Glim

by Smayds

Chapter 01: A Furnace For A Heart

“Just hold on, Spike! Hold on! JUST YOU HOLD ON!” she shouted, her face screwed up into a terrible amalgamation of shock, horror and determination. “WE’RE NEARLY THERE! WE’RE NEARLY THERE!”

Twilight blazed back towards Canterlot at fifty times the speed of sound, the enormous dragon trailing along in her magical wake. He writhed and screamed in brutal agony, steaming torrents of dark-red blood trailing behind him as he was psychokinetically pulled along behind the frantic alicorn.

He screamed louder as the heat and pain in his chest increased.

She didn’t slow down, though Spike’s scream had almost stopped her heart. He’d been torn to bloody ribbons. Both of his wings were gone, along with one of his forelegs and most of his right hind foot. One side of his face was a gushing fountain of blood and red-raw shredded muscle and sinew. She wasn’t even sure that he could see any more at all - along with his missing right eye, the left one was swollen shut under an enormous fast-rising black bruise. As she flew, she heard him choke, retch, and cough out another fountain of dark blood. The explosive red cloud caught fire in the hellish slipstream behind them.

None of this mattered. All of the physical damage that Spike had suffered as he’d slaughtered nearly two dozen enormous dragons - the smallest of which was easily twice his size - didn’t matter at all, not one single bit. None of it. Spike wasn’t just an ordinary dragon. Already an incredibly magically-powerful creature, he was, as far as anypony knew, the only dragon in the world who could actually perform magic on his own. And unlike those that he had fought, he wasn’t dead, just terribly wounded. He would survive these injuries unaided, and with her own magic assisting, he’d heal just as good as new, regrow his limbs, regenerate his wings and flesh and skin and even his missing eye... There was really nothing to worry about.

Except for that one wound.

The deep gash across his chest showed a flickering green glow from its depths through the literal waterfall of reddish-black blood. Twilight knew what that meant. She knew exactly what it meant, and she had never felt so powerless in her life.

Spike was about to die and she could do nothing to prevent it.

She needed her Sisters. Together, the three alicorns could unlock the most powerful magic known to ponydom, and then she could stop this, she could save him. Without the Element... There was no hope. She might be the Master of Magic but she couldn't possibly contain raw Dragonfire on her own.

“You stay with me, Spike! We’re nearly there! You hear me?! DO YOU HEAR ME?! WE’RE NEARLY HOME!”

Spike choked and screamed, but offered no coherent response.

Twilight gritted her teeth as she streaked through the high atmosphere, the thin air flashing into blazing white fire around her and her very precious charge. She had to fly. She couldn’t risk teleporting so far with Spike this badly wounded - the translocation shock for such a large creature over such an enormous distance would almost certainly kill him.

So she flew.

She flew fast, faster than she had ever flown in her life, moving so rapidly that she had to constantly fly downwards, not simply straight ahead, lest she accidentally slingshot out into space. A particularly agonised scream from Spike led her to find fresh reserves of physiothaumic energy. She beat her wings faster - they were already beating so many thousands of times per second that they were audibly screeching, and their pitch now increased markedly - and she somehow sped up, forty, forty five, fifty thousand miles per hour and beyond. Her long needle-sharp horn was already blazing from the shield spell she’d cast around Spike and herself to protect his weakened body from the vicious hypersonic winds that screamed around them, and now it glowed even brighter as she cast an enormously-powerful spell on her own vision. She knew exactly where she was, but right now, time was of the essence like never ever before. Every single individually-quantifiable millisecond was precious. She had to get back to her Sisters as fast as possible, so the three of them could unlock the Vault. It was absolutely imperative that she was completely, utterly, perfectly precisely on course. Her panicked eyes scanned the horizon...

There!

She banked very slightly to the south as her magically-enhanced sight revealed the hint of Canterlot’s spires and towers, far, far away on the horizon, still more than three hundred miles distant.

Barely twenty seconds at this speed.

It would forever be twenty seconds too long.

The blurry fast-moving ground ten miles below, tinged with reddish-orange streaks from the late-afternoon sun, suddenly flared brilliant greenish-white, her own dark shadow cast starkly just as far in front of her as she could see, as her magnificent lifelong Number-One Assistant screamed the loudest and most anguished scream yet. Twilight Sparkle whipped around and stared with impotent horror and despair as her first and oldest friend died.

Huge tongues of impossibly-bright green flame had broken free from the deep gash in his chest. Twilight put up her forehooves and squinted at the light, a light far, far brighter and hotter and so much more violent than that of the sun she helped to shepherd through the sky. As his Dragonfire escaped and kindled his magical flesh, the enormous purple-and-green dragon had time to scream just one final agonised word.

“RRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRITYYYYYYYYYYY!”

And then, the Dragonfire died, and he was gone.

No smoke, no ash, no charred remains. Nothing. There was nothing.