//------------------------------//
// Dragon by the Tail 
// Story: Blackacre 
// by Princess Woona 
//------------------------------//

19 June, Y.C. 970
Canterlot

The shiver started at the tip of his tail. Scales shifted as it rippled its way up his back, running along his crest until it reached the base of his neck — and Brownclaw jolted back to full consciousness.
Cold. That was the first thing to register; the cold and the dark. Uncomfortably cold, though that wasn’t saying much for a dragon. Cold-blooded or not, though, he had no doubt that anyone or anything would find the chill in the air to be too much — anything from a pony to a well-insulated ursa to one of the flimsy-winged changelings.
Changelings… why did the quvxa spring to mind? The last thing he remembered was a summons from Sss-Thss, an urgent meeting in the dark of the night to the oldest spire still standing in the Great Lair. He had gone there, and then… and then, what?
Never mind the then; focus on the now.
He wiggled his claws experimentally; the knuckles were stiff, but they moved freely enough. No sign of injury. With a crackling symphony from his joints he hefted himself into an upright position on what felt very much like a smooth rock floor. The rest of him was as stiff as his knuckles but otherwise uninjured. That was a pleasant surprise, given that he had no idea where he was, who had brought him here, or what they wanted.
Brownclaw stood up slowly, lest there be a low ceiling; there was nothing. The last few complaining cracks from his joints echoed dully; he couldn’t tell the size of the space by sound alone. Nor could he see anything, despite the excellent night vision all dragons shared.
Well, that was fine. Dragons shared another, more practical, trait: breathing fire. He relaxed his jaw, felt the familiar phosphine tickle at the back of his throat… and then nothing. All right then; he didn’t need a great bout of flame; a trickle would do just as well. Again he strained, and again nothing.
An enchantment; it had to be. Especially something like this; taking away his flame? It was as if a leg had fallen asleep: he knew it was still there, it had to still be there, but shards if he could move it of his own free will.
Not that the rest of this place was helping much. Or, at least, as much of this place as he could figure out. There was a floor, and it seemed to be large enough, but that was it; there was no light. Not low light, not starlight, not even the faintest bit one might get from the night sky on an overcast new moon. Nothing, absolutely nothing; it was like being inside a mountain.
And then there was the cold.
It was humid, as if there should be water dripping somewhere. Nothing else justified this piercing dampness that chilled him to the core. But no, this place was as silent as it was dark, broken only by his own shallow breathing and the sound of ichor pounding through his temples.
He tried to shout, but his tongue was sluggish and his voice came out a raspy croak, not even enough to echo properly in this cave. If it was a cave; it felt like one, but who could tell in this dark? And dragons knew caves; they didn’t tend to be cold and slightly damp and have an odd warm patch off to one side —
The patch shifted. Instantly he was on full alert, crouching slightly and tensing up against an enemy that wasn’t there, straining to see the dark, to hear the silence. The patch moved again, and now he was sure that it was a torch. A torch, it had to be. Something aflame: if there was anything dragons knew better than caves it was fire.
But what was fire doing shielded by darkness? How was it moving? There was magic in this room already; could this be one more trick? No, it couldn’t be. The warmth had moved almost all the way around him now. This wasn’t magic; this was —
“Hello.”
— worse.
For a moment he froze. He hadn’t heard anything in this place besides his own faint breathing; if someone else was here he would have heard. Or smelled. Or seen. It had to be his imagination.
“No,” said the voice again, slightly amused. The warmth grew, and he realized that the speaker was reading his face like a book. In total darkness.
“Who…” he struggled. Shells, his tongue was dry. How long had he been here?
“Who are you?”
The heat flashed into light, and for a moment he was blinded. His inner eyelids snapped shut but the afterimage still burned in his eyes: a figure wreathed in flame. After a moment it faded, and he blinked a few times to clear his eyes against the sudden light of… an alicorn?
“You may call me Corona.”
Her mane was afire, tongues of flame that snapped and licked at the air. Burnished steel greaves offset her tawny coat, matched by a wicked-looking collarpiece. Ruby eyes sparkled under not a crown but a circlet; unadorned by gems or other settings, it was a very simple ornament, radiating a dangerously exquisite elegance. In fact, that much could be said about the rest of her, every part of which was slightly sharper, slightly harder, slightly deadlier than any pony had a right to be.
Dragons might not use magic, but they had other skills, and one of them was deception. Any dragon worth his hide knew how to spot a fake or fraud at a hundred paces, either to reinforce his own sense of honor or undermine someone else’s. Brownclaw had seen enough of Equestria to identify most of its species, and while the creature in front of him looked an awful lot like an alicorn, he couldn’t shake the feeling that she was something far worse — and, at the moment, staring him down with a slightly haughty look.
