out of Spike's claws, clearly displeased. "Who cares if they're getting—what does that have to do with anything?"

"Oh, I thought we were just saying whatever was on our minds," Spike retorted, half serious in his frustration. "Because I swear I asked for an explanation."

Ember rolled her eyes and tossed the emerald skull into her mouth, the crunching and grinding echoing in the large room. "Does it matter? I figured it out."

"Yes, it matters!" Spike insisted. "Ember; not six hours ago, the only thing you could do was send a stick across the room and now you're conjuring emeralds like you're Twilight coming back from the future after a twenty-year library binge!"

Ember took a step back, shocked at Spike's vehemence. It took her a moment to decide how to respond. "Is that something that actually happened?" she finally asked.

"Not provably," Spike admitted. "The only time I know for sure that she actually went back in time, it only lasted a minute or two before she was pulled back."

"...Right," Ember said, adjusting her worldview once again. "Time travel is apparently another thing these goddesses of yours can do."

Spike blinked and said, "Oh, no. That was before she became an alicorn. Well, I guess she was always an alicorn? But it was before her powers came in, anyway. The spell came from a definitely-mortal unicorn regardless."

Ember once again had to stop to process that.

"Actually, if there's one of them I'd expect to do casual time travel, it'd be Pinkie Pie," he added, not entirely sure that wasn't something that had been going on since before he'd met her.

"You know, I'm just going to put all that under 'goddess grit' and ignore it," Ember decided. "Unless I actually see them do it; then it's fair game."

Spike immediately made the connection. "Wait, that's what's going on? You figured out how to do the things that Twilight did?" Spike thought back to the hours they'd spent watching Twilight create their new castle-manor and frowned. "Is that why you were being such a pain in the tail with what you wanted? So you could get her to show you things?"

"No," Ember reflexively said, looking off to the side so she didn't have to meet Spike's eyes. "Well, so what if it was? She didn't seem to mind it."

Well, that was true. "Yeah," he admitted, then pivoted. "But that's also kind of the point—you could have just said so and she'd have shown you whatever you wanted."

Ember looked doubtful, but before she could express it, they were interrupted by the arrival of the rest of the dragonesses.

"What's with all the yelling?" Slag asked, giving off the impression of a grumpy baby interrupted from her nap, which was, admittedly, pretty much what she was, having been regressed in age as a method of treatment for the bite that the ex-dragon-lord Torch had taken out of her tail.

"The yelling?" Spike asked, curious and also a little sarcastic. "Not the crashing noise of Ember disposing of her failed art projects?"

Slag barely glanced at the pile of misshapen gargoyles made of various materials. "Nah, that's just background noise," she said, dismissing it with a wave of her claw. "Kind of soothing, really," she added.

Carnelia nodded along with the statement as she entered the room. "Sensing such dissonance is significantly more stressful," she suggested in her slightly hissing accent.

"I'm gonna just go and say both are annoying?" Kindle chimed in, coming in with Drift from the other side of the hall, who didn't seem to have an opinion.

Ember, for her part, only got more excited with an audience. "Hey girls, check this out!" she shouted as she flapped her wings, did something resembling a backflip and breathed a line of fire across the room that opened a rift in the floor that immediately exploded into a shower of lava.

Ah, there it was. Spike knew the lava fountain was going to make an appearance. It was, admittedly, rather impressive, and it kept being impressive for five... ten... twenty seconds, until even Ember realized that they could only play The Floor Is Lava for so long before the room filled up.

"Spit!" Ember cursed wading through the growing, glowing carpet of lava. "Uh, how did it go again?" she asked herself, trying to bend over the rift in the ground without getting a lava facial, which Spike assumed was either actually a thing, or not a thing only because dragons didn't have beauty regimens.

Ember tried blowing flames down into the rift, but she either had the magic wrong or she couldn't get it down to where the lava was actually being created, because the unnaturally constant, steady eruption of lava continued without interruption.

Meanwhile, Slag was floating on her back, arms crossed behind her head like she was in a lounge chair.

"Hold on," Ember said, fretting about the lava-spewing rift like it was a spilled soda. "I got this—I got this," she insisted, clearly not having it handled. "I know! Spike! Send some of this lava somewhere else—not to one of your princesses! You got that figured out this morning, right?"

Spike had, in fact, managed to duplicate Ember's trick of sending things to not-princess places with his fire, but he hadn't yet managed to do it to anything that wasn't normally burnable, or send anything anywhere that wasn't immediately in sight. Still, it was worth a shot, he supposed.

