Everypony knows that the earth ponies grow the food. They're the only ones who can; the unicorns botch it up if they try, and we pegasi... well, we have our talents in other areas. However, the Pegasus Empire was made possible by one rather shrewd observation: just because the earth ponies grow the food, doesn't mean they control it.
An earth stallion can kick a pegasus through a row of tree trunks, but only if the pegasus in question is dumb enough to hover next to him for too long. Usually, the pegasus is high above and trying to pluck him from the ground, dive-bomb his face, drop rocks onto his head, or make clouds shoot lightning. After that, the pegasus can go and pick his carrots while the poor stallion lies in a daze nearby, groaning into the soil with his rump lightly smoking.
The unicorns had realized long ago that their own magic could be put to roughly the same use, and most of our history together revolved around which of the two tribes would control the third. Sometimes, the unicorns got lucky. Most of the time, we pegasi were the ones in control. Pteryx, the earth pony town on the border of our empire, was just the latest victim of a tug-of-war that had been going on for centuries.
I was merely a captain of the Pegasus Army at the time, and anti-pegasus sentiments were turning sour. None of the earth ponies had the guts to raise a rebellion, so they took it out on pegasi lower down the food chain. If a pegasus civilian wandered alone through the markets, they were likely to find shops closing all around them, with the owners peeking through gaps in the shutters and doors until the offending civilian moved on.
Military cadets were quickly snapped up as local police officers. This had the advantage of giving the army something to do, and it also kept the iron hoof pounding down on the recent outbreak of riots. Nothing major; just a few spats here and there. I was one of the ones they called in when the authorities began getting desperate.
As a pegasus and a low-ranking grunt in the army, I was a favourite target for baiters. When I was galloping in pursuit of an apple thief, most of the crowd around me closed ranks and some of the sprightlier youths tripped me up. Twice, I was snared in the line of duty by a banner; both times, they were deliberately lowered when I attempted a fly-by.
Another favourite tactic of theirs was to stop me and ask for directions, whereupon a nearby troublemaker would push a stacked tower of barrels or boxes. Then, they'd watch me squirm under the wreckage. I was disabled for two weeks after one such incident, when a falling crate smashed my wing in the wrong place and left its bony support crippled. By my third month on the streets, the constant snickering snipes and pestering pranks were getting badly on my nerves.
At the time, I had been serving alongside Sergeant Pansy. She assured me that the earth pony insults were not meant personally, that all of this was just anger at the actions of our higher-ups back in Pegasopolis, and that we were all really ponies in sisterhood.
Pansy wasn't cut out for the military life. On paper, she sounded like the first who'd get kicked out of the army. She had a soft-spoken voice instead of the usual drill sergeant shout most of us had. She squealed at scary-looking clouds. Give her a pike and a straw mare, and the worst she'd do was poke herself in the eye. Every soldier gets nerves just before a battle, but in Pansy's case she got a whole nervous system and refused to let it go.
Yet, in a strange way, we came to like having her around. When a soldier was down, she'd walk through a raging battle to drag him to safety. Pegasi who chewed metal bolts for dares would ask Pansy for tips on how to write letters for their mums back home. Once, I went to the public bath's steam room and I'm sure I walked in on a pegasus mare confiding to Pansy about her own nightmares.
Pansy also kept the bunk nice and tidy. I don't know how best to describe how it felt the first time I saw that side of her. I and a few others from our troop were coming back from a long battle, with mud all over our faces, scorch marks on our tails, a lot of battered armour, and a fervent desire to wash the worst memories out of our heads. There was something about opening the door and seeing clean sheets and cups of water on each bedside, and smelling the baking bread from the neighbouring kitchen, and hearing the few gentle notes of some old forgotten song as Pansy flitted from oven to table. It did something for a weary soldier.
It wasn't enough to get Pansy out of her usual duties, though. A pegasus who could cook a decent meal still needed to prove herself in battle, or she was dead weight. I was hoping her time in Pteryx would help her to pony up.
