The snow was melting in Draconia. Rivulets of cold, clear blue sprang from the patchy white blanket spread over the mountains and from the sheer faces of glaciers under daylight’s warmth, growing into frothing rivers latticed over the lowlands. Even in the dark and frozen north the sun visited occasionally.
Some times more literally than others. Celestia enjoyed the opportunity to stretch her wings, even if she had cheated a bit to get from the changeling hive to the dragon lands in the space of one night. Draconia itself had a rougher and more rugged beauty than her own Equestria, more appropriate to its inhabitants. Despite the far-off glint of sun on scale it was a pleasantly quiet and peaceful flight, giving her plenty of time to reflect and gather her thoughts together.
For Scar, she’d need them.
Of course, Scar wasn’t the only dragon she needed to see. His brother, the Lord of Earth and Water, was just as important as Scar himself to her inquiries, if not moreso. She knew Scar. She’d spoken and coordinated and connived and fought with and against him for centuries, but Moss, as Scar called him, had slammed down an iron curtain when he’d gained power, closing off Draconia from the world, and Celestia had never even met him face to face. She had met the ouroboros, but it only existed in the heart of the world, and had no connection to the dragons themselves. Besides, it was impossible to hold a conversation with.
She made no effort at stealth while approaching Eyrie Dracones. Scar would have known she was coming the moment she crossed the border, and he was the only one she would have cared to surprise. So of course she attracted attention as she drew near the enormous terraces of the mountain city, bright-scaled forms circling her curiously. There wasn’t the fear that the changelings had shown, but they were dragons. Even if they knew who and what she was, draconic pride and draconic arrogance would drive them to keep their dignity.
A guard appeared before her in a swirl of gold and grey armor, trumpeting challenge. “Halt and be recognized!” He thundered, glaring at her with slit-pupiled eyes.
She regarded him for a moment, a faint smile playing about her muzzle. “If you don’t already know, my name will mean nothing. But Scar knows who I am, and by now I am sure he is expecting me.”
“You will refer to our Lord of Air and Fire with respect,” the dragon growled, reaching out for her with one huge paw.
Sunlight caught on the edges of her feathers like soft rain, and her eyes flashed. She didn’t speak a word or move more than the beating of her wings, but the full presence of Sol Invictus bore down on the hapless dragon, and he paused.
“I have been friends with him for a very long time,” she said quietly. “And Scar wears that injury with pride. There is no disrespect between us. So please, take me to him.”
He stared at her for a moment, then finally tossed his head in a surprisingly equine gesture of frustration. “Very well,” he growled. “Come with me.”
A dragon flying through the skies over Canterlot would have caused widespread panic at the very least, but an alicorn over Eyrie Dracones garnered no more than disdainful curiosity. The two situations were not a precise mirror, but Celestia felt that the dragons should be something more than indifferent.
They went downward, but not far, for the citadel that topped Eyrie Dracones was nearly level with the peak of the mountain it was built into. The courtyard alone could have held Canterlot in its entirety, scalloped and sculpted and landscaped with water and lava, a strange blend of plant and crystal growing along the canals. Celestia’s hooves touched stone in front of an enormous entryway, tall enough to swallow Luna’s tower and guarded by two great steel slabs that made pretensions at being doors.
She strode ahead without waiting for the guard. She knew the way, and it was a long enough walk for dragons, let alone ponies. Here she drew more attention, draconic nobility staring as she passed through the rainbowed multitude of shining scales. The guard trailed uncertainly behind, giving her a thin veneer of authority, and Celestia’s confident walk completed the facade. None challenged her as she swept through the grand concourse and into the throne room.
It was far different than the worksponylike space where Celestia held court. Knots of dragons argued and debated, lounging in padded bowl-like seats and taking puffs from hookahs the size of carts. Runners carried messages between groups, offer and counteroffer, bribe and counterbribe, while here and there scribes recorded industriously in their books, some of paper and some of metal.
Musicians played in the background, sharp claws plucking at steel strings while fiery breath heated the instrument’s metal in short buffs, incorporating the changing tones and the unique sound of cooling metal into aimless melodies that never quite tipped over into discord. Dominating the left of the cruciform hall was a wide ring of water with a lush island in the center, filled with northern trees and flowers, while the right had a red ring of lava with a crystalline island, the minerals mimicking their plant counterparts.