It took him a moment to actually get close to the rift. The lava was up past his knees now, and it had cooled off around his legs, forming a hard shell of hot rock. At first, the shell of rock came with him like a pair of really crunchy stockings, but they quickly cracked and split, leaving behind a pair of leg-shaped holes in the lava.

Spike's first attempt at mailing the lava across the room was like spraying fire down a live volcano—pointless, and at best only going to make the volcano angry. Ember's grandfather wasn't present, of course, but from how things were going, their brand new castle-manor was going to inherit the appellation, 'The Eternal' long before Ember herself got a crack at it.

Breath after breath failed to set the lava on any more fire than it already was until, pouring all of his will into his fire to make the molten rock go away, something finally clicked and the molten rock started to disappear, consumed by green fire.

Two breaths later, he realized that the lava wasn't reappearing anywhere because he hadn't actually been focusing on sending it anywhere, just getting rid of it. What he'd cast—if that was the right word for dragon magic—was less a mail spell and more of a complete erasure spell.

That seemed like it might be a bit of a problem.

"Aha! Perfect!" Ember exclaimed as the green fire reached the rift, finally giving her a clear shot at it. Unfortunately for her, Spike's fire burnt out any need for her to do anything; the lava spewing out of the rift guttered out like a clogged sink. "Well, I guess that works too."

"Uh, Ember?" Spike prompted, trying to communicate the exact amount of panic and concern he was feeling, because the green fire was still slowly eating away at the lava, the stone floor and the earth below it.

"You know, I'm beginning to wonder if magic is actually worth it," Ember grumbled.

"I don't suppose you remember what Twilight's failsafe spell feels like?" Spike suggested hopefully.

"What the heck is a 'failsafe spell'?" she asked, backing away from the green fire that was slowly removing the lava from existence. Ember liked her existence just fine and didn't want it removed.

"It's a general purpose dispelling spell that—"

"Is it something she did earlier with her weird goddess magic?" Ember interrupted.

"Well, no," Spike admitted. "But—"

"Then no," she answered. "Figure it out yourself!" Ember, of course, wasn't going to rely on him and set to trying to breathe her own solution into existence. At first, she thought that smothering it with granite had worked, but the granite soon collapsed from inside, having burned the middle away without leaving a trace, which wasn't how fire or stone worked, but they were long past that point now.

Once again, Spike's first few tries did absolutely nothing, but panic was a good motivator, and that was especially true for both magic and dragons and after literal years of listening to Twilight go on and on about magic, he had a powerfully vivid image of what he wanted to happen, which made all the difference. Spike let out another wave of green fire and finally, this one managed to put the first one out without going on to burn anything else.

Everyone held their breath, waiting to see if another green flame surfaced, but everything was quiet and not on fire.

"Well," Kindle remarked, breaking the silence as she looked over the mess that had been made of the main hall. "That happened."


— Spike —


Once the excitement died down, Ember explained her discovery to the other girls, who were suitably interested. Kindle was holding an artless chunk of ruby that Ember had made as another example, and it seemed to pass muster.

"So," the orange dragoness said, raising her gaze back up to Ember. "This is like the ruby grass outside? Meaning it's edible?"

"Yep," Ember said with an absolute certainly that wasn't deserved.

Kindle took a bite out of it like it was an apple, looking thoughtful as she chewed the brittle, crunchy material, taking her time with it. "Huh," she mused. "It's not the same, though?"

Carnelia was nibbling experimentally on her own ruby, and cocked her head to the side in question. "How so? It seems sufficiently similar?"

"That's the thing," Kindle said. "The ruby grass outside is still flexible enough to work like grass; this is just your everyday ruby. What do you want to bet it doesn't grow like the grass, either?"

As the girls discussed the vagaries of copying magic from a feeling, Spike focused on the absolute mess that had been made of their brand new home. Knowing Ember, she might not even see the problem with it, but damn it, he'd been looking forward to having a place of his own that he could be proud of.

That was the problem with the old library tree and why he'd never really done much with it. It had been home since Twilight had come to Ponyville, but at the same time, it wasn't really his and it didn't really fit him.

So, Spike spend the evening burning rocks.

His first instinct, of course, had been to clean up traditionally, but it turned out that they didn't actually have a broom... or quite a lot of other household items that Twilight hadn't thought to magic up, if she even knew what they were.

Besides, pickaxes weren't things you'd usually find in a cleaning closet anyway.

No, this was more of a mess than he could clean up using any normal means. Having magic as a problem solving solution was—well, it wasn't weirder than having a whole new body, admittedly, but it was a close second, even though he only had the one new trick so far.