Still, I was young then, and I took her words to heart. I'd already made up my mind that the expansion of the Pegasus Empire was a mistake. The sooner we withdrew and gave the earth ponies whatever was their due, the better.
During my early days on the streets, I saw quite plainly what holding down the earth ponies and monopolizing their food meant. Many homes were boarded up, their occupants having long since been cast out onto the streets to beg. You saw more pegasus guards around these days, trying to stamp harder on any protests bubbling beneath the surface. Stalls began to dry up, and markets swarmed with ragged faces trying to haggle desperately for whatever crumbs the pegasi had left for them.
We pegasi were pretty well fed and plump by comparison with our earth pony neighbours. When I’d last seen him, the Commander had been so obese it was hard not to think he was rubbing it in our faces. When he wasn't around, we called him the Fat Commander. Even then, though, we whispered it.
He had walked through the main street towards the palace, between rows of pegasus officers. I was among the front row. He was surrounded by a private squad of elite Pegaserkers, officers so crazy that merely looking at them was a test of nerve. If a stranger had come up to me at that moment and (in a whisper, if she valued her life) asked which one was the Commander, she would be quite justified in wondering why the fat one was considered better officer material than the dozens of fitter, leaner, meaner-looking monsters marching either side of him.
If I had been a civilian and not a captain, I probably would have sent a message to the Fat Commander of the Empire. I'd have urged him to learn from the unrest, and to hightail it out of there while we still had some credibility. There were already rumours and stories going around about the Fat Commander’s sanity, none of them flattering. In fact, many of the details were so spot on that it was hard not to think of them as evidence of a spy network.
However, the pegasus creed is never to talk back to a superior officer. A captain, no matter how ripe for promotion her commanding officer thinks she is, would never do anyone any favours by protesting. A captain who tried would just get banished and replaced by someone less imaginative.
All I knew at the time was how confused I sometimes felt, a terrible thing for a growing pegasus. I would quite like to have kicked the incumbent Commander hard in the jaw for what he was doing. Yet, I couldn't help feeling some resentment for the constant swipes I was getting from the very ponies I felt sorry for. On a really bad day, if I'd been asked to lead the charge against the pie-throwing earth ponies of the street, I would have done so with grim pleasure. It was only Pansy's hoof on my wither that stopped me from kicking the worst troublemakers into the middle of next year.
Like I say, I was young. Even after I'd outgrown my naïvety, Pansy had yet to outgrow hers. This was probably why she was demoted to private long after all this business in Pteryx had passed. Neither of us, strictly speaking, should have been allowed to communicate about political matters within the town’s walls, but we were holed up together for a long time, our patrols always coincided, and I was dying for someone to voice my frustrations to. Politics wasn’t a pegasus concern. At least, it wasn't until you were high enough in rank to get your own temple. You couldn't even have any part in the political process unless your temple was on the same cloud as the Fat Commander’s.
Our Pegasus Empire was dying, but from where I was standing, it looked like it was the one doing the killing. It was like a manticore in its prime. My role in its later attempt at re-expansion, especially during the windigo incident, had yet to pass. In fact, I was such a sad sack at the time that any gambler wanting to wager on the next decade’s Commander would quite rightly have stuck me at the bottom of the table, (if they had remembered to put me on at all).
It was all this "politics" business. I was wet behind the ears, and though I'd been in a few battles, I never saw the big picture. The only reason I had such a simple, wide-eyed view of things was that I had only Pansy to discuss them with. She was the only pony who would have been deliberately ignored by the gamblers on the aforementioned next-Commander bet.
Yet an incident on one otherwise uneventful day, a month after the Fat Commander’s visit to the Pteryx palace, gave me a strong wake up call as to why the politics mattered so much. If I can trace my rise to the top to any specific event, I'd pick this one.
Early one morning, Corporal Cirrus came directly to my bunker and said that a dragon was ravaging the marketplace. Then he went and dived under the bunk bed, which was a mite unfortunate as that was where Pansy was sleeping. It took a while to calm her down and stop her from trying to wrap herself around my head.
