-- From the journal of Sworn Shield --
Five griffons and a unicorn alighted on the crags. Steel gleamed moonlit at their belts. Snow muffled every stone. One by one they stole up to the ridgeline. A sharp northern wind cut amongst the rocks and stabbed at their eyes, sweeping clouds of vapor breath out behind them.
From on high Luna’s moon cast a disapproving eye. Her pale gaze swept the land from horizon to horizon. Five of the figures felt that gaze all too keenly. They cleaved to the shadows and nursed guilty consciences. Only the pony ignored it. She stood alone, bathed in moonlight.
A valley stretched out below, strewn with fields of ice and broken rock. Out of that valley rose spires needle-sharp, and above them stacked cliff shelves akin to colossal stairs, all layered fifty feet deep in snow. Every pair of eyes scaled those walls, higher and higher, alive with dread and longing.
Above it all towered a prison built for dragons.
The Glowing Mountain loomed astride the shoulders of the cliffs, incandescent as a lighthouse. A false dawn welled from within its crown like a beacon into the heavens. The clouds above it burned an angry, roiling orange. Every inch of the arctic landscape huddled beneath its enormity, just as every inch dripped with the malicious irony of Discord. What could be more appropriate a prison for immortal beasts of fire than one wrought of ice and stone? No one knew how many dragons were trapped inside. Was it their entire race, or did some yet hide in the far corners of the earth?
The leader of the griffons crept forward. He hulked over the others, clad in leather and sooty mail with a wingspan to dwarf them all. One taloned hand went to the axe at his belt. His long, cruel beak was trapped in a smirk by misfortune of its design. It was a hard image for a coward to live up to.
“We need to move quickly,” he said.
“They won’t wake,” piped up the shortest of his fellows, raising a talon. He licked his stub of a beak, not quite believing his own words. “No need to rush.”
The others rustled their wings and looked to one another for reassurance. They were warriors all, save the smallest of their number, and even he was bound by their honor. But not a one could bring themselves to boast. Not in this place, not when all sense bade them flee. Each one saw the same uncertainty in the eyes of the others.
But the pony amongst them looked to no one. The cold seemed hardly to affect her. Her eyes remained on the mountain and its burning clouds, only slightly squinted against the driving wind. Her flanks were bare, as she’d left her saddlebags behind. The cutie mark emblazoned there was a knight’s helm with lowered visor and flying purple plume, the same color as the mane and tail she kept braided.
Her spiral horn was further proof of noble birth, yet she wore a patchwork of furs and oiled ringmail under a saddle of battered leather. Unusual dress for a pony to be sure, perhaps even unsettling, but practical all the same. At her side hung an undecorated sword. Lashed to the scabbard was a metal crest, her family’s ancestral seal. It was the one thing of importance she still carried.
“This is the last chance to change your mind, pony.” The leader of the band glanced back south. It would be a hard day of flying back to the Eyries. He would gladly make the journey in half that time if only they could start immediately.
The unicorn’s nostrils flared and the wind quailed before her. “I’ve come too far to turn back now.”
She thought little of the griffons. Five years she had wandered, and now at last she stood at journey’s end. Only a valley of rocks stood between her father’s House and redemption. Nothing would stand in her way. She’d drag herself back across the Crystal Mountains on broken hooves, if necessary.
Without willing it, her thoughts turned to home. She longed to feel the warmth of the hearthfire again, to experience the love of family and the familiar smells of her childhood; scented candles, warm baths, clean sheets, and good pony bread. She remembered her father, and their dutiful servants, and the taste of wine. Most of all she remembered the cool breeze of Luna’s nights across ballroom floors, and the warmth of Celestia’s sun on tournament lists. The sudden memories twisted like a knife in her chest, surprising her with their sharpness. She took a moment to lock them back inside the secret corner of her heart where they had slept for so many years.
“Lady Tilter?” beseeched the smallest of the griffons, always polite. He reached out as if to touch her shoulder, then shrank away. He was only barely her height, with a delicate little beak and feathers as soft as his voice. His only blade was encrusted with gems and seldom touched. The others called him Bantam, but she suspected they meant it in insult and not as his real name.
“Not ‘Lady.’” Tilter kept her eyes resolute on the mountain ahead even though the wind stung them to tears. “I have not been a lady nor a dame in a long, long time.”
He pressed on. That was unusual for him. But then, desperation pushed even cravens to audacity. “Please, let’s go back. This place is... It’s dangerous.”
Tilter had already made up her mind years ago. This time she turned and met his eyes. “And I am dangerous too. You may fly home if you wish.”
Bantam swallowed and seemed to shrink into his downy neck feathers. He looked to his older brother Voehorn, the leader. There was pleading in his expression. Voehorn found his courage against the backdrop of his brother’s cowardice. He puffed out his chest and widened his smirk, then slapped Bantam on the back.
“Not scared of a few sleeping dragons, are you? Don’t be pathetic. We’ll be rich after this. Rich as kings!”
