//------------------------------//
// Enter the Dragon 
// Story: The Journey 
// by aliengirlguy 
//------------------------------//


Chapter 3: Enter the Dragon.


It was nearing night fall on this new world, and Harry had been trodding for hours. His hooves were killing him and he had yet to come across another pony, though he did see other animals.

Now that he thought about it, what was the deal with the other animals? 

There was something in the way that they looked at him from time to time, something that struck him as being a bit more aware then was normally found in nature. Then again, he was a talking pony, so maybe ponies weren't the dominant species on the planet after all? Maybe everyone talked in this world? So he had tried asking a passing rabbit and a few varieties of birds for directions to the nearest gathering of ponies like him, but many just flew off or shrugged various appendages, further unnerving him. It made him suddenly glad that he was now a herbivore (at least he thought so) or else things might get awkward later.

At least the weather was decent. Unlike where he had come from being in the beginnings of winter, here it was warm and sunny, perhaps late spring, early summer.

He was really starting to worry about what he would do for his first night, after all he had managed to pack some shrunken camping gear, but he was uncertain how he was going to set anything up since he no longer had fingers, which honestly he had not been prepared for (perhaps one maybe, considering the ritual, but all!?) when he spotted a light flickering through some trees from the corner of his eye.

With rising hope, he picked up speed into a full out gallop, his eyes shinning with hope as he broke through the trees...

...And promptly fell head over tail over a tree stump, sending him rolling directly through the little fire lit camp (being at the bottom of an incline that Harry had not previously noticed as well), passed the startled gaze of the figure tending the fire, and into a nearby river with a KER-SPLASH!

Small scaly hands pulled him out of the river before he could drown and patted his back as Harry groaned, occasionally spitting river water (which was refreshingly clean and absent of any hint of pollution he would later note) out of his lungs.

When he had blinked water and his embarrassment out of his eyes, his savior finally came into focus.

Harry  leaped back as a giant purple and green lizard stared up at him in concern.

"Hey there, are you ok?" the lizard asked him.

Harry stared, backing up another step in horror, he had never seen a lizard this large before, and back in the human world, any reptile  larger then an iguana was usually something to be concerned about, if his "Wildlife Planet" class videos in primary school were anything to go by, and not only that, a talking lizard apparently.

"Hey, it's okay," the lizard tried to sooth, taking a step forward.

Harry, spotting the sharp teeth in that reassurance, grabbed a nearby branch in his own blunter ones, waving it around awkwardly snarling.

"Bas oo alking izerd!"

"What?" the lizard asked confusedly, "I can't understand what your saying."

Harry, seeing the pointlessness in wielding a stick with his mouth anyway, now spat it out, raised on his hind legs and put his hooves up, "I said "back you talking lizard!" so...so back you talking lizard!"

Said lizard gave him a dead pan look then drawled, "Look, first off, I'm not a lizard, I'm a dragon, a baby one to be more exact, and second, of course I can talk, all dragons can talk, the same as anypony."

Harry backed away further, eyes immediately trained for the sky when he heard the words "baby dragon", He had dealt already with a ticked off overprotective mother dragon before, the last thing he needed was to inadvertently incur the wrath of another.

"Where's your parents? the last thing I need is my arse on fire again thanks!" Harry declared. 

His eyes returned to the purple reptile though when the dragon muttered, "I don't have any parents. I'm an orphan."

An awkward silence hung between them for a moment. Yet again, Harry was left from feeling rightly defensive to now feel like a heel, and judging by the dragon's more open expression of distress at the thought, this wasn't something put on to trick him with sympathy. Harry rubbed one hoof over a leg awkwardly, having returned to all fours again, and felt compelled to say awkwardly, "Um, so am I, an orphan I mean."

Since the dragon didn't make any threatening moves and he wasn't likely to be roasted alive by a peeved mama, he took the offered seat across from the dragon's camp fire.

"So," the baby dragon started off, "My name's Spike, what's yours?"

"Harry Potter" Harry replied then flushed when his growling stomach also introduced himself.

"Wow, you must have been traveling awhile," Spike commented, then reached into a pack resting beside the boulder he was sitting on and pulled out something wrapped in cloth.

"Here, its my last loaf of bread, but you can have it," Spike handed it over to Harry who took it with fervent thanks and bit into the slightly stale, but still really good, bread with gusto.

"So," Harry asked after swallowing, "Dragons eat bread?"

"Oh yeah, I eat the same things as any other pony, though between you and me, I think daisy sandwiches are over rated. I do enjoy gems though, delicious, sweet crunchy beauties..." the dragon drooled a little.

Harry raised an eyebrow at that. Huh. He wondered if dragons from his world ate gems? Some how he doubted it though, Norbert had been a little to vicious and chompy with that teddy bear of his.

Seeing how there was no one else to ask, Harry turned to his new companion and asked, "so this may seem like an odd question, but where am I exactly?" 

"So your lost huh?" Spike commented, "That's not odd at all, I've gotten lost loads of times!" Spike reassured unreasuringly. He pulled out a roll of parchment which he laid out on a bolder and the two stood over it as Spike pointed with a claw to a particular spot on the alien landmass he currently found himself.

"Let's see, this is us, and we're sitting somewhere between The Badlands and Hayseed Swamps," he pointed to a small sliver of creamy white between a scorch-brownish-red area and a yellowy-green area.