Cirrus wasn’t above crying wolf for a prank. I nearly had him court-martialled once for frightening Sergeant Pansy over a rampaging cockatrice. Well, I say cockatrice, but on closer inspection it turned out to be a badly painted peacock.
Still, I decided to see what all the fuss was about, so I went out as if on a routine patrol. I took my armour. It wouldn’t be much protection against a dragon, it being used mostly to stop an enemy pony from bucking my kidneys out through my skull, but wearing it was standard practice. Besides, you’re only thought of as an idiot if you take on a monster without protection.
Monstrous creatures were all the rage these days. There was nothing unusual about one rampaging through the town. In the last month alone, I’d had to deal with a Gorgon’s Horse, a Ponytaur, and a plague of birds with steel feathers and bronze claws. A dragon was a new one, though. They generally saw nothing worth stealing from us, and most of them were hidden in the mountains, hibernating through the blizzards.
Quite a few earth ponies stopped me as I cantered through the streets. They told me all about the dragon in that accusatory tone that makes the question “What are you going to do about it?” so darn annoying. It wasn't a mature dragon, as I had thought, but a young one. It was one of those unicorn pets that they used as yardsticks for social status.
I cursed under my breath. Clearly, the unicorns from the next town along had been invited to Pteryx to negotiate something or other. Sometimes, unicorns and pegasi got stuck in a stalemate, and ambassadors would be called in by both sides, to try and smile and sweet talk their way into convincing the other side that it had all been a ghastly mistake, just a little misunderstanding, sorry about the battle of Unitopia and all that, etc. I couldn't stand ambassadors. Not even pegasus ones. Everypony knew they were just there to keep up the smiles until the stalemate broke. This could last for weeks, like a well-spun court case, and one of the unicorns had felt quite at ease letting his pet off the leash while he worked.
I really couldn't stand ambassadors who left their dumb pets off the leash.
I soon found a promising trail and my first smashed stall in months. Despite their reputations, the previous monsters had done surprisingly little property damage during their attacks. A stall owner was trying to buck a pile of shattered planks back into shape. Whatever he’d been selling, the dragon had cleared his stock out, so he must have had something good on him. He shouted several threats – some directed at the dragon – and kicked a standing wooden block across the street to make his point.
Earth ponies have some strengths. Yet even an earth stallion was defenceless against a fully grown dragon, and in the meantime the pegasus riot police were having trouble just keeping up with it. I followed the trail of smashed stalls, gouged buildings, and burning wooden frames, galloping along the ground to conserve wing power for later.
It was hard to see what I could do against it, but I’d been told to deal with disturbances, and from what I could tell the whole town was getting seriously disturbed. Footprints large enough for a pony to curl up in guided me from street to street, and sometimes a coin or a gem could be seen along the trail.
Eventually, I caught up with the riot police, who had stopped and were debating with themselves whether to fly overhead or search on the ground. The trail of footprints had vanished, and we were stuck between two high walls and a double row of abandoned stalls. There was too long a gap between the prints and the end of the road, and no sign of footprints further ahead which would have betrayed a leap. A flying dragon, just what we didn’t need.
Pegasus riot police are not built for speed, and the chase had left them tired. Pansy had caught up with us, torn between her devotion to duty and her desire not to get cremated prematurely, so we agreed to do a fly-by and let the police catch up with us later.
I remember how cloud-saturated the sky was that day, as though the weather teams were preparing to make this ordeal more intense than it really should have been. We began with a simple ascent to try and get a full view of the town, but I hated flying straight up. It's not as pleasant a business as we sometimes make it out to be. I went too high too fast, and my ears popped with a stab of pain from each one. I felt that horrible sensation that was like my head was getting pinched. It was with relief that we both came down low and began scanning district after district – the dragon had, at some point, landed and hidden itself among the labyrinthine streets crossing and crisscrossing each other.
