Chapter 7 – Dragon's Rage
Spike was floating.
He wasn't quite sure where he was, how he'd arrived or how long he'd been there. Everything from the last hour or so was...
Just a blur.
Sharp shivers rose from his tail and through his spine; his body's way of telling him he wasn't quite dead yet, but might end up so if he didn't do something drastic. He remembered having those shivers before. Once, when encountering an enraged, giant dragon in the Everfree Forest, all on his own. Another time, when he was falling through the sky with Rarity, plummeting toward the earth together at breakneck speeds.
Both times he had been dead certain that he was about to die; only dumb luck and Twilight's intervention had saved him from the dragon, and dumb luck and Rainbow Dash (with some help from Fluttershy and a purple scarf, but mostly Rainbow) had gotten him alive out of the fall.
He didn't know where he was now, but it sure didn't seem like any ponies were around – this fourth time around, he was on his own.
Wait. Fourth? What happened to the thir–
In an instant, memory flashed by his mind's eye. A fall, fortunately broken by a small spring of water. A cave, lit with strange red light. A bird, much like a monstrous, enormous version of his own phoenix Peewee, roaring like a furnace and spitting fire like a dragon, and his deathly shivers rising like never before. Except its fire wasn't actual dragonfire, so he avoided being roasted completely by virtue of his draconic skin. Then, choking. Blood rising in his head, breath giving, ribcage crackling, vision failing, and then...
I remember wind. The ground rushing by, before vanishing. Clouds... That, at least, stuck out. I must've been sent flying, somehow. I can't even remember landing... I must've lost consciousness before that. That's a long way to fly.
His chest hurt, but the fact that he was perceiving the pain of his – probably – broken ribs meant that he was starting to return to his senses, bit by bit. He tried to gather what wits and sensations he could find, and immediately found something he hadn't been looking for.
Eugh.
The foul taste of soot laid heavy in his mouth, something no dragon could stand. Soot was, to dragons, not much different from excrement. It was an unneeded byproduct of firebreathing and various reactions in their body, it had a foul stench and an even worse taste, it looked worse still, and it always managed to creep in between your scales and your wings and your plates and–
Spike stopped that train of thought, warning bells going off in his head. How did I know that? He coughed up a small ball of black ash and spit it out in an instinctive reaction to the foul substance's presence in his throat, much like he had ever since he'd struck his first sparks. Yes, he had always thought it smelled bad, tasted bad and was annoying in general, but that entire rant had just sounded...
Way too detailed. Like something Twilight would say.
“Twilight,” he mouthed.
Immediately his own worries evaporated, and were replaced by an enormous gnawing fear for his surrogate sister and her friends. Something went wrong with Twilight's spell. Something appeared. I saw it. Then everything went bright and everyone disappeared, and I ended up–
He opened his eyes wide. His first thought was that he should not possibly be able to breathe – the way the faint light above him wavered and angled about meant he was without a doubt underwater. He could feel himself floating about, and he was definitely not breaching the surface anywhere; still, he was breathing. Or at least he was pretty sure he had been; the moment he'd realized he was completely submerged, he'd shut his mouth tight and started holding his breath.
At least, he thought he was holding his breath.
But if I've been breathing down here, does that mean...
His claws went to his clenched mouth, and he tried to feel if there was anything different about it. I mean, I might've magically sprouted a pair of gills, that would make sense. Well, okay, about as much sense as Pinkie sense, but at least it's something.
Alas, there were no new body parts or other unfamiliar things to be found on his head, and he let out a sigh before he could stop himself. The next moment, he made a rather shocking observation.
There were no bubbles.
I definitely sighed, but there wasn't a single bubble. I'm underwater, and I don't make bubbles when I sigh.
Huh.
Just to make sure, he opened his mouth, and repeated that last thought out loud.
“Huh.”
There were no bubbles this time either.
Spike frowned a bit, before gathering his resolve and trying to think of something he could say to Twilight when he eventually had to explain himself – breathing underwater was probably pretty high on her list of “things that are just stupid and you shouldn't do, and that's that”, or whatever name she had for the thing. And surprised himself when he realized there was a perfectly valid reason for him to do what he was about to do.
As a certain magical unicorn would say: For science.
He closed his eyes, and breathed in.