At the very end of the massive chamber Scar lounged on an iron throne, presiding over the bedlam with a lazy insouciance. He wasn’t the focused core, like Celestia was when in her throne room, but his presence suffused the stone, the light, the conversation. There was no doubt that he was the beating heart of Draconia, and when he spoke everyone else was silent.
“Celestia!” He boomed as she crossed the threshold. “My dear friend! What an unexpected surprise.”
All heads turned to look at her, giving her a spectrum of both color and reaction. Surprise, surmise, and suspicion confronted her, but Scar’s welcome cleared the way for her. Her hooves rang on the the stone in the sudden silence as she stepped forward, picking her way toward the ancient throne. “Scar,” she acknowledged, her muzzle curling into a faint smile. “I would have sent word, but that would have made it official.”
“Ah, and if it were official they wouldn’t let us have any fun.” Scar slithered bonelessly off the throne and onto his feet, waiting as she strode down the long stretch of the hall. His blind eye looked out over the assembled dragons while the seeing one twinkled at her. The silence, if anything, grew with each step she took, until she stood before Scar, looking up at his massive head. “So what brings you to my fair city?” He prompted.
“I must speak with you. And Moss.” That broke the silence, finally, a soft wave of reaction that didn’t quite break into words.
Scar’s cheerful smile grew into a toothy grin. “Oho? Well, I suppose that is not a conversation meant for this audience.” He looked up at the crowd, twin curls of grey smoke leaking from his nostrils. “I shall be back later, then. Do try to refrain from breaking anything - or anyone - while I am gone.”
He turned and flowed back around the throne, moving less as a creature of flesh and blood than as a gust of wind. Celestia followed, familiar enough with his humour to know what was coming. She went airborne with a flick of her wings, and a gale howled out of nowhere, flinging both her and Scar upward and through an opening in the back wall, just barely missing the balcony before the wind deposited them on a lush carpet of grass in a brilliant mountaintop garden.
Slowly flowing lava pushed back the chill of the thin air, though neither she nor Scar strictly needed the heat. The garden itself had more of the characteristic half-plant, half-mineral growth of Eyrie Dracones, but the glade showed signs of Scar’s other interests. One of the steel-stringed instruments stood on a stand next to a pool of water, and a canvas lay discarded in a corner, half-shredded by frustrated claws. Celestia affected not to notice as Scar turned to her, all the humor gone from his expression.
“So,” he said. “All three of you are unbound.”
“Not precisely.” Celestia shook her head. “Twilight and Luna, yes. They wear no chains that they did not don themselves. But I -”
“You are out and about, and not even raising the sun in the mornings,” Scar said pointedly. “I can tell.”
“True,” she admitted. “But I’m not here from simple wanderlust.”
“Celestia,” he said gently. “I don’t believe you have done a spontaneous thing since they put that crown on your head. If you’re here, you have very good reason, and I am of course at your disposal. So much as I can be.”
“Thank you,” she said quietly. Unlike the other gods she’d seen, Scar was a friend and sort of co-conspirator, even if he could never be an ally. “And Moss?”
“I can bring him.” He shrugged his massive shoulders. “But neither you nor I can force him to speak to you.”
“That can wait. Perhaps you can satisfy my questions yourself.”
“Questions, hmm?” He paced over to a lounging sofa, warmed by the sun, and slid into it, half-reclining. “They must be questions for you and not Equestria. How long has it been since you could separate one from the other?”
“L'État, c'est moi?” Celestia shook her head. “I’ve always kept myself separate from Equestria, if sometimes only just. Else I could not have engineered an Equestria without me, as it is now.”
“Without you, perhaps, but as you said yourself, it was your planning. Your design, even now.”
“Which is part of the problem,” Celestia said wryly. “Equestria has been running to my design for so long that it has not had a chance to become something else.”
“That old saw again?” He lifted an eyeridge at her. “Surely you didn’t come all this way to cry on my shoulder.”
“Of course not.” She shook her head at Scar in admonishment. “I am trying to decide whether or not I have made a mistake.”
“With Twilight Sparkle?”
“Not just her. All of it.” Celestia settled down on the soft grass, looking at Scar. “I committed myself to all the gambles I took centuries ago, because I knew Equestria needed two gods. But now that the time is at hoof, I wonder if I did not miss another option.”
“Knowing you, that’s ominous.” His tone was light, but his good eye was keen, focused steadily on the alicorn before him.