One of the other warriors did not agree. He crouched behind the group, crank-bow crushed to his breast. His eyes were wild. “Rich as kings?” He scoffed, voice on the edge of cracking. “Dead like dead kings, more like. Forget it. Forget this whole mess! I’m not risking it!”
He backed away, waving one clawed hand. “You lot can go ahead without me.”
Some of the color went out of Voehorn’s face, though his smirk remained fixed. It was almost rictus now. He threw himself at the other griffon as a drowning pony might scramble to keep hold of sinking driftwood.
“Wait, Gerfried!” Voehorn spread his wings and arms. The wind tore at his feathers. “Surely you know how bitter you’ll be when we’re all back at the Eyrie splitting your share. Think about this!”
But Gerfried was already coiling to leap into the wind, wings spread. “I have thought about it.” He stopped just long enough to stab a talon in the direction of each griffon. “And if you took a second to think about it too, you’d follow me!”
He launched into the air and was away like an arrow. If he said anything else, it was lost to the wind.
Strange. Tilter had thought Gerfried looked the hardest of them all, full of a sincere, quiet toughness that overshadowed Voehorn in every way. Perhaps she’d been wrong. Or perhaps the grey griffon was simply the wisest of them. That thought troubled her, so she excised it from her mind.
“Yeah, well, you’d have just lost it all at cards anyway!” Voehorn whipped out his axe and made as if to throw it, then stopped himself. He sputtered, stomped, and fumed, but to Tilter it was clearly all for show. “I always knew you were craven! Cud-chewer!”
His curses chased after Gerfried on the howling wind, but the grey griffon flew faster. He was already gone. Their courage flew with him.
The four remaining griffons exchanged glances and turned south. Bantam furled and unfurled his wings. He would follow his brother’s lead, and even Voehorn was all too ready to fly home. Tilter could see them wilting right before her eyes. Would they fall apart here, now, on the cusp of success? It was clear their code of honor was no longer enough.
Tilter ground her hoof in the snow and lit up her horn. The magic tingled at the base of her neck, calm and precise. She loosened her sword in its scabbard, wrapping it in a sheath of light. The message was clear.
“Pathetic. All of you.” She hardly needed to force a deeper scowl. It came naturally. “You call yourselves warriors? Warriors don’t slink away from danger.”
Voehorn’s smirk almost managed to become a snarl. Almost. His talons tightened around the axe. Then he softened, casting his eyes from one griffon to another. They looked to him with bated breath, desperate for his decision. Tilter knew what they were thinking; please let us turn back. Please let us turn back.
But Tilter had gotten the measure of his pride. He glared daggers at her and shoved the axe back into his belt.
“Fine.” He snarled over Tilter. Her magic cast a silver glow across his face. “But I won’t carry you.”
Another griffon took her in his claws and they leapt from the crags, diving low to fly beneath the winds. Tilter could feel the fear and resentment grow in her companions as they drew closer to their goal. She wondered if they’d drop her now, to let her fall screaming to a cruel death below. Nobody would ever know. But perhaps they worried that her magic might somehow slow a fall. Most griffons feared unicorns, and magic in general.
They landed where the lines of the mountain converged sharp on its highest cliff. The ledge was built for landings, wide and flat, an anvil towering over other shelves below. Misshapen spires surrounded it on two sides like vast teeth with snowdrift gums. The crags where they’d started now formed a rim of squiggles far away. High above towered the mountain’s violent peak.
Bantam pointed upward, shivering. “There.” His beak chattered.
Tilter followed his talon. Sure enough, her eyes found the cleft in the mountainside wherein hid the tunnel entrance. It was the only safe way into the mountain, at least as far as the griffons knew. Anything was safer than descending into the glowing abyss atop the crown, for while magic might have conceived a way to bypass lava, it was not lava that shone in the mountain.
“A deadly barrier seals its mouth,” the griffons claimed. “Vast and brighter than the brightest magelights.”
She turned to little Bantam. It was hard to believe that he was the only griffon to ever enter through the hidden passage in the mountainside. His brothers had been too cowardly to enter themselves, and he too cowardly to refuse their dares. Oh, how he must have quaked and cried. She pitied him for that, but she checked her sympathy there.
Despite herself, Tilter felt fear worming its way down her throat. She drew air in through her nose and grit her teeth. “Move.”
The griffons checked their weapons. Two of them loaded crankbows with slender bolts of iron; one of these pulled out a knife and clenched it in his beak. Voehorn snatched up a shortspear that another had carried for him. Bantam lit a little iron lantern, talons trembling. His breath puffed orange around it.
Tilter resisted the temptation to draw her sword. It remained secure in the scabbard. She had no need of a weapon’s false comfort. With luck, none of them would.