“Corona,” he said, forcing himself to stand up straight. Something told him a defensive stance wouldn’t do him any good here. “I am Brownclaw, wyrm of the Badlands, attaché to Sss-Thss, First Claw of the Hierarch, Dragon of the Great Lair.”
She accepted this with a nod. “I know.”
On the one claw, it never hurt to at least attempt politeness. Especially not to the being who he was fairly certain was his captor. On the other, though… it didn’t look as if she was paying him much heed; her attention was focused on a table off to the side of the room.
The room! He stole a glance at the rest of it. He was right; between the smooth granite floors and rough-hewn walls it looked an awful lot like a cave. With one exception: there was no entrance. Just four walls lit by the dull glow of the alicorn as flickers of flame rolled off her mane.
“What do you want from me?”
Corona paused and turned towards him, and a shiver ran down his tail.
“No petty threats or demands for release?” she asked. “How efficient of you.”
“I won’t try what I know won’t work,” he ventured, doing his best to maintain a level composure.
She arched a coal-black eyebrow, held his gaze for a moment, and turned back towards the table, where he caught a glimpse of the barest glint of metal. She took a few steps alongside it, hooves echoing with the dull clink of armor, idly scanning the table and its contents.
“There are tales,” he started.
No response.
“Tales of Celestia’s fiery dungeons,” he continued, doing his best to keep his composure, “of places deep within the mountain. And other rumors still, of her… intendant.”
That earned him an upward twitch of her lip.
“Fiery dungeons,” she said, tasting the label. “I can see how that might happen.” Corona laughed, a rich sound. “I like it.”
Brownclaw was silent. Somehow, he got the distinct impression that he would be hard-pressed to share in that laughter.
“I do wonder how, though,” she said absently, hovering a hoof over the table and selecting an item.
He blinked.
“Rumors are rare enough beasts in Equestria, and those that do live often don’t have the legs to roam very far,” she said by way of explanation, turning back to him. “And so I wonder how they make it all the way down to the Badlands.”
He blinked again, caught off guard by what sounded eerily like genuine curiosity.
Another glint of metal and he realized she had selected a scalpel. It floated slightly as he gaped, delicately hovering an inch or two above her forehoof.
“I wonder,” she said again in a perfectly innocent voice, staring him down all the while.
“There… there are merchants,” he stuttered. “Merchants that come to the Badlands through the passes or over the Macintosh Hills from the deserts. Ponies can’t patrol all of the desert border, and things slip through the cracks.”
“But it’s not much,” he added quickly. “A rumor here or there. Gold, artefacts, other treasure to bargain with dragons who will hear them out. Nothing that compromises your security.”
The scalpel started a lazy rotation, cutting noiselessly through the air.
“But sometimes they tell us things, of course,” he said, licking his lips. “It’s not us doing it. We’re not asking for anything. But if a griffon flies over and offers a map, or a set of books, or papers, or something, dragons won’t refuse them!”
Corona plucked the scalpel out of the air, examined it, and gave the slightest of frowns.
“No, I don’t think so,” she murmured to herself.
“And, and it’s them that’re doing it,” he added quickly. “Not me. I don’t have a choice. I’m just a wyrm; we just do what the others, what Sss-Thss, tells us, tells me, to do.”
She set the scalpel down on the table and idly ran a hoof over the other implements on display. He craned his neck to get a better look at the neat rows of polished metal, the shiver down his rail returning with the realization that most of them were bladed and none of them looked friendly. He only recognized a few of the tools, but that was enough.
“That’s what it is, really,” he said, scrambling to find something to say. “You have to know your place. We — we have to know our place, is what I mean; not you, of course. Er. We have to know our place, know whose stomping grounds we’re on, know who they respect and who they don’t, know who to step aside for and who —”
“Your hand,” she said, picking up a robust-looking chunk of metal.
“My what?”
“Your hand,” she repeated icily, turning to face him.
Despite his better judgment, he raised his left arm, quivering slightly. He could feel the heat radiating off of her as she stepped closer, closer….
She didn’t touch his hand, but it froze as if she had. She examined it, then the device, then the hand again —
“Too big,” she declared absently, drawing back.
“Too… big?”
“I do not have much call for thumbscrews,” she said, gesturing at the device with a hoof before replacing it on the table.
“Not much call,” he echoed in a hollow tone.