Water rushed down his throat, but he didn't choke – the only real difference he felt from breathing air was that this was significantly slower, really – and as it reached his lungs, he felt a strange feeling of warmth in his chest. Strange, but not uncomfortable. Like the lukewarm heat of a lava lake the sensation ran through his veins, spreading through his body at a leisurely pace.
It reached his legs, and somehow, he felt stronger.
It reached his claws, and he felt muscles in places he'd never thought he had them.
It reached his back, and a sharp, intense vibration spread through his spine, somehow making strange tones ring in his ears; tones that rang in terrible dissonance, of wrongness with itself.
Like the slowest fire he had ever breathed, the feeling reached up to his throat, his neck, his face, his eyes, his head...
The sensation of warmness seeped into his brain, and he saw. He felt. He heard. He knew.
He knew everything; and never before had he felt so lost, so alone, so terribly wrong. Never in his entire life.
-/-/-/
Without warning, the air around her erupted with sound.
Clair cringed as an awful wail echoed through the cave, flattening herself against her Dragonair's body and holding it in a death grip brought on by sheer primal terror. For a number of seconds her mind was blank, every thought of investigating the mysteries of the Den washed away by a horror she could barely imagine.
That death grip did manage to bring her out of her reverie, however. Being the command she normally used to order her mount to submerge, the serpentine dragon-type complied with haste. The result was Clair being swiftly dunked in the frigid waters of the Den's lake – which quickly brought clarity to her senses.
Well underwater, however, she could hear – and sense – the disturbance much more clearly than before. The Elder may not have approved of her mastery yet, but the first thing any dragon trainer was taught was to always be prepared for anything in her taming of the mighty, yet fickle beasts that were dragon-type pokémon.
Sudden underwater excursions included.
Resisting the urge to order her mount back up, she fumbled with one hand inside her suit for a bit before finding the breathing rod. Unclasping it from its holder, she put the device into her mouth, and resumed her breathing.
Clair tapped Dragonair's side with two fingers, and she immediately shone up the orb on her neck with a bluish light. Following the pulses and the sound of the disturbance, the pair navigated their way closer to its source, Clair trying to ignore the biting cold best as she could.
Fortunately, thanks to her speedy mount the search did not take too long. In a far end of one of the Den's underwater cavelets, she spotted a purple-green form; unfamiliar, yet obviously draconic in nature. Its wingless shape had not the serpentine grace of the less evolved dragon-types, but the sturdy bluntness of their final forms. Confusing, seeing as it was not even half her height.
She motioned Dragonair for a cautious approach, and her mount slowed instantly. There was no intermediary period of moderate speed, or even any sensation of being thrown forward as her momentum changed; all she could tell was that the rocky walls of the surrounding cave went from rushing past to sedately flowing by in the blink of an eye. That was simply how things were. Dragons did not always seem to abide by the laws of nature like most other creatures on the planet.
And the same was true for this specimen, apparently. As soon as she came near it, its tail perked up and it spun around, entirely sure-footed despite the fact that there was nothing but water under its clawed, stubby feet. Then, it roared.
Much like the primal, fearsome wail that had cut through the cave before, the sound was both terrifying and deafening; and this time, her mount was not exempt from it effects. Her Dragonair writhed and squirmed between her legs, and it was as much of a battle for Clair to keep control of herself as it was to keep control of her pokémon. She managed to keep the creature in her sight, however, and when the deafening sound eventually faded, she made a troublesome observation.
The tiny dragon was not so tiny anymore, and by the second, it was growing larger. Larger, and different. Wings were sprouting out of its back; its rounded, stubby scales were growing sharp and rough, and its claws were lengthening into enormous sword-like lengths of metal. Its hide turned from soft green to angry red; and anger indeed laid about the beast like a cloudy miasma, almost tangible in its presence.
Clair did not feel much of a need to elaborate her feelings on the subject, but found it quite sufficient with a short and succinct: Oh, fucking shit.
In an instant, the sense of tranquility brought on by her meditation was gone, replaced by a brief panic that she instantly crushed with her well-honed battle sense. Her strange connection to the shrine and its dragons vanished, but was replaced by an instinctive awareness of her surroundings. Suddenly she noticed the small, glimmering light that shone down from above, the strange cracks in the cavern walls around her, and that the water was very quickly becoming uncomfortably warm.
Clair despised cowards, but there was really nothing for her to accomplish here aside from getting slowly cooked to death, or worse. All things considered, it was time to get while the getting was moderate to bad, rather than catastrophic. So, with not much more than few mumbled curses that were quickly swallowed by the howling, writhing waters of the lake, she clung to Dragonair's backside once more and let the serpentine pokémon carry her to safety.