They climbed. Ice encased every surface, ribbed and invisibly slick. Bantam led the way with lantern held high. Tilter followed close behind, dragging herself over the roughness of the stones. Her braided mane lashed at her back and flanks in the wind. She scraped swirling snow from her eyes.
The cleft went deep, a cave in its own right. It reminded her uncomfortably of a throat, ridged as it was with a thousand layers of ice all down its length. Were they climbing into the mouth of a great beast? Still they pressed on.
Their breath rushed away from the opening as if fleeing from what lay ahead. Every fiber of their beings told them to follow, to escape as Gerfried had.
A gust of warm air rushed out from deep within the tunnel. The mountain’s breath roared faintly in their ears. Tilter reminded herself it was more likely to be the collective breath of countless dragons. Somehow that was preferable. The candle within Bantam’s lantern flickered, as did the griffons. Voehorn gulped.
Tilter pressed against Bantam. “Move,” she commanded. He obeyed with no small amount of trepidation.
They slipped into the darkness. The tunnel wound its way through the rock, widening and then shrinking. Bantam’s lantern barely illuminated enough to see around them, much less whatever lay ahead. The griffons only seemed to follow because they dared not leave that light, and Bantam only pressed on because Tilter blocked the way back. She didn’t bother to hide her quickening breath or the trembling in her legs, but she didn’t let it stop her either.
How far did this tunnel stretch? It felt like they’d been slinking downward single-file for an eternity. The air grew warm and heavy, blowing every now and then in their faces. The walls were damp, the floor slick. Little drops of water fell in front of the lantern.
“How much further?” asked Tilter. She could smell brimstone. The taste entered her mouth when she spoke and made her want to gag.
“C-close,” was Bantam’s weak-throated reply.
At last the tunnel widened and leveled out beneath them. They stepped out into a cavern that swallowed up the light of the lantern. The smell of brimstone was stronger here, more pervasive and eye-watering. There was another smell too, something musty that none of them could identify. The roaring sound of the mountain’s breath had not faded in the open space.
They moved ahead of Bantam to put the lantern at their backs. It took a minute for Tilter’s eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness. They stood in an antechamber. The ceiling sloped up and disappeared, and something wet dripped on Tilter’s collar. The floor was smooth save for nearly imperceptible smears of dampness. A few pillars of glistening stone rose from those smears into the ceiling. Their tips were scarcely visible in the darkness.
“I see a light,” whispered one of the griffons, knuckles creaking around his crank-bow. “Up ahead. What is it?”
She saw the glow as well. It was a different, fainter light than what shone from the top of the mountain. It came from around a bend where the wind whispered ‘go back, go back.’
“Come.” She led them on, taking special care in where she placed her hooves. They were unshod, but each step was torturous to the ears. Behind her came the padding of lion paws and the scrape of talons.
The cavern expanded yet further around the bend. It took Tilter’s breath away to see Bantam’s light crawl up the walls and disappear utterly into black. She stared into an abyss that stretched in all directions, an endless and unnatural night devoid of stars. The weight of it made her eyes clench shut involuntarily, and still she felt dizzy.
“We’re here,” breathed Bantam. The lantern rattled in his hand. Something glinted at the swaying edge of its influence.
“Give me that,” snapped Voehorn. He yanked the lantern into the air. “By the moon...”
Great stone fangs dipped into existence from above, dripping beads of water. Some sank deep into the floor. Ridged spikes rose up to meet the rest. A few were slender, others wider than Voehorn’s wingspan. All were knife-sharp. Like teeth. And jaws. They shone cruelly in the light. Shelves of rock stood on either side of the five little figures. And all around them, above them, ahead of them, were embedded gemstones of every imaginable color.
But all of that paled in comparison to what lay at the other end of the cavern. For there, nestled on a shelf of stone and ringed by enormous clusters of clear crystal, lay dragon eggs. There were eight of them, each a different size and covered in different patterns. The crystal nest caught the lantern light and came alive with it in a flash, glowing with shifting rainbows, refracting the eggs behind it.
“By my pinfeathers,” echoed another griffon, as if seeking to outdo Voehorn. Everybody stared at the nest of crystals.
“Pry out everything you can carry!” Voehorn pointed to the walls. His shout echoed away and never returned, lost in further expanses of the cave that no eye could see.
The griffons spread out slowly, all of them unblinking. They had the wide-eyed look of foals on Hearth’s Warming Day, beaks agape and tongues dry. With knives they began to gouge out amethysts, sapphires, and other gems, all the size of fists or larger. Voehorn passed the lantern to one of his companions while he set to work with his spearhead. Each griffon had brought canvas sacks. The sacks filled up quickly.
“Do not be too greedy,” warned Tilter. She scorned the common gems and turned back to the crystal nest. It drew her forward, beautiful and alive with that dim light.
Strange, long tendrils spilled all across the floor like the roots of great trees. Many lay intertwined. She stepped over them, no longer caring what noise her hooves made on the floor. Bantam followed her.