“You shouldn’t be concerned. You already thought of it yourself.”
He growled softly, a dragon’s snarl that was felt more than heard. “Then I am more concerned. Spike is my loophole. My escape hatch. My retirement policy. And that is dependant on you.”
“Twilight now,” she replied, merely correcting, not disagreeing. “Her magic hatched him and while she and I raised him, Spike falls under her auspice and not mine. When the time comes, if it comes, for him to challenge you, she will have to haul that yoke and not I.”
“I see.” He growled again, but this time it was more content. “So long as you are honoring our bargain. But then, I do not see what you are intending.”
“Twilight is a god now,” she said. “And she will make mistakes. All of us do. But she is not constrained as we are, so her mistakes may be...broader. And her mistakes will affect the whole of Equestria. Yes, she keeps Luna whole and sane, but what will she do to the rest of Equestria? They never asked for her. They never asked for Nightmare Moon, for that matter. The question I must ask is whether there should be gods at all.”
Scar stared at her for a long, silent moment, then snorted softly. “And if the answer is no, what do you intend? To erase all the gods of this planet, peel it from its source of magic and hurl it into the void?”
“Possibly,” Celestia said calmly. “It has been done. But I need to understand we gods better than I do before I can consider anything. So I come with questions.”
“What questions could possibly be worthy of such a goal?” His serious expression slid into the more usual smirk.
“What are you to your subjects?”
“Well. That is a good one.” He considered. “Dragons think themselves close to gods to begin with, so my brother and I are not as far distant from our subjects as you and Luna - and Twilight - are from yours. Perhaps if they were less arrogant we would be something more, something to compare with Sun and Moon.” There was no bitterness in his voice, merely calm fact.
“But we are more. Stronger. More powerful. Perhaps more intelligent, and certainly less petty. Without us they would collapse into squabbling and Draconia would be dust and ash in a century. There’s too much of the need to show strength ingrained in them for anything else. We give them a strength they can depend on without grinding them into nothingness ourselves. Something to strive against that will not yield.”
“But if that’s how dragons are, how do you possibly expect Spike and Twilight to change them? I don’t believe either of them could play the part of the tyrant.”
“We are all defined by our limits. Moss and I provide a conflict-shaped home for them. We can do no other.” Scar shook his head. “You are proof enough that strength does not need to walk in step with force.”
“You don’t seem to have that problem with me.” Celestia’s tone was mild, but her eyes were sharp and challenging.
Scar put his claw to the long path of ridged flesh winding along his muzzle. “Ah, but you did defeat me. I tested my strength against you once, and that has satisfied me.”
“So I did.” Celestia had no scars from that encounter, but she found her hoof pressed against her muzzle anyway, in sympathy for Scar’s namesake. “But you seem to agree that there should not be gods at all, if we keep our subjects so constrained.”
“Oh no.” He showed his teeth. “We are far more than just parents or guardians, aren’t we? We are a truth. And perhaps that should have been my answer. For good and for ill, we are what is true in this world and without us those truths would shatter into a thousand, thousand pieces. And where would that leave them? Scattered, lost, alone.”
“That seems to be a theme,” Celestia sighed. “I have already spoken with Chrysalis, née Rosedust, and They of the Zebras. Would you like to hear what they have to say?”
“How could I resist? We gods are like the most distant of family. We know of each other, but we never talk or write.”
“Would Moss?”
Scar wrinkled his muzzle in brief thought, then flowed out of the couch. “Hold,” he said, and was gone.
Celestia waited patiently, taking a closer look at the massive draconic sitar and watching koi swim in the pool. Of the brothers, Moss was more conservative and stubborn, reflecting his charge of earth, while Scar was more quixotic and impulsive. She deeply respected Scar’s intelligence, but Moss might have some more reasoned insights on the nature of godhood. If he would speak.
There was nothing to announce the arrival of the dragon brothers other than their sudden presence, entering the garden side by side. Celestia turned to get her first view of the Lord of Earth and Water. She’d had his description from Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy, of course, but it had been no more than a welter of confused impressions.
There was a definite family resemblance between the two, but where Scar was lithe and graceful, Moss was bulky and powerful, solid as a mountain and nearly as large. He eyed her with clear disfavor, but crossed over the expanse of manicured lawn toward her without hesitation. Scar resumed his seat, but Moss disdained the furniture to lower himself onto the soft grass near the pool, not far from where she stood. “Do you have any idea,” he growled. “How terrifying you are to the rest of us?”