So, burning things out of existence it was.

Spike had spent enough time with Twilight that, absent an ongoing emergency, his next automatic go-to was to do as many safe, controlled tests as he could come up with. It was fine, though, he reasoned. It wasn't actually science if you didn't write it down, so his status as a normal, sensible person was intact.

Two dozen rocks later, Spike was relatively sure he could use the erasure spell safely. He had to concentrate pretty hard on the idea of making things go away to even get it to work, and that focused intent translated directly into what the spell affected.

It made him feel a bit better to know that he probably hadn't actually been in danger of erasing Ember and the others from existence, but not much. Glancing across the room, he could see that Ember was trying to teach the girls how to breathe gemstones into existence without much luck and instantly decided that, no, he wasn't going to be showing them how to burn things out of existence without getting to know them a lot better.

Not even Ember.

Especially not Ember, even if she could probably do worse with the Ring of Ashmund.

The more he thought about it, the less sure he was that it had been a good idea for Ember to remind dragonkind that they were magical, in fact. Sure, the world had gotten along just fine with magical ponies, but pony magic all came ultimately from Twilight and it wasn't impossible that that had an ameliorating effect in addition to being filtered through their cutie marks.

Also, they were ponies, which was pretty much an excuse all on its own.

"Huh," Spike absently mused. "Am I racist?"

"Yes—one-hundred percent," Ember instantly answered, the group having relocated closer than Spike had realized while he wasn't paying attention. "What are we talking about?"

"Err." Spike flushed, not having expected to be overheard. "Just that dragons—"

"Say no more," Kindle interrupted.

"It's not racism if it's dragons," Drift agreed.

Slag put it succinctly, "Dragons just suck."

"That's literally why we're all here," Ember reminded him.

Spike blinked. "Well... Okay, then?" He was briefly reminded of being told about Twilight and Luna's visit to wake up Emberstoke the Eternal—Ember's namesake grandfather—and how Luna had pointed out afterwards that 'Dragon's are jerks.'

There seemed to be something wrong with that logic, but he couldn't put his claw on it.

"Anyway," Ember said, brushing the matter to the side and moving on. "Spike, tell me if you feel anything, you know, magic-y," she instructed, then breathed her salmon-colored fire right in his face.

Spike couldn't help it; he flinched in spite of an entire lifetime of knowing that fire couldn't really hurt him—it didn't mean he wanted soot in his eyes, after all.

He didn't get soot in his eyes, but he did get a faceful of emerald—quite literally. Spike probed his face with a claw to figure out what she'd done, then removed the faceted green mask and took a bite out of it. "And just what was the point of that?"

Ember rolled her eyes as if she'd expected more from him. "I told you, I want to know if you can feel the magic. It was hard to miss when your star princess did it, but none of the girls are getting anything from it when I do it."

"It is certainly discouraging," Carnelia opined.

Spike went over that in his head, but to his surprise, the request actually made as much sense as he thought it did. "...I can't believe I'm going to say this, but—do it again," he requested.

Ember wasted no time spitting fire in his face once more, and Spike did what he could to feel for the magic in it as another mask formed on his face—ruby, this time.

"...I might have felt something?" Spike said, uncertain. "I think it's either that you're more sensitive to magic than the rest of us or Twilight is just putting that much more magic out. It's probably that, honestly, but here." He handed Ember the ruby mask that she'd just created. "Put this on."

Emerald immediately did what she was told. It didn't fit well, having been formed over Spike's face, but they were similar enough in proportions that she made it work. It was only after a moment that she began to consider why she was doing it. "Wait—"

Spike interrupted her with a blast of green fire to the face that completely vanished the mask in moments, leaving the perturbed dragoness unharmed.

It was a good thing that dragon magic was in their breath, because the look she gave him could have melted steel otherwise, which Spike did his best to return with casual indifference. Ember caved with a huff, then breathed another mask into being and put it on. "Do that again."

Spike took a deep breath and, in one sharp burst, vaporized the mask off of Ember's face.

Ember, for her part, just stood there, eyes closed, focusing on the feeling of magic that she'd gotten used to with Twilight. Eventually, she shook her head. "I think I get what you're saying; there's something there, but I can barely make it out."

"So it is the stellar princess who is the singular exception, then," Carnelia concluded. "Vexing, for such simple spell study to suffer such a stranglehold."

Spike shook his head. "Look, no, I already told Ember—there's no stranglehold. Twilight will be ecstatic if you tell her you were able to copy what she was doing. She will literally jump for joy and drag you back to whatever underground lair she's using as a lab right now in order to show you all the things."