“I told you they’re like metal,” Bantam whispered. He put a hand on one of the eggs, then struck it with a claw. It rang dully like a stuffed bell. “Feel it!”
Tilter ran a hoof over the eggs. Some were smooth, others porous, one of them textured like a towel turned to stone. Each was comfortingly warm and hard as steel.
“Help me pick out the best!” cackled Voehorn. He and a third griffon pressed in close, sacks open. He wrenched the biggest egg from the nest. It was so heavy the tendons stood out in his arms, and it made a muffled bang on the floor when he shoved it in his bag. Gems bulged sharp against the canvas.
“The best egg goes to me,” warned Tilter. She cast her eyes from one prize to the next.
Greed had made Voehorn drunk with newfound confidence. He puffed out his chest. “You’ll have a good one and be thankful. I get the biggest. You can’t even lift it.”
Tilter had strong doubts that his strength matched that of her magic. She gave the pony-sized egg another glance. It was huge, yes, but ugly. It was covered in barely perceptible yellow diamonds. The pattern reminded her of a faded quilt.
She smiled and nodded to him. “You may have the largest. ‘Tis only fair.”
Voehorn nodded, prouder than ever. He didn’t even consider her smile suspicious.
The crystals and eggs were reflected in Bantam’s huge eyes. “How many can we carry?” he wondered aloud.
“Only four,” said the third griffon, who had set aside his crankbow. He worked to stuff a squashed green egg into his bag. “Maybe five if the pony can float one behind us.”
The childlike Bantam appeared crestfallen. “We should come back for the others, then.”
“And we will!” Voehorn searched for a good egg to stuff into his brother’s bag, his promise to Tilter forgotten. “We’ll rob the dragons blind. Then, when these are gone, we’ll go deeper and look for more.” He stepped over another tendril. “Where are those dragons, anyway?”
Tilter was beginning to wonder that herself. Surely they hadn’t just left their eggs on this altar as if in offering. Were they escaped? And if so, to where? She had little hope that they were dead. If they were, somebody would have seen bones by now.
Her eyes turned to the fourth griffon. He had stepped onto a rock shelf and held the lantern high, regarding the wall at arm’s length. With the light closer, the stalactites above appeared almost bone white. There was a curious bulge in the wall just in front of his face. The moisture on the wall made it glisten like wet metal, or sun stone.
Voehorn stuffed the last of the sacks with an egg striped like a zebra, only red. Each sack contained a dozen or more gemstones as well. Bantam took the smallest, visibly straining with the effort. This would more than double the time it would take to return to the Eyrie. They would need to pitch camp. Tilter wished she’d brought her saddlebags, now.
“Pony, pick an egg already and let’s go!” Voehorn’s confidence was beginning to wane. He wanted free of this place.
“One minute,” she replied, holding up a hoof. She needed an egg that would bring respect back to her family. But none of the remaining eggs caught her fancy. She indulged in a frown and settled on one that appeared to be made of fresh bronze. It would have to do. Maybe she could trade for a better one later. Her magic sparkled to life and floated it over to the sack provided for her.
That’s when she saw it. The egg in her telekinesis froze, then fell to the floor with a BANG before rolling to a stop against a great stone tendril. Another egg had been revealed, one that sat unobtrusively behind all the rest.
The secret egg was tiny, somewhat smaller than the head of a filly. But there was something about it that caught Tilter’s eye. She reached out and rolled it over for a closer look. There was no other so perfectly shaped. And it was purple, all purple, with lavender spots of varying sizes all over. She felt herself smile, truly smile, for the first time in years. She grinned so wide it hurt her cheeks.
Purple. The color of royalty in the days of old. The former ruling family in Canterlot still wore it. They paid exorbitant prices for the dyes to make it. It was the color of her mane and tail, the shade of the night sky when viewed from the window of her childhood room. There was no color in all the world that held more significance. This egg would buy redemption.
“Ha! A little egg for a little pony!” Voehorn’s laugh was far too loud. “Come now. Bring that little runt of a thing before I leave you.”
Tilter wrapped the egg in her magic and sat it reverently in the folds of the sack. It was heavier than she’d expected, nearly as heavy as the bronze egg, but the canvas would hold it. She looped the straps around her neck to carry it against her breast.
“Alright, let us go.” She nearly danced with joy, only reining herself in so she as not to trip over the root-like things that criss-crossed the floor. There was a new spring in her trot.
Voehorn turned to the griffon holding the lantern. “Come on, you cud-chewer. Quit staring at the wall!”
It happened then. Of course it happened then. A hot, stale wind roared in Tilter’s ears. She felt it on her back, smelled the overwhelming stench of sulfur. The fur on her neck prickled like spines.
She froze. They all froze. Steam rushed around their legs.
Every nerve in Tilter’s body flared with fear. Some part of her said don’t turn around, don’t turn around and it won’t be there. It was the same juvenile part of her that as a child bade her sleep completely wrapped in a blanket for fear of the noises in the night, and beasts under the bed. But when the rush of steam came again, she knew without a doubt that this time the fears were real.