“Juvenile hoofscrew should fit your claws, though,” she murmured to herself, continuing down the table.
“My claws,” he said again. “My claws… claws are sharp, sharp because they train us. Yes, they train us,” he affirmed, more confident in this line of discussion. “Each wing commander is responsible for training their own troops, personally. And if they don’t do a good job, then another commander could declare a Trial, defeat them in combat, take their troops.”
Corona said nothing.
“But it’s single combat with the commander, so a strong commander can do a bad job and still win the Trial,” he said, feeling his way through the sentence. “So… so the strongest field commanders sometimes have the weakest troops. And it always works out because we — because they’re strong, and no one stands against dragons for long.”
She picked up another object, with a stubby handle rigged to a large gear and a small cage-like outcropping at one end, and again glanced at him for a moment of contemplation. 
“No… not this one.”
“They’ve got a bunch of lairs all along the Macintosh Hills, mostly, because they know you aren’t going to try sending anything across the Hayseed Swamps, even though that’s closer to the Great Lair.”
Again she picked something up from the table. A broad-headed clamp with a wicked-looking barb on one end and a razor along the other, it bore no resemblance to any of the other implements. He recognized it quickly enough, though, as he had seen one before: buried in the bottom of a chest in Sss-Thss’ private chambers.
Brownclaw had made the mistake of asking what purpose it served. At the time he wasn’t sure which was more unnerving, the fact that the elder dragon could give such a finely-tailored description of the excruciating process of scale extraction, or the fact that the description seemed to have come from personal experience. Either way, that was one tool he had hoped to never see again, much less have brandished at him by this… creature.
“Yes,” said Corona to herself, the slightest of nods sending the fiery flickers of her mane into the now-dry air. “This will do.”
It was all he could do to keep talking in the face of the alicorn’s advance, but he could only rattle off a dozen or so lairs before she was directly in front of him, her mane searing its way into his eyes. When she spoke, she addressed him directly, her voice taking on a silky steel tone.
“Step back.”
He wasn’t about to let her repeat herself. He stepped back — and smacked his heels into a cold slab, the sound ringing dully in the room.
“Wrist up,” she commanded.
He didn’t comply with that order, largely because he was using his hands to feel around what seemed very much like a solid slab of metal directly behind him. Where had it come from? Somehow, that didn’t seem to matter much at the moment.
Corona’s horn glowed a burnt gold, whipping his left arm up and back against his will. With a crisp click he felt a shackle snap home, the metal burning cold against his wrist.
“Wait!” he shouted, though he might as well be yelling at the sun for all the good it did; she stepped over to his other wrist entirely unperturbed.
“I can — I can show you! Give me a map and I’ll mark out all their positions! Sss-Thss gets a lot of reports and they all go through me; I can show them all to you!”
He could feel the warm tingle of power around his right wrist, but it held short for a moment as the alicorn considered his offer.
“Lots of reports,” he repeated with what he knew must be an air of desperation, but at that moment he cared more about his hand than his tone. “And I can mark them all down for you but I need a hand for that,” he added, wiggling his claws against the firm push of the magical field.
A moment dragged on for a year, and then the force around his arm faded.
“Mark,” she commanded, and there was a pencil in his hand. He started scrawling things down at once, trying to get as much information from those reports onto paper as possible. He must have read thousands of them — shards, he had written hundreds more — and this was how that information mattered?
Well, fine; he didn’t care. It was his life on the line, and with one wrist shackled by an alicorn out of his nightmares, he wasn’t about to complain.
He had just finished marking up the lair that Skath had built last year when he felt an uncomfortable warmth wrap around his legs. He looked back to Corona as she stood her ground, stately, regal, and utterly sane.
“You write with your hands,” said Corona with the slightest shrug. “Not your legs.”
A moment of silence, broken only by the lapping tongues of her burning mane. She glanced at the extractor, still gleaming in the air.
“No, that’s right,” she said to herself. “There’s no need for this.”
She walked the extractor back to the table, paused for a moment, and caught his eye with a hard gaze that cut neatly through the layers of indecision piling up in Brownclaw’s mind. At once he bent back to the map, marking lairs and hunting fields and roads and anything else that he could think of. Anything to take his mind off his current situation, take it away from the exquisitely deadly alicorn all too near him.
And, for a time, it worked; all he could think of were those damned reports, the facts and figures, places and names, the data that was keeping him alive. He was focused on the map, but not so much that he couldn’t hear Corona again murmuring to herself as she replaced the extractor and ran a hoof over some of the other implements.
“Not yet.”