Crowds were still out – it was a busy market. Ponies looked up and openly mocked us, or at least that’s how it sounded from up high. I’d learned how to block out such sounds by now, but Pansy still hadn’t gotten used to it. As far as pegasus upbringing went, she’d had it soft. I’d learned a few weeks into the job that she hadn’t been submitted to the hilltop test like the rest of us had been. Her parents had belonged to some weird sub-community that favoured nurture over torture, a pretty alien concept to most pegasus parents at the time. Being left on a hillside overnight to see how a foal coped was pretty tame stuff compared to the drills and disciplines that soon followed, and somehow Pansy had been lucky enough – unlucky enough, I would have said back then – to have avoided all that. It was still a mystery to me how she’d ended up in the army.
Since we weren't having any luck, and it was already raining, I dived for the streets. Pansy got the hint and soared after me. I settled for a place a couple of blocks from where we’d taken off, as the crowds were in full flow there and one of the ponies must have seen it rise up.
Each time we asked a bystander to help us locate the dragon, we never got a straight answer. Some said it had alighted on the corner, while some said it had landed not too far from here. Others swore blind that they’d seen it head over to the other side of town. North, and east, and south, and west – all were given as answers to the question “which way”. Even the ones who gave consistent directions had a tendency to point in any direction save the one they’d just described. A minority denied that there was even a dragon at all, insisting that I was merely getting worked up over a gold-obsessed giant chicken, or that it was actually nothing at all, and just my imagination, a glimpse into another world, or that I’d eaten some really bad hay the night before.
After a few minutes of this, I was quite content to simply fly back to the bunker and let the citizenry deal with the dragon. I would have done, too, if Pansy hadn’t spoken up. She heard some calling, she said, from the next street along, and as one we hurried over, flying over the crowd when it became too obstructive. We came out onto a street that was clear, except for three ponies huddled around something in the middle of the road. Further along, I saw the glimmer of a fallen sapphire in the dirt, and as we glided closer we could see the impression of dragon claws deep in the mud, like an illusion revealing itself. They started near the three ponies, and I suspected for a moment that the bystanders were stealing loot. I crashed into them, knocking two aside, and stood up straight to deliver a lecture before I heard the shriek of pain.
I looked down, and saw a broken leg lying before my hooves. Beside me, Pansy nearly vomited at the sight. The leg was attached to a stallion, though only just. He was half buried in the mud and appeared either unwilling or unable to move. He was the first earth pony I'd ever seen without rags or cloths, and his bony body made him look far older than he really was. The dragon’s foot had probably stuck to any cloth he’d worn and torn it off when the foot was lifted.
The three bystanders were nearly in hysterics. From what they were saying, they’d fled at the sight of the dragon, but their father – the one who was currently trapped in a footprint bigger than his own body – had not seen it in time. The dragon had landed on all fours, which was a small mercy as that distributed the weight, but all the same you didn’t get out of that situation without something to remember it by. The pony was lucky it had only been his leg.
As soon as I heard this account, I sent Pansy to a nearby doctor’s house to send a team down for this pony. I wanted to go after the dragon, but the bystanders were on the verge of pulling their fallen loved one from the footprint, and I hastily stepped in. They were more likely to harm him than help him, and I told them so outright. At least he was still breathing and conscious. To this day, I sense that the only reason they desisted was that I was in uniform and, to them, one of the military overlords. A pegasus civilian would have been bucked for such an outrage.
Pansy came back pretty quickly. It was a pegasus establishment, and the doctors were unwilling to come out for an earth pony. I sent her back, this time with a strongly-worded message. On any other matter, this animosity might have been just another burden to stomach, but when you’re looking at the pony who’s lying in the mud screaming over what’s left of his leg, you don’t put up with any horse offal from anypony.
When she came back, a team of doctors came with her. With the casualty covered, I went ahead, Pansy hurrying after me. We were on wings now – speed was essential to cover lost ground, and in any case I was working myself up for the big moment coming up. As we went along, a group of civilian pegasi caught up with us and told us that the dragon had made a beeline for the palace. They weren’t the only ponies following us. Word had gotten around, doubtless since we stopped to ask for directions, and the whole marketplace got up and moved like a caravan behind us, muttering among themselves. Some were shouting excitedly that we were going to fight the dragon. I cursed them under my breath. Most of them, as far as I could tell from the snatches I heard, were looking forward to seeing a pegasus getting char-grilled.
