With considerable effort, Twilight found herself back home, gasping for air and exhausted. Perhaps now was the best time for her to go to sleep. Her head was pounding and her muscles ached, so with a shifting of her body, she let the saddlebags fall heavily against the floor. The book on dragon anatomy was the first thing Twilight grabbed before settling herself in bed, enjoying the quiet her own domicile gave her. If there was one thing that Twilight adored in this new life was having her own home and lying down in her bed. Aside from the occasional scurrying of pests in the walls and dripping water, the place was very quiet. It was perfect for those rare moments when Twilight would lay down on her bed, enjoying the relative softness of the straw and the warmth and weight her comforters gave her.
She set the book on her pillow and started going through it, learning about how a type of magic originated from dragons rather than being accumulated and reused as ponies did. Ligaments, joints, the type of bones, susceptibility to diseases and spells. Even pages on what the 'villains' would use their parts for when captured. Twilight felt her eyes start to droop despite her efforts to stay awake. Eventually, she succumbed to her fatigue. The unicorn didn't exactly enjoy her dreams when she slept, haunted by weird nightmares of Celestia and, more recently, what she believed to be Luna, though this 'Luna' just looked like a starry sky.
Twilight awoke with a start and wiped the drool from her mouth. How long had she been asleep? With some luck, she didn't sleep through the night and would be able to get to work finding a proper candidate for her spell. While she still had her doubts, a fully skeletal undead was always more useful than one with flesh still on it. That coat of slime and guts always slowed them down and made them incredibly stupid thanks to the brain becoming vaguely active due to the spell.
"I wonder if it's because the brain becomes damaged the more it's left deprived of oxygen..." Twilight pondered. She levitated a parchment and ink-stained quill and wrote down her theory. "To. Test. Later!" she said as she punched a dot onto the parchment.
She placed them on her unkempt bed and hurriedly looked through one of her crumbling shelves to find several old maps waiting to be unfurled. They were old and excessively outdated, but they were extremely helpful for find burial mounds, barrows, mausoleums, and, especially, old battlegrounds. Twilight had to go through three different maps of the area, but she found the 'tilly', as Silvery Gleam called them: An old battleground centuries old that pitted five groups of dragons against each other. A truly chaotic free-for-all because they were all too stubborn to decide when to strike.
The unicorn had no idea why they were fighting, and she wasn't interested in that. She was, however, interested in their remains. They would be a day's journey from her home if she didn't know how to teleport. Coming back, though, was another problem.
"I'll think about that later..." Twilight muttered to herself as she put on her saddlebags and strapped her shovel to her back. She took in a deep breath. "Let's go!" The mare turned to her crumbling shelves full of jar'd parts and waved a hoof at them. "Bye, everypony! I'll be back soon!"
Her trip through the land was as tiring as it had always been. The unicorn preferred to experience the path forth to better travel back rather than cheat her way and teleport precisely where she needed to be. Besides: If she didn't know the location personally then the chances of a teleportation mishap were extremely high. There were patrols of armed guards that Twilight had to hide from, and, much to her annoyance, they would always take the pathways she would use: Side roads usually engulfed by brambles or frequented by nasty beasts. It was a mental chore for her to not just immediately fry the guards, but she knew better than to harm someone just because they annoyed her. They were never the same patrol, and Celestia herself said that having the power to kill is why you don't use it. Well, Twilight was paraphrasing in her own head. As night turned to day turned to night again, the unicorn found herself on a large swathe of hilly terrain covered in many rocks and boulders.
The setting sun created a disturbing blood-red sky that all-too-well amplified the odd sensation that Twilight felt here.
"Yes! This is where they are!" The unicorn removed her shovel from her bag and held it in her magic. "Time to start digging randomly!" she mused.
Her random stabs into the earth almost instantly revealed dragon bones, but the majority she found were gigantic. There was no way she could use it as an assistant, let alone be able to control an undead of its size. The spells needed required precision Twilight didn't yet have, and she wasn't interested in creating a rogue undead dragon to terrorize the countryside and get an even larger warrant on her head. The council already had that covered when she fled Canterlot.
Twilight hummed joyfully as she dug into the ground, throwing dirt everywhere and stopping when she reached an excessively large bone. While she was disappointed to not find precisely what it was she was looking for, she was still enthralled by what she kept unearthing.
"I wonder..." A sinister grin grew across her face. "The princess will need an army to overthrow the council and get rid of all those traitors...equinly of course. Maybe, when I get stronger, I can raise all of them and control them."
Her fur stood on end when she felt something unworldly stare at her, but the unicorn shook it off and went back to work. It was common for spirits to hate ponies like her, and she knew she deserved it, but it was for a good cause, even if they didn't care. Besides, they were dead! Why should they influence her?! It should be the other way around!
After what seemed like hours of digging, and taking back some souvenirs for her lab, Twilight started coming upon smaller and smaller bones. She was unsure if they were infants or adolescents, but she could have at least taken care of these ones.