Little Bantam saw it. He made a noise in his throat that died before it could escape. His brother made a similar noise, half gasp and half strangled scream. The cavern began to glow with a green, burning light that threw deep shadows across across the floor.
Tilter turned. She immediately wished she hadn’t. Fear like a hot knife cut her open and let the contents of her guts spill on the floor.
The entire wall behind the eggs was not a wall at all. It shifted and reared high, high, higher into the air. The cavern was far more vast than Tilter had dared imagine, and the head of a monster surged upward into that starless night. Green light flooded from deep within its smoking throat. All around it fires burst alive, and illuminated in the distance were leathery wings that unfurled so impossibly wide she had to turn her head from side to side to take in their entirety.
It was a dragon. A dragon more enormous than any legend.
Then something on the right wall splayed out and became a tree-trunk leg, its scales turning to red before her eyes. Ancient rock shattered beneath the crush of its foot. Talons as long as swords flexed and retracted. They sliced the stone.
The things like tree roots all over the floor began to slither and writhe. Color bloomed down their lengths, and Tilter saw now that they were massive tails, some studded at the ends with spikes or clubs. She and the griffons jumped away, screams lifting from every throat. Above them the bone-white stalactites moved, not stalactites at all but claws attached to vicious hands that dwarfed the trunk-like leg.
Claws like those could pull down castle walls. Tilter could picture five little ponies impaled screaming on the points.
“YEAAGH!” shrieked the griffon closest to the wall. He stumbled back and dropped the lantern. The bulge he’d been inspecting flew open to reveal a glistening eye as tall as the griffon’s wingspan. A translucent inner lid like mucus pulled back and the slit pupil contracted, then rotated in a flash to stare directly through him.
Tilter could see the warrior’s whole reflection in that emotionless onyx gash. He aimed his crankbow before the lantern even hit the ground.
“No!” Tilter screamed too late.
The griffon shot directly into the dragon’s eye. It hardly reacted, just blinked the eyelid like a huge leathery shutter and batted the bolt away. The whole wall that was its face rose high into the air. Before the warrior could even reach for another bolt, he disappeared beneath a falling green hand. A feathered wing flapped and spasmed between talons longer than his body.
This new dragon’s head was smaller than the enormous monster above, but no less threatening. It was quickly joined by a dozen others, each a different size and shape, some as large as barns. They shrugged off crusts of stone. Fires of red and green and yellow lit up every wall from floor to arched ceiling. Suddenly the unnatural night above had its countless stars, and for every star, a dragon. The cave wasn’t just one cave but many conjoined, most stretching half a mile to ceilings that writhed with serpents. Tunnels and alcoves filled every wall, and each was alive with the glow of yet more fires. Stalactites tumbled from above to shatter against newly woken wyrms.
The first dragon with its green fire dwarfed everything. Its head scraped boulders from the ceiling. The tail was a coiled hill. It was ridged with tapering green plates. Nostrils leaked black smoke, while purple and black scales shone like adamantine in the light. His mouth crashed open and closed, alive with that powerful inner light that burned brighter and brighter.
“Who DARES steal the child of Glaurâg?!”
The dragon’s voice threatened to burst Tilter’s eardrums. It shook the whole cavern, drove even the other dragons to cower. The griffons shrunk around her, their beaks open in silent screams, and she couldn’t open her eyes. She felt it thunder in her ribcage, felt her teeth rattle and skull throb even though she had hooves to her ears. Each word Glaurâg chomped out was a crack of rolling thunder, too loud to understand. Tilter’s eyes were about to burst. She was going to die.
When the echoes finally faded, she felt physical pain in their place. Nothing had ever hurt more. She found herself writhing on the stone floor, face slick with moisture. She half expected both hooves to come away wet with blood. Only one did.
The surviving griffons fought one another to get away. One stumbled over her. She looked to Voehorn and saw his rictus beak open wide to scream “RUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUN!”
The words sounded distant as if shouted through water. But her legs obeyed. She needed to escape. Her House wouldn’t survive without her. A tail swept across the floor and she leapt it without thinking.
Air rushed past her face. The dragon’s glow intensified, turning everything green. She knew without having to look that Glaurâg was drawing in breath for dragonfire. It would turn her flesh to steam and glue her sticky marrow to the floor. The sound was indescribable, more like reverse thunder than anything. She had maybe seconds to live.
Glaurâg’s lungs were vast. Tilter rounded the bend and was almost to the mouth of the tunnel in the antechamber before he filled them. Still she would have died, surely, except that a century of sleep had cooled the furnaces of Glaurâg’s heart. The blast that hit Tilter from behind was more smoke than fire, but still it lifted her off her hooves and threw her tumbling ahead on a wall of hot air. She felt flames lick at her, burn her. A thousand kicks landed very suddenly in every part of her. She struck every surface of the tunnel.