Pansy was still showing her inexperience. The idea of a dragon wanting her burnt to a cinder was enough to make her turn white, but by the time we reached the palace gates, we'd listened to the cheers of the crowd behind us, and they definitely wanted to see us burned to a cinder. Pansy was shaking so badly that I was worried she'd faint and fall out of the sky.
The sight of her losing her nerve made me feel uneasy. I had no intention of letting her get close to the dragon. She was only tagging along because I felt better for having a witness who wouldn’t groan in disappointment if I survived. I was just hoping she’d have enough sense to leave it to the riot police if I failed. Pansy had a weakness for trying to save fallen comrades in the middle of battle, which was weird to the high command. Their view was that being recognized for falling in battle was nothing less than a posthumous badge of honour.
I soared over the gates, feeling like a complete fool, and told Pansy to hang back at the watchtower. It was deserted, which was probably just as well as only pegasus washouts were assigned guard duty on the tower. They’d be next to useless in a brawl. Beneath me were the slopes of the grassy hill, and looming before me was the palace, a set of granite-block towers.
The dragon had touched down on one of the towers. It had its back to me, but its wings were tucked in and the slates being thrown off either side of it gave me enough clues. It was beginning to tear through the conical roof to get at the chamber inside.
Goodness knows how the ambassador would react when he found out that his pet had become a house-sized monster overnight. He probably wouldn’t care beyond the short-term inconvenience it would cost him, dealing with us street-level grunts. My blood boiled at the thought. We had to clean up his mess. To cap it all, unicorns had the annoying tendency to try and bribe their way out of almost any scrape during a "peacetime".
The dragon was large, even if it hadn’t fully grown yet. That left it with a set of jaws capable of snapping me up whole, so I wasn’t about to charge in. Instead, I flew closer until I was nearly perching on its tail. From here, I could see the bulging cheeks and the dribbles of golden chains either side of its mouth.
I decided not to get any closer until I had a plan worked out. Even with its mouth full and its flame thus averted, the dragon was still capable of killing me. As soon as it noticed me this close, it would forget what it was doing and try to swat me out of the air. It might not even stop there. Now I hated with double vigour its ability to fly. Had it been a run-of-the-mill ground dragon, I could have defeated it simply by making it lose its balance and fall off.
I still had the image of the crushed pony, and Pansy’s terrified face, in my head. I hung back, wondering if it was best to go through with the job.
The dragon was now unloading its collected gold into the hole it had made, and once done it would probably be content to sit tight and bother nopony else. While it was on the tower, there would be no real danger unless it made the tower collapse. A tower this sturdy needed at least ten thousand years of erosion before it would even be weak enough to collapse. The unicorns were still within the palace grounds and would learn sooner or later about the monster’s doings. One of them might be competent enough to get it down and change it back to normal. However I looked at it, I was just pointlessly wasting time.
I looked back at the gates, seeing the crowd of spectators growing. I could simply have turned around, folded up my wings, and started the long trek back to the bunker, but the crowd were having none of it. The intensity of their combined will was horrible. I’ve seen ranks and ranks of enemies swarming from horizon to horizon all around me. I’ve seen armies as vast as seas roar and close in like tidal waves. I’ve seen skies blackened with the wings of a thousand pegasi. Yet at least then I’ve always had my hooves full kicking them down one at a time. If I fell, my comrades would have cheered for me and sung a noble eulogy in my memory.
All I could see was a crowd of sneering civilians watching my every move. They were already falling silent, having made their bets and worked themselves up into believing they were about to see a real treat. They wouldn’t have been there at all if I’d been an earth pony. Yet a pair of wings and no choice over my parenting, and suddenly I was classic entertainment. They’d be telling this to the children, and it’d be known by everypony I’d ever met before sundown. It was terrible enough thinking what they’d say if I was wounded.
It was worse still to wonder what they’d say if they saw me reduced to a sad little pile of ashes. I’d have no control over what they did with my reputation.