Temporary safety, at least. There was, after all, the matter of an enormous rampaging dragon to take care of.
-/-/-/
Rage broiled within Spike like wildfire.
He did not know why he was angry, or even what he was angry about; and in all honesty, he did not care a smidgen about reason at the moment. He was rage, its avatar and personification. Reason did not matter. Reason was weakness. Knowledge was power, but rage made knowledge irrelevant. Reason or knowledge did not make right. Power did.
So why did he still feel so very, very wrong?
He felt something move in the water behind him. He didn't know how – he didn't care. He spun around to face whatever manner of beast had approached him, and came to face with two. No, not two, his newly acquired knowledge corrected him. One Beast, and one Dweller. He knew these words, knew what they meant, somehow. But he didn't care. For a moment he struggled to grasp just what, exactly, he cared about.
He remembered.
“WHERE IS TWILIGHT!?”
The Beast squirmed under its rider, and the Dweller cowered in – he assumed – fear as well. Neither of them said a word, other than perhaps inarticulate moans that were quickly absorbed by the water around them.
So. He had failed. Even with all his rage, power and right, he had still failed. Even now, he was still wrong.
The roar died in his throat, and rage took its place. Nothing mattered anymore. Rage was everything.
His skin was iron. He didn't care.
His blood was the blood of the mountain. He didn't care.
On his back, two tiny stubs pierced his metal hide and became wings. He didn't care.
Spike the dragon grew, grew and grew, but it was not the same as it had been when he had been consumed by his greed. That time, his desire had turned his entire being into something less than he was, a guttural beast barely capable of remembering who it was, what it was.
This was different. He still knew, he still felt, he still remembered. He felt every difference, and he saw everything he did.
He knew. He just didn't care. Rage was everything.
His rising, metal-plated head reached the tiny dot of light above, the hole he'd made falling down into the lake. With as much subtlety as an erupting volcano, he smashed through the mountain, and kept growing. Meter by meter, rock came crashing down into the swirling waters of the lake around his legs, legs that were the size of a small house and still growing larger. He roared, and the mountain cracked open like a broken toy.
The afternoon sun blinded his eyes. He didn't care.
Stood where he was, half-buried in the mountain and half hidden by the rubble of the peak he had crushed going up, Spike howled his rage at the world like one angry god.
-/-/-/
The Dragon's Den was in uproar, like Lance had never seen it before. Its waters writhed with panicking pokémon of all sizes, and their anguished wails and cries reverberated throughout the normally so peaceful Shrine. Somewhere behind all that noise, though, he swore he could hear something else, too; something louder, deeper and more ominous in nature.
A deep frown creased his face as he regarded the disturbing scene before him. What have you done to this place, Clair? What did you find?
As if summoned by his thoughts, his cousin shot out of the water on her Dragonair like a cannonball riding a javelin. The serpentine pokémon stayed afloat in the air, in the mysterious way that only Dragonairs could; Clair slid off its side and landed on the rock of the Shrine's entrance with a wet sound, and was promptly followed by a small downpour as gravity claimed some of the water that had clung to her hair and clothing.
Well, mostly her hair, to be honest. Clair's outfit really did not allow for much water absorption. He had always thought it a bit promiscuous, but the girl had always been in a slight rebellion against the more conservative elements of the dragon clan. She had always greatly favored the water, as well, so he supposed it made sense for her to have what essentially was a glorified swimsuit with a cape as her everyday wear. It did make sense. But damn her if she didn't look more flamboyant as she was now – drenched to the bone, skin and fabric almost glittering in the cave's flickering torchlight – than she did when dry on land.
Like a fish and its scales, maybe.
Clair did not care much about the soaked state she was in, though; that much he could tell only from her expression. From the very first time she'd been in a battle, using the hatchling Dratini she'd been given by her father on her seventh birthday, she'd always worn that same face. Calm, determined, focused. Lance wished he could have had her composure, sometimes; he occasionally let his emotions get the better of him when faced with a particularly tough opponent. He seldom showed it nowadays – years of being the Champion had trained his poker face to perfection – but the emotions were there. He had control, but she had serenity. For that, he envied her. Sometimes.
“Lance. There's trouble. Big, enormous fucking trouble, and it's gonna bloody well boil the lake if we don't do something about it, and fast.”