When she stopped rolling, she scrambled to her hooves and galloped for her life up the throat of the mountain.
Somehow she was alive. She couldn’t breathe, and every inch of her was a bruise, but she was alive and she intended to stay that way. The purple egg was still at her breast, whirling and slamming at her shoulders, but the weight of it felt like it might have wrenched her neck. She couldn’t feel if she’d been hurt yet.
The three remaining griffons raced ahead of her. She lit up her horn with an overglow of silver light, caught a glimpse of a lion’s tail whipping around the bend ahead. Puddles splashed around her hooves, and sharp rocks tore at her knees and chin with every stumble. The tunnel flew by in a flash, and her lungs burned when she finally burst free. Moonlight nearly blinded her, slashing deep into her dilated eyes. The cold air shocked her awake, cooled her burns, and raked pain through her lungs.
She didn’t even bother to slow down, simply bounding from one stone to the next until she hit the ground and tucked into a roll. The scabbard of her sword fetched up against a ridge of ice to stop her slide. Burning clouds and Luna’s moon loomed above.
Voehorn lay next to her, tongue lolled out, chest heaving. He had somehow dragged his great big dragon egg all the way outside. One strap of his bag was torn.
“Fly, fly, we need to fly!” wailed Bantam, his pupils mere pinpricks in the whites of his eyes. His egg and tiny sword were nowhere to be seen. The third griffon gasped for breath nearby.
The mountain shuddered. Thunder boomed again and again, and suddenly light spilled out across the plain like the sun rising from the earth. Only it wasn’t yet dawn. Tilter looked up with a muttered curse. The peak of the mountain had split open. Enormous claws tore at it from within.
She shoved Voehorn, gathering up her egg with an envelope of magic. But when she tried to stand, the whole cliffside bucked beneath her. She landed on her side. The griffons struggled to take off, and Bantam shrieked.
The Glowing Mountain gave a casual shrug and its cloak of snow slid from stone shoulders. Tilter wondered why she wasn’t screaming yet. Fear pinned her where she lay. The avalanche appeared slow-moving, almost languid, and yet it was already halfway down the mountainside. It would flatten them all long before the dragons broke free.
She didn’t run so much as stumble back to the griffons. There was no point in yelling. The avalanche was deafening. Instead she wrapped her magic around one griffon and braced a shoulder against Bantam to steady him.
The mountaintop exploded.
Voehorn and Bantam threw themselves into the air. Tilter felt talons wrap around her middle and yank her after them. It knocked the breath out of her. She could only watch upside down as the mountain sloughed off layer after layer of rocks and snow. The avalanche was above them, ahead of them. Wings tore the air around her, brushing her face with every beat. But it wasn’t enough. The moon went dark.
The wave caught them. Tilter saw a flying boulder strike a griffon square between the shoulderblades and tear him from the sky. Then all she saw was white, and pain and fright. She was in freefall. Tumbling, tumbling, tumbling, unable to breathe and out of control.
The cold shocked her awake. Had it been seconds or minutes? There was snow in her mouth and nose. She spat out a clump of it and tore a leg free to scrape at her eyes. Was she in an air pocket? Her head pounded. Brainfreeze. Just like when she ate one of those fancy popsicles as a filly. It almost made her want to laugh. The pain was blinding in its intensity and yet she was amused. Or maybe just concussed.
The avalanche had broken at the top of the cleft before slapping them out of the air. They’d been carried down to a lower cliff shelf. One of the griffons frantically dug himself free nearby. She recognized him as the one who’d carried her. What was his name again? Her head was full of snow. She sat up and shook herself while the roaring subsided in her ears.
Voehorn’s head burst free with a wild shout lower on the slope. He was buried to the neck. Tilter and the other griffon struggled down to free him. Falling debris blasted into the snow all around.
“Where’s Bantam?” he shouted, barely audible over the wind and crashing of stone on stone.
Tilter almost replied before she remembered the dragons. Her eyes turned upward.
The mountaintop was shattered. Veins of ancient obsidian cut through the rockface where snow had once sat, and dragons poured from the peak. Drakes, longwyrms, wyverns and ice wyrms, some tiny and some beginning to approach the size of Glaurâg. They streamed out like bats. Hundreds of them. Thousands beyond the counting. For a moment Tilter’s heart stopped beating. The scene was apocalyptic against its backdrop of angry, burning clouds.
How could Discord have imprisoned them all? How did they even fit?
“Where’s my egg?” shouted Voehorn. His brother was forgotten. “My egg! Where’s my egg?”
Tilter placed a hoof to her own egg, reassuring herself that it was still there. She breathed a sigh of relief. “It does not matter! Fly us out of here!”
The griffons exchanged glances, panting. Then they looked at her. No, she realized, they looked at her egg. Maybe it was the cold, or a head injury, or just the shock of the moment, but it took her just half a blink too long to process their intent.