Pansy hovered between me and them, and I wondered how many were actually seeing her. The idea that she’d be alone, despite the crowd, when she saw me go up against the dragon was a shock. It was unthinkable.
No, one way or the other, I was taking it on, and if I was taking it on then I had to win, or at least not lose too badly.
I tightened the muscles in my wings – it was not enough to change my flight trajectory, but enough to prepare for a change – and rose silently behind the dragon. Common sense told me to flee and let the matter sort itself out, but a pegasus never flees, and I was starting to see options coming up. That was probably when it hit me.
Eureka moments are not moments at all and can’t be defined by an arbitrary point on your life’s timeline, but if I had to date it, I'd say something occurred to me around then. I was military, through and through. I wasn’t going to flee, but not because the crowd wanted me to stay, and not because I enjoyed the thought of being a reckless idiot. I wasn’t going to flee, because I was born to treat fighting as the highest of the high arts, and if I thought I had a chance of winning, nothing was going to deny me the pleasure of a good fight.
I’d have a crack at it. If it proved too much, I could always go for a “strategic retreat”.
I rose higher, readying myself for the dive. I couldn’t kick hard enough to hurt at normal speed, but with some momentum built up in my body, I’d give the dragon something to think about.
The ponies in the crowd were now completely silent. For a moment I wondered how the dragon could not notice the change in sound; I could hear it clearly over this distance. The ponies were going to remember without fail whatever happened next. Despite the familiar pains I had to endure throughout my ascent, I was pumping with a wonderful sense of anticipation. I’d show those ponies a thing or two. I had my target identified. The dragon was nicely relaxed now, perfect for me to get a shot off. I built up speed, then did a quick U turn and propelled myself straight towards the ground, breaking through g forces under sheer willpower and a mounting sense of bliss.
It took a while for my vision of the dragon to show any sign that I was getting closer – I’d covered a lot of air – but once it started it seemed to jump straight to the other extreme and my vision was full of dragon almost immediately.
I tore into the membrane with a satisfying slash and changed direction immediately, heading out over the town’s rooftops. The dragon's wing was jerked back, ripping the beast – which was caught by surprise – clean off the tower. It roared in alarm and I was suddenly encumbered by the sheer weight I was dragging through the air.
Dragon wings rely on innate draconic magic to get around the more burdensome gravitational physics. Otherwise they are, when you get down to it, two big leathery capes.
It tried to flap – I could feel its pulling through the membrane wrapped around me – and only managed to entangle itself further. I tried pushing the speed a little more. He felt suddenly loose. I changed course again, wrenching both of us directly upwards. At least, I hoped so. The membrane covered my face, and I could only tell where I was going from memory. Having been up already, I never had a pop in my ears to confirm it.
My plan started to fall apart once the dragon regained its senses. Up until then, I’d relied largely on its being too surprised to respond.
With a jerk, its wings whipped off my face and I was thrown tumbling in an eddy. For a fleeting moment, I was expecting a brief flash of heat to engulf me. I steadied myself, flipped round, and tried to build up momentum again.
The dragon was a mess. It was trying valiantly to flap, fighting against the tumbling of its own body. Despite the amount of time it had enjoyed getting used to its subadult form, the dragon hadn’t practised much on the wing. I tackled it in the chest and pushed down. I couldn’t see the ground. The air howled like a choir approaching its climactic finish. At any moment, I was expecting to strike earth and shatter every bone in my skeleton.
To my shame, I turned chicken at that point. Both wings came out and I stopped to hover in midair. I left the dragon shooting downwards under our joint momentum.
The impact knocked down two buildings either side of the street. For a moment it was lost amid a cloud of dust, before the cloud cleared away and I could see its body sprawled across the road. To my horror, it was on the main avenue and had landed dangerously close to the back of the crowd.
After what seemed a long time, the last of the dust settled. The dragon’s mouth was wide open, and it was frowning as if in the middle of a protest against its treatment. Every limb was bent wherever there was a joint – at the knee, at the wrist, at the elbow, along its claws – and even the wings looked like they were folding up wherever possible. I landed next to its head. The eyes were closed, though whether with unconsciousness or because it was dead I couldn’t tell. I simply stood next to it, watching in case a muscle twitched.
