Chapter 7: Reflection
By N00813
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“Do you ever think about what you’ve done?”
Archangel looked up at her question. Across the campfire, his cold blue eyes seemed to hang unsupported in the midst of flickering tongues of orange, against the backdrop of night-time sky. He shifted, and the she saw the tiny gleam of oil painted over every black feather. The illusion broke. “Maybe.”
He pulled a stick out of the fire, shaking the char off the meat speared by it, and waited for it to cool. The falling embers burnt brightly, before they were extinguished when they hit the black ground.
She waited. A few metres away, the Jackal sat against one of the wooden wheels bolted onto his cart. The arms and armour on the back of the vehicle had been wholly replaced by pile upon pile of massive, high-grade diamonds. The rock hound himself was looking at the two of them, his beady eyes never straying from the fire.
Awkward silence degraded into still, stagnant quiet. In the distance, far behind them, the sounds of a vicious slaughter faded into the chirping of crickets and the crackle of the campfire. She could see the orange glow of burning huts creeping over the tall Zebrican grass.
Her eyes drifted back towards the cart. The diamonds glistened orange and blood-red in the firelight, almost as if their cores were burning or bleeding. She shook her head.
Archangel tapped a black talon against the meat, and then ripped it off the stick, before cramming it into his mouth. She grimaced.
“That used to be someone, you know,” she said, gesturing to the stick with a lavender hoof and hiding a shudder beneath her cloak.
Archangel shrugged, wiping his claws on the dirt. “Everything used to be something else.”
She slumped against cold rock. The howling wind quieted. Snow shifted around her, painted the same shade of red by the dying sun as the blood pooling a few metres from her leg. Some of her own blood dripped from the end of her hoof to join the pool.
She stared outwards, over the entirety of the landscape that presented itself to her. Under the light of the setting sun, every tree in the massive forest below seemed to burn like embers in a bed of coal.
She felt her head twist towards the body of the dragon behind her. The Great Dragon. The Scourge of the South. The Black Death.
She shook her head, before wrenching her gaze away from the shadows that now began to cling to the dragon’s corpse. The tear tracks framing her face had dried, the drops themselves long having reunited with the snow and earth at her hooves.
“In the end, mate, what you can do, is what you will do.”
A low rumble started behind her; the Great Dragon’s inner fire started to consume his body. A sudden flare of heat smashed into her side and cloak, whipping the ends of the fabric around her torso. The attached hood fluttered as best it could, trapped in between the burst of scalding wind and the solid form that was her neck.
Still, the stench of blood wouldn’t leave her. She looked outwards, through the roiling air.
“Nothing else you can do…”
On the horizon, the sun was slowly swallowed by the maw of the earth. The teeth of mountains stood resolute and strong, even as the sun’s light bathed them in fire.
The first cracks and pops sounded out behind her. Her head felt like it had been glued onto a broken statue of a pony. She closed her eyes. There was nothing but blackness.
The crackling reached a crescendo. The drumbeats of fire, the hustle of the observing wind and a low, keening moan swirled around Sterfgeval’s summit. In the absence of any other sound, nature’s funeral song rushed into her ears.
She opened her eyes, just as the first scale floated past her shoulder, suspended in mid-air. It spun and twirled like a dancer as invisible currents caressed it, lifting it higher and higher into the sky. A trail of golden embers followed behind, glowing against the darkening sky, indistinguishable from the stars as they sparkled.
And then another scale drifted past. And another.
Like cherry blossom leaves whipped up into a storm by the gentlest of winds, the golden scales spiralled upwards and outwards, forming a shimmering golden canopy over her head.
She took in a deep breath. The cold sharpness of mountain air, the spicy, electrifying taste of loose ley and the stench of coppery blood rushed into her nostrils.
“Stay safe… Best of luck.”
She chuckled mirthlessly.
The sun sank below the horizon in full, the last few dregs of blood-red light fighting a losing battle against the oncoming black of night. Overhead, the pieces of dragon flickered more and more dimly as they continued to ascend, in their journey towards the stars. She never took her eyes off them.
Some time later – it could have been a second, a minute or ten times that – the last golden scale flared, outshining the brightest star of the night, rivalling even the moon in intensity. For a second, it looked almost like a miniature sun, as if day had come by early.
And then it was gone. Blackness returned, full and encompassing. She lifted a hoof – but all she could see was darkness.
Shaking her tail to dislodge the flakes of snow stuck onto her cloak and coat, she pushed herself up. A small spell humming on the tip of her horn lit up her surroundings, and she turned around. A dragon skeleton looked back at her, its eyes empty sockets and its mouth set in a permanent grin.
She looked upwards once more. The stars sat in place, cold and distant observers to a fleeting, unimportant event. She looked back down. There was a piece of ivory, coloured in flickering magenta light, beneath one of the Great Dragon’s claws. She yanked at it with a tendril of magic, and the claw disintegrated into separate bones.
It was a skull. A long-snouted dragon skull, scored around the end of the nose and the eye sockets, and blackened. She turned it around and around.