The dragonesses all shared a look. "Solitary study it is, then."

Spike gave up and went back to what he was doing.

Burning the room back to a semblance of cleanliness continued to be a surreal experience. Spike was pretty sure he had a handle on only burning specific things out of existence—he was sure enough to spit the spell-fire in Ember's face, after all—but that didn't mean he'd mastered every facet of it. Twilight could never quite explain to him what casting unicorn spells was like for her, but from what he'd gathered there was a lot more formula to it. Dragon magic seemed to rely a lot more on will and intent than knowledge and understanding, which meant that instead of studying like Twilight, he needed to practice instead.

It was one thing to start a fire that only burned specific things; there was some value in that. Burning specific parts of things, though? That would be wildly more useful, and it went... well, it went. Spike spent the better part of an hour burning small patches of lava out of existence, trying for shapes, textures and anything that came to mind. Ember had been right, though; doing it was one thing. Doing it well was another matter entirely.

Eventually, though, the lava was all gone and he'd even managed to burn away the soot and small spatters on the walls and ceiling. Things actually looked clean again, save for the large holes in the floor where Ember's lava font had been removed which required Ember's help to fill in.

The end result was... remarkably okay.


— Spike —


The next morning started with something like déjà vu, though on further examination, the situation was completely different from the morning after Twilight's alicornification party. It started when, stumbling out of his new room after a fitful night of sleep in a new place, he found Kindle and Carnelia standing in the main hall, looking out the front window, both looking far too bright and chipper for the early hour.

Carnelia in particular looked like she'd already spent an hour filing her claws and polishing her scales this morning, but for the short time he'd known her, that seemed to always be the case.

Spike walked up next to them, dragging his feet in lethargy. "...Huh," he remarked, then took a sip of his coffee, which was one thing that Twilight hadn't forgotten to supply. As magically-created coffee, though, it tasted kind of one-dimensional. "Well, that's a thing."

The thing that 'that' was, was, of course, the dozens of dragons spread out on the front lawn grazing on the emerald and ruby grasses.

"Yep," Kindle agreed, following one dragon with her eyes as it got frustrated and flew off. "Kinda glad I'm not out there, to be honest," she said, popping an acorn-sized ruby in her mouth, which she had a handful of. "No offense to the princess, but it seems all flash and no substance, and kind of insulting."

Carnelia nodded. "I do wonder how Ember will take this. It is disrespectful to dragons, yes, but it is disrespectful specifically to those she considers subordinate to her, so she might savor the schadenfreude."

Spike looked at Carnelia and blinked.

"You must admit, she is... shall we say... less than respectful, most of the time," Carnelia added.

Spike went back to watching the lawn dragons. "No, I'm just surprised to hear the word 'schadenfreude' from you."

Carnelia shook her head. "Just because I was hatched in the dragonlands does not mean I am lacking in vocabulary," she said, which, well, was fair. Actually, Carnelia was probably the most well-spoken of any of the girls in her own way, though she phrased things oddly, sometimes.

All of a sudden, a wave of movement spread through the flock of lawn dragons. Spike scanned the crowd, but aside from several of them looking around in confusion, he didn't see anything out of place.

Then, it happened again, and Spike spotted dozens of small, red and green gemstones falling from above, bouncing off the heads and bodies of the dragons on the lawn.

The laughing from the roof was what finally clued him in.

"It seems that she has chosen schadenfreude," Carnelia dryly observed.

Indeed, flying up to the crenelated rooftop, they found Ember there with half a dozen buckets full of emeralds and rubies. As the three of them landed, they watched her scoop up a clawful and toss them out into the lawn like birdseed—or maybe like the rich throwing bits out into a crowd? Spike recalled Twilight talking about that happening in one village where they would heat the bits first, just to watch ponies burn themselves trying to pick them up.

Admittedly, the dragons on the lawn would find red-hot gemstones a nice, toasty snack, but he didn't want to give Ember any ideas. Unfortunately, they had given the dragons on the lawn ideas, and they soon had dragons crawling and flying up to the roof to the source of the gems.

"Hey! Just where do you think you're going?!" Ember shouted, chucking her current bucket at one of the approaching dragons. The dragon dodged, but followed the bucket down to the ground anyway. A few others nearby were redirected, going after the same bucket, but only a handful.

The first dragon to crawl up over the crenelations was not nearly as agile, and took a bucket to the face, sending him back over the edge. The thud that the dragon made on the front steps made Spike wince, but it was probably fine. Dragons were tougher than even ponies.