She went for her sword. Voehorn was faster. His fist collided with the side of her head and stars exploded behind her eyes. Her ear rang, felt the impact, but the pain came later. Then she realized she was lying in the snow, on her side, and something was being wrenched free from her. She blinked, tried to speak, to rise, only for another punch to drive straight into her ribs. A fist fumbled with a dagger and she lashed out with a kick, shattering knuckles. Someone screamed.
Her magic coalesced around the sword far too late. Feathers beat against her face and in a rush of wind they were gone. She wrenched upright, but the griffons were already beyond her reach. It took a moment to gather herself, to catch her breath. All she could do was watch the griffons race into the distance on swift wings, her egg dangling beneath Voehorn. Boulders rained down around them, showering the landscape. She watched because she had no idea what else to do. Part of her wanted to scream. Most of her wanted to sit down and cry.
Was this how her journey would end, betrayed by those she never should have trusted, left to die to fire or the cold? It hurt deep inside to know that the griffons’ displays were still not the cruellest Tilter had yet seen. A sense of defeat welled up within her.
That’s when she heard it. The voice. Bantam’s voice.
She turned, wild-eyed. Had she imagined it? But yes, there, she spotted him. The little griffon was trapped up to his chest less than a hundred yards up the slope. He waved an arm down at her. The wind plucked his pleas from the air and threatened to bury him in yet more snow.
Hope surged in Tilter’s breast. It always did seem to come from the unlikeliest of places. Maybe she was doomed, but she had to try.
She stumbled on frozen legs, righted herself, struggled upward through knee deep snow. A dull ache throbbed in her ribs. Desperation fueled her pace until she was bounding ahead, panting. Her heart pumped raw pain through every vessel in her body. She kept climbing.
Bantam reached out to her as she approached the last twenty feet. He was bleeding from a nostril. One whole side of his face, eye included, was clumped with snow tinged red.
“Help me!” he screamed. “Please help me help me, please!”
A boulder exploded into the snow just yards away. Another hit the toothlike spires of rock that rimmed the sides of the cliffs. Shards of stone blasted everywhere. Tilter ducked low, felt shrapnel carve through the snow around her. It didn’t slow her for but a moment.
She came to Bantam’s side after a lifetime of running, pain ripping sharp down her side, and began to scoop away with both forehooves. The snow was loose, powdery, full of chunks of ice and stone. She threw herself into the task with a tenacity born of desperation. Bantam didn’t even have the presence of mind to help. He held his arms up and cried, every inch of him dusted white.
Before long she nearly had him free. Both wings were out and rigid. And then her hooves struck stone. She cursed aloud, sweeping the last of the powder aside.
“What? What is it?” Bantam’s voice choked on his own tears.
When he looked down, he sobbed. One little lion paw was trapped between two stones. Boulders, no doubt. Was there time to free him? Could he be freed at all? He wouldn’t survive an amputation. Tilter choked on the rising urge to scream. The griffon beside her just sat back, a defeated look on his face.
Tilter took a moment to gather herself. She tried to measure how many minutes she had before the dragons reached her, how many seconds. It wasn’t enough. The rational part of her mind told her to cut her losses and run, to hide, but she knew it didn’t matter. Something inside her had locked in place, something more than practicality, stubbornness, or pity. That terminal disease that put her House to ruin and sent her into exile now stirred anew. Honor, some called it.
More than that, she knew Bantam was her only chance to escape. She tuned out his cries.
A roar sundered the new dawn sky. Glaurâg’s arm burst free of the mountaintop and sent an entire cliffside spinning through the air. Tilter hardly spared the dragon a glance. She breathed in, breathed out, and lifted her swordbelt over her head. The chape of the scabbard struck deep by Bantam’s foot.
Thoughts of home and sunshine and father’s hugs spilled free of her heart as she worked. She put them out of her mind and concentrated on the digging. Her hooves drove the makeshift shovel down again and again, widening the hole around Bantam until she could stand in it. Before long her body fell into a rhythm, stabbing again and again until sweat melted the snow from her furs and her breath was agony. Chips of rock scattered before the chape of her scabbard and peppered her face. Snow whipped in a frenzy around the widening hole.
It was exhaustion that finally made her stop. There was no use. Tears swelled in her eyes. She’d worked herself into a frenzy and still failed to expose the whole of the boulders. She couldn’t find their edges in her magic.
Bantam had finally cried himself out. He was in shock now. Blood dribbled from his beak down sticky plumage. There was blood in the snow now, too. Did he realize she couldn’t save him? Would he be able to forgive her?
“I’m sorry.” Tilter sank to her haunches. The metal chape of her scabbard was bent and torn nearly off. She regarded it sullenly, then banged it one last time on the boulders. She couldn’t even fit it down between them to use as a lever. It would only have hurt her sword if she tried.
“Just go,” Bantam croaked. A distant roar nearly drowned him out. He blinked hard, looked away. “Save… save yourself.”