"Let's see..." Twilight mulled over as she looked over the many skulls she had unearthed. "Too round, too thin, too wide, too misshapen..." She looked back at the last one and shook her head. "No, no, no...Ah ha! Yes!"
She dug her shovel deeper into the ground and pulled out a crested skull missing several of said crests and sporting several fissures along its surface.
"The right size!" Twilight said to herself. "Can't go half-reared on this spell. Best get it done right rather than just doing one casually."
The mare pulled out a quill that, once dipped into a small inkwell full of a fuming blue liquid, started drawing runes and triangles around the dragon skeleton. It was followed by a single wickerlit candle, several colorful feathers, a jar full of gray clouds that sparked angrily. Last, but not least, was a perfectly conserved strand of Celestia's mane in a block of polished and sanded resin. It still glowed with the alicorn's magic, but it seemed to be fading.
"Oh no!" Twilight said with dread. "I have to hurry!"
She set the resin souvenir on the ground next to her and sat down on one of the corners of the triangle. The points had all been encircled, and several waves linking each corner and the center where the skull rested were drawn as well.
Twilight took in a very deep breath and steeled herself. "Let's do this."
As the mare muttered the incantation under her breath, the wickerlit candle lit up and its flame started sputtering more and more uncontrollably as time went on. At first, the dragon's remains stayed inert, then they trembled. These spasms lasted longer and longer as time went on and the magic of Twilight's spell started to seep in. Lights flickered in the empty orbits of the skull, like a gas stove trying to turn on, until a deep purple color stared at the void behind Twilight. The mare was too entranced in her spell casting to notice the results, but she could feel the ground shake as her spell weakened the soil around her prize, allowing it to casually pull out a clawed, boney hand from the soil and find purchase on solid ground further away. Fingers dug into the dirt as their owner did its best to pull itself out.
With two loud thuds, the undead dragon's feet were finally out of the ground and standing on it this time. Its head twisted left and right as dirt, rocks, insects, and worms fell out of every nook and cranny of its skeletal form. Twilight's magic coursed through its body, suffusing it with power and unlife. It wrapped around its arms and legs, creating a helix of magic that allowed it movement. Its wings became glowing, purple webs just as an orb of pulsating magic formed in its torso. The crests on its head were replaced by the same ghostly energy and ran along its spine and tail. Its claws and teeth followed the same concept of 'replacement', producing a gradient of yellowed-bone to bright purple at the tips.
The dragon stood over Twilight, silent and unmoving like a statue. When the unicorn's incantations finally ceased, she drooped heavily, exhausted by the effort.
"That...hooo. Haven't done anything like that before." She looked at the resin souvenir and hugged it closely when she saw the strand was once more glowing vividly and changing colors. "Just like when you were still around," the mare squee'd.
A glint of purple caught twilight's eyes, making her look up slowly from the three-toed feet to the four-fingered hands to the toothy skull. Her inner filly leapt more and more at the sight of her successful summoning, but she was skeptical.
"Hmmm...Hop on one foot," Twilight asked. The skeleton obliged. "Okay stop. Now spin around twice." It obliged once more. "Hee hee! Now, help me get all the ingredients back into my saddlebags, and carry them for me please." Twilight rocked in place, excited at seeing this bipedal skeleton doing just what she wanted. "Hmmm...You seem to be an adolescent, but I'm unsure of the age you used to have. What's your name?" The mare waited for answer, but the skeleton did not react. It preferred to pick the feathers and quill up and stuff them in one of the saddlebags. "Oooh. Shy, huh? Hmmm. What to call you what to call you..." Her eyes lit up suddenly. "I know! I wanted to call the dragon I was supposed to hatch 'Spike'. She chuckled nervously. "Hooo. What a fiasco that turned out to be."
Unpleasant memories cascaded through her mind, bringing her back to that day where she was going to pass the exam to enter Celestia's school for the most gifted ponies. She was meant to force a dragon egg to hatch. Where they acquired such an egg was a mystery, but ultimately unimportant. Twilight thought she wasn't going to succeed, and the stress caused her magic to bounce on itself and overflow, and with the ambient magic around Canterlot because of Celestia's mere presence and what laid dormant within the unicorn, chaos erupted.
The unicorn clutched her head as she tried to remember what happened to her parents. All she could truly recall was that they had to go to physical therapy for years after the fiasco, prompting Celestia to take Twilight in, albeit temporarily, to help reign in her magic. As for the dragon egg, it had been cooked thoroughly, and nothing came from it save a meal that egg eaters would have maybe enjoyed. That part of the school had to be quarantined while the errant, damaged magic was siphoned off and stabilized by experts.
It was a terrible tragedy for Twilight, but thanks to Celestia's intervention, it had become a mostly joyous memory, though Twilight wasn't sure what happened to her parents and brother when she fled Canterlot after Celestia's...Her hooves dug into the ground. 'Spike' responded to her agitated status and stood with its back towards her, looking around for any threats to its master.
Twilight couldn't help but giggle softly. "It's okay, Spike. Just memories reopening old wounds. Come on," she said as she sat back up. "Let's go home and figure out where I can put you when I don't need you."