"Back off!" Ember snarled at the encroaching dragons.

"And why would we do that?" asked the next dragon to poke his head up over the crenelations. This one was ready, and dodged the expected bucket before pulling himself fully up onto the roof. He was large, red and beefy, which was saying something since all the dragons had been normalized. "You expect us to eat off the ground like ponies? Is this a joke to you?"

Ember cocked her hip to the side and set her hand on it. "I mean, kinda, yeah," she said, completely unashamed. "You did come here to my territory to eat my grass. I figured the least I could do is have a laugh instead of do something a little more drastic."

As Ember talked, more and more dragons made their way up to the rooftop by wing or claw, and they were starting to crowd the roof. Spike wasn't really worried since, you know, Ember, but he couldn't help but be a little intimidated.

"Drastic?" a weedy blue dragon asked, doubtful. "You? Look around; you're out here in the middle of nowhere surrounded. What are four girls gonna do?"

"Wh—hey!" Spike shouted. "I am a guy!" he whined unconvincingly.

The large red dragon took a closer look at him and scoffed. "Not much of one."

Ouch, right in the manhood. Spike knew that Ember had remade his body to be similarly lithe and graceful as the rest of the group rather than the haphazard way that she'd handled the rest of dragonkind based on their existing forms, but he didn't think she'd gone that far in making him 'in her own image.' The girls certainly seemed to like it, anyway.

Actually, that was a good point. "I mean, one: rude," Spike said, offended. "And two: I was literally made like this for the empress' enjoyment, so I have nothing to be ashamed of."

"Yeah?" he said, making a show of looking around. "Well, I don't see any 'empress' here, so I think you're full of shit."

"Spike?" Ember prompted, drawing everyone's attention. "On a scale from one to ten, how bad will it look to the ponies if I'm caught kicking babies?"

"Err—"

"Like, specifically, if I was punting them off a rooftop," she clarified.

Spike scratched at his jaw, thinking. "Well, I mean, if the paparazzi actually got a picture of it, they'd probably run the story into the ground for months, but otherwise... they already expect that sort of thing from carnivores anyway. There's still an article every once in a while in the skeevier magazines claiming that the Gryphon ambassador eats babies, and as far as I know, that was blown up over some hard boiled eggs."

"Great," Ember said with a vicious grin, and suddenly they were surrounded by baby dragons ready for punting.

There was a sudden clamor of confusion across the rooftop as the trespassing dragons all processed the situation, and it lasted just long enough for Ember to fashion herself some ruby slippers.

Well, they were more like boots, actually, but they did perfectly well at sending the lost children home.

When it was all over, most of the dragons having made like lemmings, Spike had his head in his hands. "I can't believe you did that."

"What?" Ember said, faux-defensively. "You said I could. Besides, de-aging criminals is literally the punishment your princesses and I agreed on and stuff. What was I supposed to do, not punt them?"

"Strictly speaking, yes," Spike said, not that he had thought for a moment that it would actually happen.

"Well, that's dumb," Ember declared, hands on her hips. "What's the point of punishing someone by making them puntable if nobody actually punts them?"

Spike blinked.

"Hah!" Ember exclaimed, pointing at him. "You just realized I had a point!"

"A very small one," Spike insisted.

"As amusing as this is," Carnelia chimed in from where she was bent over the ramparts, watching tiny colored shapes disappear into the distance. "Our greatest concern right now is recidivism."

This time, it was Ember that stared blankly without an answer.

"Making sure that they don't do it again," Spike clarified for her.

"Oh," Ember said, suddenly getting it. "Well, they'll be like that for a day, then go back to nearly what they were for, I dunno, a month or something before they're completely back to normal? I figured that was fine for the crimes of, you know, trespassing; making threats; not recognizing me, that sort of thing. "

"Or something?" Spike asked.

Ember gave him a flat look. "The ring doesn't come with a calendar."

"Anyway," Kindle said, getting them back on track. "We should probably be less concerned about those specific dragons than just in general. The lawn full of gemstone grass is less funny now that we actually have dragons coming here at way-too-early in the morning to trade their dignity for a bite to eat and getting greedy."

They all gave that a long thought, until Ember came up with a solution.


— Twilight —


Twilight had to stop on her flight to Spike's new place to double check that she was in the right place. Strange; she'd been this way just yesterday, and she didn't remember there being a giant, house-sized emerald hanging from a five-story tall post like the world's biggest, translucent green salt lick.