The words struck Tilter as truly, undeniably brave. She hesitated, then carefully took his taloned hand in her hooves and kissed his forehead. It was all that she could think to do. “Bantam...” She squeezed the hand in her hooves. “I’m sorry. I am.”
“Voehorn was r-right a-about me.” He sniffled and screwed his eye shut. “But I’ll be… b-be s-s-strong.”
It seemed to her a brave thing to say. But there was naught left.
Tilter shrugged her harness back on and tightened the cinches. Another roar and the boom of breaking stone hit her ears. Glaurâg had clawed himself nearly free of the mountainside. A jet of green flame leapt from his throat and beat back the clouds. The sound of it was like an onrush of charging knights.
She bounded down the slope at breakneck speed. Twice she stumbled and rolled. The third time she couldn’t stop herself and fell from one cliff shelf to the next. Over and over she tumbled through the snow until her hooves found solid stone. Behind her came a thundering crash, and jagged boulders big as houses carved through the toothy spires to her right.
She turned back just long enough to see that an entire cascade had smote Bantam’s cliff to ruin. The snow it threw in the air would temporarily screen her escape, but the little griffon was gone.
Down she galloped, faster and faster, between tall spires sharp as axes and over chasms that had no bottom. She tumbled down cliffsides and dashed herself against rocks even as debris smote the land around her.
At last she reached a shelf of frost-swept stone that reached out farther than all the rest, near three hundred yards. She was near the bottom now. Her hooves clattered across sheets of ice. When she looked up, she saw hordes of dragons swarm in spirals across the sky. Hundreds of them were headed south to the Crystal Mountains. She almost thought she could see them chasing two tiny specks.
“Ahh!” she screamed. Her hooves dug into the ice and skidded to a stop. She teetered, held her breath, and barely avoided a long fall to a sudden death.
She’d reached the end of the last cliff. Far, far below lay the plain, but it was all in shadow. The shadow was in the shape of a dragon.
Her head swam at the thought of the fall. It was easily a hundred foot plummet into the darkness below. Probably two hundred feet. There was no way down. She’d never be able to climb it, not unless she wanted a broken neck. A sprinkle of snow swirled around her hooves and vanished over the edge.
Glaurâg at last wrenched himself free of the mountainside. Smaller dragons struggled out around him, clinging to him, leaping from the swell of his shoulders. When he unfurled his wings they seemed wider than the shelf on which Tilter stood. His wings were black, not purple. Their wind blew other dragons in whirling circles. The thought of facing him chilled her very blood to ice, though it raced through her veins.
“Find them!” that terrible voice commanded from far, far away. The mountain crumbled beneath him at his every move, rolling new avalanches down to destruction. And then, impossibly, he looked down straight at her.
Glaurâg roared with the pent-up rage of over a hundred years of captivity. Even at a distance, Tilter felt the force of it bounce around in her ribs.
A horde of dragons poured out from the hidden tunnel below him and swarmed down the slopes like winged ants. Some flew, while others slithered and clawed their way over shattered obsidian. They were faster than any pony and scaled with every color imaginable. A dozen of them were coming straight for her, young drakes and wyverns by their appearance, an onrush of teeth and fire that spelled certain doom. The fastest had already reached Bantam’s final resting place.
Tilter glanced over the cliff. Wind tore at her braids. Jump to one death, or stand and fight to another?
She wrenched her blade from its scabbard and cut away the harness. The straps fell in a tangle. There was blood there, caked with frost, and streaked all down her side. She remembered a griffon’s fist and a dagger. She wondered how she’d not felt it when they stabbed her. Two wounds throbbed, numb with cold. No matter now, at least. The blood froze to her coat. One ear rang continuously. The other heard nothing at all.
The hilt of her sword was worn and discolored, stained with more than just saliva over years of exile. Its blade was sharp-edged without a nick, though silver scratches cut across the flat on both sides. It had served her well and now it floated easily in her magic, light as a feather, an extension of her very mind. She fell into a fighting stance, wounds forgotten.
It was a woefully inadequate weapon for fighting dragons. Even against pony-sized foes she’d have preferred a good spear. A single, calm breath fogged on the flat of the blade.
The dragons swept closer and closer. They roared and shrieked, flame dripping from angry maws. It had been mere seconds and already they were a single shelf above her. For just a moment she glanced to the side, saw rocks a few yards away and wondered if she still had time to hide. Maybe the dragonlings hadn’t yet seen the little unicorn on the cliff.
Then they were upon her.
Tilter suppressed a pang of sorrow. A memory sprang unbidden to the forefront of her thoughts. It was of her family the year before the war that damned them. Her brother… Father tied a ribbon in her hair. She indulged in the happiness for but the barest instant before she forced it from her mind.
Then she seized a clump of snow in her magic and flung it, evaporating, into the face of the first drake. A single breath died with a sizzle.
Dozens more flared around her.