Celestia lifted her eyebrows at him. “Do tell.”
“We’re supposed to keep to our people, our borders.” He waved his claws at the garden they were in, representing Draconia. “But you send your sister and your student to involve us in some insane metaphysical scheme. You break all the rules of godhood by arranging for a mortal to ascend, and now you’ve completely slipped your leash.” He glowered at Scar. “This is precisely why I cut off contact with ponykind. They’re far too dangerous.”
Scar tilted his head, regarding Moss. “You said it was because they were too weak and unbecoming of our attention.”
“An appeal to draconic arrogance.” Moss waved it away. “If they ever saw that simple ponies were more powerful than they, it’d shatter their world - and us along with it! And then there’d be nobody to pick up the pieces.”
“Except ponies,” Celestia put in pointedly.
Moss turned the glare on her. “Precisely.”
“Scar seemed to think you wouldn’t speak to me,” Celestia observed, her head tilted slightly as she eyed Moss.
“He has an exaggerated idea of my habits,” Moss snorted. “But were I at the head instead of the tail, it would be different.”
Celestia merely nodded. She well knew how easily it was to misjudge someone you had known for thousands of years. “So I take it you think gods are necessary.”
“Of course. That’s why we’re here.” He shook his head at her. “They need us. Mortals are squabbling, fractious children otherwise. Even the wisest never really understand what can happen over generations and see beyond their own desires.”
“That’s comprehensive enough,” she allowed, casting a look at Scar. He had a scowl to match his brother’s, albeit for a very different reason. It was a strange mirror of her relationship with Luna, and she was grateful that ponies preferred harmony to the dragon’s serial dissent. “Though it begs the question of how much we have changed them. When Rosedust became Chrysalis, all of her subjects changed too. And became even more dependant on their god. What were dragons before you? What were ponies before me? Perhaps by our heights we bring them lower than they should be.”
“Has anything like that happened with Twilight’s ascension?” Scar asked, preempting further sour words from Moss.
“No. Whatever effects there may be are more subtle.” Celestia shook her head. “If we are, as you say, truths, it is true that she went from mortal to god. I would think that would broaden what ponies are capable of, not narrow it.”
“Perhaps she changed gods, instead.” Moss growled. “Why else would you be asking these questions?”
Celestia’s world shuddered down to its very roots. It had been a long time since she had suffered a real surprise, not just the unexpected but the unexpectable, and if she had been standing it would have sent her to her knees. The world swam in her vision as half-formed thoughts and concepts and ideas wrestled with her. It seemed as if she was going down for the third time when Scar’s voice cut through the haze. “Celestia!”
She looked up, and noted absently that both the dragons were on the far side of the garden, protecting their eyes - or eye, in Scar’s case - with a foreleg, and the iron couch was beginning to glow and slump. Calmly, neatly, and precisely she gathered up her spilled power and brought it back where it belonged, dimming the novae incandescence and stilling the fiery lashing of her tail and mane.
“I am profoundly sorry,” she said, looking sadly about the ruined garden as she picked herself delicately out of a cobweb-cracked crater of black glass. The grass was gone, mere ash scorched on baked earth, and the pond boiled dry. The crystal flora had survived, but its greener counterpart was in flames. “I...have not had a shock like that for millennia.”
She drew another glower from Moss, but no words as he padded forward and stretched out a claw. Water poured from it into the pool, though there was no reviving the fish, and the ground shivered as his power rippled outward. The hard-baked earth churned back into moist, rich soil while Scar put out the fires with a soft ripple of presence. A soft zephyr brought a procession of wind-borne seeds streaming down from the sky, and where they touched earth they sprouted. Celestia watched as, working in quiet concert, the Lord of Air and Fire and the Lord of Earth and Water brought the garden back to life.
“I am sorry.” She said again, and a touch more formally than before. “I have not lost control like that for millennia. I had allowed for understanding when I began asking my questions, but I was not prepared for revelation. If there are any reparations I can make, you need only ask.”
“We’ve done worse, in our time,” Scar said mildly, but his eye was wary as he watched her.
“If you intend to have any more epiphanies,” Moss growled. “Please go elsewhere.”
Celestia bowed her head, chastened. “I shall. Thank you both for your time, and your words.”