The crowd was already galloping up the road to take a closer look, and most of my morning was spent simply watching their mob thinking at work. They were breathing very calmly, with steadying breaths. Many were gaping. It was clear they had never seen a pegasus fighting anything larger than another pony, up close or at a distance. I was pleased to see I was commanding respect now.
I waited a long time for them to disperse. They didn’t.
Finally, sensing that I wasn’t about to be troubled for a while, I sat down and waited for Sergeant Pansy to catch up. She landed next to me and pawed the ground. Strangely, she was as quiet as the rest of them, and to my surprise seemed reluctant to talk whenever I made an observation about the dragon or told her what was going to happen next. She didn’t make eye contact. Even she hadn’t predicted that I’d win, but I had expected to be seized in a hug so relieved to come out that the joy dammed up behind it was enough for a party and an all-nighter. It took me some time to realize that she was scared of me.
The crowd was trickling away – slowly at first. I noticed that none of them went up the road if it meant passing close to me, and even the ones who went the other way did so with a hypnotic stare back, as though terrified I would follow them. This was new – even among pegasi, I had so far shown no skills out of the ordinary. Faces that would otherwise have mocked or ridiculed me were now pretending very hard that they had never even acknowledged my existence, and indeed were trying so hard that the lack of attention was in itself a kind of acknowledgement.
It seemed curious that this was the reaction I’d get for essentially doing what they’d half-expected me to do – indeed, for doing what was expected of me, as a military pony. I had worked something out around the time the last of them went, and by then I had nothing else to look at except for the dragon, which wasn't dead. Its chest was rising and falling, and once in a while a faint wisp of smoke puffed out of a nostril.
By lunchtime, nopony seemed to be coming, not even the riot police, and I was tired with the delay. I sent Pansy off to bring a squad here to supervise the beast, and then had to repeat the order loudly when she didn’t move. It wasn’t a long wait after that. Clearly she’d been in a hurry not to disappoint me.
The squad came soaring overhead. One or two of the guards landed next to me and began asking questions, mostly along the lines of “what the hay just happened” and “was Pansy telling the truth”. I wasn’t in the mood, so I rattled off a few answers and left. I swear that I saw the dragon half-open an eyelid as I went past, as if to check I was really going.
I heard later that the dragon was pretty compliant, and was soon shrunk down and reunited with its owner. The pegasi had difficulty persuading the unicorn ambassador that I’d done what I’d done. To be honest, they’d have had difficulty persuading me, and I’d been the one who had done it. Pansy told me the next morning that nearly everypony outside of town for three miles around knew what had happened.
It was then I understood why the Fat Commander insisted on the expansion. It wasn’t the land he claimed that made it worth it – a quick look at how poorly he managed Pteryx could dispel that notion like lightning – but the conquest itself. There was no pleasure in having conquered. There was little to be gained from going hoof-to-hoof with the powerful unicorns. Yet something had yearned in him to perform greatness, and what better testament than conquest? For a fleeting time in my life, I felt respect for him. Taking on the dragon, I had seen and felt exactly what he must have experienced. It was intoxicating.
Several days later, the stalemate finally broke. Trouble was brewing closer to Pegasopolis, and the Fat Commander was losing interest in the earth pony town, which in any case he'd been holding down by the tip of his hoof. He was going to withdraw his troops from Pteryx. Though we didn't know it at the time, that was the start of the Empire’s decline.
Despite what I’d led myself to believe, I felt it as a bitter blow. We were supposed to be tougher than that. To Pansy’s horror – and my own horror too, in retrospect – I actually pined for the old Commander, the one I’d hated for most of my time on the streets in Pteryx.
There wasn't much to say about his replacement. Some ponies are just placeholders in the history books. The new Commander was a pretty nondescript mare who did her job, and who would do her job until somepony more suitable could be found.