For a second, hot anger bubbled up inside her gut. She tossed the skull back into the pile, where it landed with a clatter. A stray gust of wind swept over her, and she felt cold again – inside and out. She tried to reach again for the anger, but it had dissipated into some deep crevice of her mind. Now, all she felt was tired.
She charged up her horn, lifting the bones with the soft hum of magic and setting them down inside the cave mouth, on top of the massive pile of gold and gems. She stopped for a moment, and stared. The gold and the ivory of bones seemed to meld together, and in the magenta light, they looked like dark islands in the sea of black blood coating the stone floor.
For a split-second, the rock seemed to change into the middle of a blood-drenched dirt road, and the skeleton of the Great Dragon turned into the corpse of a griffon bandit. His chest was torn open and his yellow beak encrusted with flecks of fresh red over splatters of old brown. Even as his face was creased in pain, there was an acceptance and serenity in his eyes that made him look triple his age.
Then his face changed that of a rock hound’s, and the dirt became sand glued together by shockingly red blood. This time, the head was severed from the body, looking up into the sky with one eye and into the ground with the other, even as his torso lay twitching on its stomach. Denza’s face was etched with fear, with the ice-cold certainty of his fate and the hatred he took refuge in, in the midst of his hopelessness as she hacked his head off with Pinkie’s knife.
A blink of her eye later and the cadaver of a black-scaled dragon replaced Denza’s. Spikes jutted out from the edges of its face, curving backwards and outwards. Its face was locked in an eternal snarl, amber eyes unmoving, snout scales cut across to reveal the pink muscle and sliver of white bone beneath.
And then Spike’s corpse was there, his frame shockingly small amongst a pile of bones and gold many hundreds of times his size. In a heartbeat, the infantile snub of his snout lengthened into that of the Great Dragon’s. His body dissolved into a shapeless shadow, growing and growing until he was the width of the cave, and solidified as a mass of purple scales and viscera. His face was peaceful, almost mockingly so, as blood coated his lower jaw and stained the scales. She choked back a sound in her throat, and closed her eyes.
When she opened them again, the body she saw there for a split-second was her own. Lush purple fur was draped on a frame of broken, near-juvenile bones, and the violet eyes stared glassily outwards, without a hint of life in them. Her face was sombre and resigned, and at that moment, it made the image-her look much, much older.
What’s the difference? she mused. What made Spi – the Great Dragon so different? What made me so special? So just? So right?
She couldn’t think of anything.
I used to think that I was doing the right thing. Saving him at the cost of everything I’ve done, the blood I’ve spilt and the people I’ve put down.
The right thing. Now, I’m not sure what that even means.
She thought for a second, and the emptiness in her heart only made itself more known. Nothing. Nothing at all.
She remembered the funeral rites. She might not have known the Great Dragon, but she wanted to think that she knew the dragon he used to be. Bitter irony settled on her tongue, as she shook her head. A stranger performing familial funeral rites for another stranger.
Her horn glowed. Her tattoos lit up, white-hot stripes on her skin. Rivers of magenta ran over the cave’s ceilings and walls, flaring up for a moment in brilliant pink, before subsiding.
There was a moment of peace, when she could hear the wind howling quietly.
Then, with an almighty crack, the cave crumbled. Thousands upon thousands of kilograms of rock fell, a rumble that rivalled thunderstorms in power and volume. Dust and sand spat outwards, whipping her striped mane backwards and forcing a squint from her eyes. She blinked rapidly. The almost-unnoticeable weight of slick tears ran down her cheeks, following the older, dried tracks. She ignored them, waiting motionlessly until the growl of falling stone quieted.
Rubble met her gaze instead of the cold black hole that was the cave mouth. Cracks ran up from the roof of the opening into the surrounding rock, and little showers of dirt rained out from in between them, covering the rubble-pile with a minute spray of earth.
There was nothing more to be done. She shook her head, staring into the rocks until her eyes watered as the icy wind scraped against the tissue. This was the final resting place of the dragon Spike and the mare Twilight Sparkle.
Twintel released a breath she realised she’d been holding, and turned back towards the lip stretching out from the mountain. The village below seemed dead, deserted – only the faintest orange flickers told of civilisation within its boundaries.
It was a goal, if nothing else. Something to work towards. Akila had been right, though the shaman hadn’t known at the time. There really had to be something in your life to work towards. Because if there isn’t – if you have to choose between dying for nothing and living for nothing – then you don’t really have to choose at all.
The lights below burned weakly in the encompassing darkness. Then, someone closed their curtains, and one of the tiny specks of light was extinguished. The dark night grew even blacker.
Something inside jolted her into action, and a little voice in her head told her that she had to move now if she didn’t want to be swallowed up by the inky night. Reach for the fire, it said. Anything is better than nothing.
She thought about pain, about essays written in blood, about the emptiness yawning inside her. About darkness, about sacrifice, about salvation. About scales and balances, fire and hope, chance and probabilities.
About doing the right thing.
With a running jump, she launched herself off the mountain and into the dark night sky.