But the small frown she now wore on her face, the slight flustered blush on her cheeks, the tiny tinge of fear he could hear in her voice when she spoke up, even the foul language she used to try and mask it; all of this made Lance extremely worried, for his cousin did not fear her enemies. Had not, ever before, at least.
And if she did now...
Steel yourself, Champion. Now darker times are coming. Those had been the words of his aging predecessor, when they had spoken just after the Cerulean Incident a couple of years ago. He had doubted him, then – after all, what could possibly top that menace, in terms of sheer fearsomeness? Had they not just managed to defeat and dismantle Team Rocket, the single greatest threat to the safety of the Kanto-Johto region? Had they not just gained not only one, but two young trainers worthy of the Champion's mantle, as their allies?
A massive tremor shook the Shrine, and a wall of sound hit Lance like a fist of air. There was no time to think; he leaped into the air even as his Dragonite was materializing from its ball, and in the corner of his eye he saw Clair mount her own pokémon as well. No words were needed; nor would any that they said be heard. They soared through the vibrating air toward the exit, and took to the open skies.
Well outside, Lance was met by a disturbing sight. Blackthorn City was nested deep in the mountains, surrounded by fells low and high; he knew them all well, from the countless little escapades and adventures he'd made here as a child. Now, one of the peaks to the south – the Javelin – was simply gone, its spindly top torn from the landscape and turned to slag and gravel. In its place was an impossible shape, but one that nevertheless could only be one thing.
An enormous dragon, its shining red and purple scales glinting in the evening sun like a bloodstained dagger, was emerging from the ruins of the broken mountain like an oversized hatchling from its egg. Only its head and shoulders were visible, and they nearly matched the other mountaintops in size.
It was a behemoth. It was an avatar of rage. And out of its smoke-bellowing mouth flowed not red fire, but the scarlet burning iron blood of the planet itself. A volcanic tide, washing toward the fragile walls of the city itself with not so much as a smidgen of mercy.
At that moment, Lance was afraid. More so than he had been during the chaos of the Cerulean Incident; more so than he had been during his first, struggling battles against Team Rocket as a young boy; more so than he had been in his entire life. Terrified, and frozen in place atop the mount he had once thought to be among the mightiest of dragons.
Oh, how wrong he had been.
But I am the Champion, he told himself. Fear or not, the Champion must do what only the Champion can get done. I cannot back down from this, no matter how terrifying it may be.
His fear did not relent. If anything, the inevitability of his duty only made it greater – darker, more ominous, more primal. Sweat beaded on his forehead; his poker face was starting to slip. And that, more than most things in his life, was a slippery slope that was ever hard, near impossible, to climb back up.
Damnit, Lance! Look at Clair. She's almost ten years your junior, and she's taking this way better than you are. She's not even a certified Dragon Master! Never mind being Champion – isn't this exactly the sort of thing you're supposed to be good at? Get over there!
And without giving a single thought to his own building sense of panic, he urged his Dragonite straight toward the still-growing leviathan south of Blackthorn. Unsurprisingly, Clair followed, prompting Lance to let out an inaudible sigh.
Great. Now I have to not only solve the crisis and save the city – I have to do it in style, too.
And then, inexplicably, he smiled. Well. Go big or go home, I suppose.
With a part of him groaning at his newfound – and utterly terrible – sense of humor, the Champion of Indigo Plateau tore through the skies above Blackthorn like a red-streaked lance.
-/-/-/
The iron scales and spikes of his arm tore through the mountain like a knife through hot butter. Sparks flew around his body as he crawled out of the enormous mass of stone and gravel, striking his metal hide like hail. Magma flowed through his body like blood; the lava flows that rolled down toward the valley below was not as hot, but that hardly made much difference to its destructive power. He was a force of nature. He was his rage – and his rage was endless.
It didn't help.
He could feel it all slipping, deep down. The wrongness he had cast aside before was starting to make its presence known again, and he could not shut it out. He could not, because if he did, the storm of fire that was his fury would be swallowed whole by the dark, cold abyss that was churning below it.
It was a sea of despair, and Spike could not, for all his newfound power and strength, outrun his own heart with his mind.
He screamed – a terrible piercing sound, like a thousand eagles howling their wildest while someone was sharpening a hundred swords. He screamed, and found words.
“WHERE IS SHE!?”
And to his surprise, there came a strangely familiar answer.
“Who?”