Soon after the news came through, I was given a recommendation by my commanding officer, and thus would begin my ascent to the Commander’s position. I felt strangely calm about my first promotion. It was as though it was obvious it would happen, even natural. Pansy went in the other direction. This also seemed natural. I started to look down on her; she was not cut out for the demands of a position of authority, for greatness. I kept her close all the same. Despite the dragon incident, we still had several months of plodding through the streets behind us, and a lot more had happened since then that only strengthened it.
Strength became my watchword for nearly the rest of my stay in Pteryx. I’d shown it, and the Fat Commander – before his withdrawal – had shown it. I suspected, on my better days when I was feeling more kindly disposed, that Pansy had a strength of her own too, though for the life of me I couldn’t tell what it was. I often went into moods like this. Ever since my promotion, I was physically giddy with the prospect of gaining more power.
I remember my last day in that town, when the bad news came through and I sought one last walk through the streets before we were to pull out. Pansy came with me, having recently been demoted to Corporal for trying to comfort a young criminal she was supposed to be incarcerating. There were so many petty thieves targeting food stalls these days that soon we’d have to send them to another town’s prison.
I never learned the full details, but I was briefly brought out of my power fantasies and reminded of my former self. I felt outraged. It was the Fat Commander’s fault all over again. The food monopoly hadn’t yet been broken; I was seeing evidence of it all over the streets. Earth ponies were thinning. To my surprise, many pegasi were feeling the brunt too. Any pony who wasn't military was having their food rations cut down “to resupply the troops”. It wasn't long after this that the Fat Commander lost all respect among his peers and was ousted.
Pansy and I went along the marketplace, silently living out our last few hours in the town. There wasn’t much to see that wasn’t already etched deeply into our minds, so we felt more like we were checking off a list than evoking fine memories. We came upon the food stalls, most of which were nearly empty. Whether this was due to an early rush buying up stocks or due to a lack of stock to begin with, I couldn’t say. Either seemed plausible.
A pair of earth ponies lingered around the apple stall, eyeing up the red fruit. Perhaps they were contemplating theft? Perhaps they were simply trying to slake their hunger by feeding their eyes? Or perhaps the sight of food was too distracting for them to pass it without taking time out to gaze? My old sympathies for the dishevelled ponies of this town came back to me, but more out of habit than out of any hope that I could help. For once, I felt powerless. It was a sharp antidote to the puffed-up attitude I'd indulged ever since facing that dragon.
Pansy then went ahead and did the sort of thing that got her demoted later on. It was also the reason I wanted her close when I became Commander.
Without a word, she walked up to the stall owner and bought two apples. I had expected one for me and one for her, but instead she walked over to the pair and offered her purchase to them. They looked stunned, almost frightened, and I fully expected them to turn tail and bolt. They reached out gingerly. I could see them looking for the hidden irons, waiting for Pansy to clap them over their pasterns and pull them along by the chains.
They held out their hooves until they were nearly touching hers, but dared come no closer. Pansy tipped the apples into their hooves and smiled encouragingly, like a teacher to a pair of students making a breakthrough.
I don’t think the pair knew what they were doing throughout the entire ordeal. Receiving an apple each from one of the sworn oppressors just didn’t figure into their worldview, and I couldn’t blame them for still trying to find the trick. They ate the apples in the end though, greedily, heartily, and noisily. We passed on, catching up on our patrol route. When I looked back, they were staring after us.
I don’t remember what Pansy and I talked about after we left the marketplace, though we never mentioned the incident with the apples. Truth be told, I suspected Pansy was slightly embarrassed about it. She tended to blush a lot if I began to frame a question with the word “why”. I could certainly see why she’d keep mute when we joined the rest of the pegasi at the bunker for a last lunch. The others would have ripped into her if they’d known she’d wasted money on earth ponies. They would have called her a soft heart. To her, I suppose, facing them would have been like facing a dragon.
If I could pick an incident that started my rise to the top, it would have been the dragon incident. If I could pick an incident that kept me from taking the previous Commander's path, however... well... I guess it would have to be this one.