For a moment Spike shuddered, as rage and despair both struggled to push aside his astonishment. Sure enough, there was a small, flapping figure in the distance, circling a nearby peak. It took him several moments to account for his new greater size, and realize that the figure was not much smaller than most of the full-grown dragons he had seen.
“Who?”
But the dragon did not move its mouth while speaking – instead, a much smaller creature straddling its back did. He could hardly believe he hadn't seen it right away; his depth perception was a bloody ruin. The creature raised its claws, cupping its mouth.
“Where is who?”
Clarity came to him, and immediately he felt his body tugging at him. He clung to his rage instinctively – as if his body knew something about this huge new form that he didn't – while trying to find words. It did not take much searching, however. Only one could possibly come out to answer that question. “TWILIGHT.”
He did not scream, this time. Instead, it was a tired, teeth-clenched grumble that shook the air around him like a small earthquake. The smaller dragon struggled to stay aloft, and its rider had obvious difficulties hanging on as well. Eventually, though, the creature regained its balance, and once again raised its hands to shout. “I don't know who that is!”
Resignation bubbled below. Of course it doesn't know. There was no point to any of this. In the end, despite all this I am just as useless as I've always been. There's no point to anything. Desperately, he clung to the last sparks of his anger, fanning them without knowing how, struggling to escape the vast, churning ocean of hopelessness that spread out below him.
It's like flying the balloon, he realized. I'm flying a balloon, there's a hole in the top, and I'm trying to stay in the air by just turning up the fire.
“Listen! I don't know who you're looking for, but these lava flows are going to destroy our city if this goes on! If you don't stop, thousands are going to die!”
The fuel in his balloon went out, and he crashed in the sea of despair.
It was like someone pulling out the plug to a bathtub; he felt the fire in his blood sizzle and die out, while his body writhed and wilted like a burning piece of paper. It was not like the other time he had transformed back – this was, again, something different entirely. Bit by bit, iron became scaly skin, red became green, spikes retracted and every sharp feature on his body became blunt and rounded. All the while, the immense, horrible feeling of being pulled down remained, as his mind kept fighting its futile battle against the depths below it, struggling to the last to keep hold of the power it had only just gained, but already lost.
The churning depths did not care.
A minute later, Spike stood on a small, lonely rock in an enormous pit of gravel, crying like the lone, lost child he was. He felt more useless than ever before, because for a brief moment, he'd had power. For a short few minutes, he'd been strong. And despite that strength – no, because of it, even – all he had managed to accomplish was to threaten the total destruction of a city he'd never seen, while he was throwing a temper tantrum.
But more than anything, he felt small. So, so, small.
For in the end, without Twilight, that was all he was. Spike, the small, weak, useless dragon.
-/-/-/
“Well,” Lance finally said to himself as the dragon vanished into the ground, “That was a lot easier than I'd expected.”
Fear still bubbled inside him, but it was starting to die down bit by bit as his subconscious realized that yes, the threat was indeed gone. Too bad about the dragon, though. I've never seen any pokémon like that, or even close to that size, for that matter. An entirely new dragon-type would have been an amazing discovery, but if it comes at the price of all of Blackthorn, I think I can live without it.
He turned his mount around, and spotted Clair approaching him. His Dragonite was quite a bit faster than her Dragonair, and he'd had to get fairly close to the beast in order to speak with it. Speaking with a pokémon. No, a pokémon speaking back. The Dragon's Tongue is one thing, but it doesn't help much with the words themselves.
He sighed, shaking his head. Well, no use going further down that hole, now. He raised a hand toward his cousin as she quickly drew close. “Well, that's about it, I think. We should-”
Clair shot past him like a bullet, and it took a few seconds before he had his balance back. Riding a Dragonite was quite a bit harder than doing the same with a Dragonair – Dragon Master or not, there simply wasn't much to hold on to unless you used a saddle, and it was hardly possible to just straddle its enormously wide back like one could do with its pre-evolved form.
As so, Clair was well past him when he turned back around, descending toward the enormous hole in the ground that the dragon had vanished into. He thought for a few seconds about going after her, but only a few moments after she'd gone out of view she came back up, speeding toward him like an arrow of blue light.
Mostly blue, at least. Looking carefully, he could see she was holding something in her arms; something green, purple and...
Oh, bloody fucking hell, Lance thought as he turned his mount around and started off toward the Dragon's Den, with one more dragon than he'd brought with him in tow.