"Here," he pointed to a small dot in the shape of a pony's profile, "this is Croup Crossing, its a boarder town between Equestria and the Dragonlands, it's the closest, and last town before you leave Equestria."

Of course,  Harry was going to have to take Spike's word for it, because he could not understand a word that was written down on the map. It all looked vaguely like a cross between hieroglyphics and tetrus to him. It seemed that while the lingo had passed on to him somehow, the written word hadn't. Swell.

"So Equestria huh? That's the name of where we are?"

Spike stared at him, "you don't know the name of the country your in?"

Harry had a sudden feeling he had goofed.

he mentally scrambled for the most plausible and airtight, excuse available.

"I'm not from around here," Harry explained giving an awkwardly winning smile. 

Spike frowned and commented dubiously, "it must be pretty faraway for you to not have heard of Equestria," He asked suspiciously, "and you must be really lost if you don't even know what country your in."

"Umm...I took a wrong turn?"

There was a tense silence then Spike said chirpily, "oh, well, that explains it then."

Harry let out a sigh of relief as the two returned to the map.

Harry had already decided early on, during the long walk, that it was probably a better idea to keep his origins a secret. He had a feeling that if he told anyone that he was a human from another world who crossed into a magic mirror and turned into a pony, he would be tossed in this world's equivalent of a funny farm or in the unlikely-hood that he was believed, something decidedly more negative in reaction.

The two of them agreed that they would travel together until they reached the outskirts of Croup Crossing where he would continue on in that direction while Spike continued on with his migration. Spike estimated that it would likely take them about an extra day of walking before they reached their destination though.

After that, the two soon continued on with their dinner. 

After a time of companionable silence where Harry was treated to the fascinating sight of the dragon roasting a ruby the size of a baseball over an open fire, lightly seasoned with a salt shaker, and then the dragon taking satisfied bites out of the thing like a turkey leg on Thanksgiving, the two of them soon fell into a conversation about why they were traveling.

"Well, I was watching the dragon migration with my friends, Twilight, Rarity -sigh-, Pinky, Applejack and Rainbow Dash. When Rainbow Dash made this remark about my apron..." Spike went on to explain how his friends teasing had made him realize that he really was different from other dragons, and Twilight, who apparently was the pony who raised him, had no idea where he had come from, only that she got him as an egg from her mentor, some pony named Cefestia...or was it Celestial? or something, then hatched him, and he had been with this Twilight Sparkle since. So he had decided that going on a migration like other dragons was the best way to trying to discover who he was.

"...It's just...by the time anypony is my age, they at least have some idea of who and what they are. I'm a dragon raised by a pony, there has been other dragons raised by ponies that I know of, and I feel...I don't know, disconnected somehow. My friends care about me, but there is still this wall that I can't cross because I'm a dragon and their ponies. Anytime anything rears up to remind them of that, things...don't turn out so well. So I decided that if I was going to figure out what it means to be a dragon I was going to go on the migration, so here I am."

Harry pondered this story for a time. In the end he was of 3 thoughts about this:

Had this Twilight literally hatched Spike from an egg? Like a chicken? How did ponies do something like that? was it like with Hagrid and Norbert, did she toss Spike into the fire place or something?

The second was that while he did play the jibing down a tad, Harry felt that the ponies were being somewhat mean spirited. It reminded him of Neville and the jibes that the other students at Hogwarts threw at him because he was a bit timid for a Gryffindor, house of the brave and bold. Granted, these ponies may not have realized that it was being mean, Spike did speak about them with obvious affection, especially this Rarity pony (the figurative hearts in Spike's eyes was rather obvious) but that didn't excuse this.

The third notion was rather more sinister. Where exactly did this Celmessia -Molestia?- pony get his egg? did she actually take it from his dragon parents? Thinking, talking, beings as Spike himself proved to be? Though Harry supposed it could have been a rescue or something, maybe something happened to Spike's parents? But why not just give the egg to other dragons? Why keep it? Was it like with birds where if you touch the egg or baby bird the parents loose interest in it? And if it really was so innocent, why not tell Twilight or Spike himself when he was old enough where he came from? Spike was obviously going to have some questions! Perhaps this Celestia -yes that was it!- Celestia pony wasn't very smart?

Eventually he decided to put that on the mental back-burner for now and said instead "that's pretty harsh, I can relate to that sort of. Where I came from, I was told my parents died in an accident that they caused, while it turned out they...died a different way," he was unsure how the dragon would react to the mention of something like murder, "and at the same time I found out this, I was told I was something, someone else then who i thought I was. I struggled to try to be this grand person they wanted me to be for four years, to the point where I would look in a mirror and not know who was looking back at me, and those around me didn't really help with that. Its part of why I'm here as well."

There. honest yet not giving anything away that was to odd.

Spike took a thoughtful bite from his seasoned ruby and asked softly, "and have you figured it out?"

Harry rolled the crusty remains of his bread in his hooves until there was nothing but hard crumbs, "no," Harry said heavily, looking at his hooves, "I've only just begun trying to figure that out."

When they were done, the two agreed that it was likely time for bed since they wanted to make good time the next day.

Harry grunted as he struggled to get the danged saddle bag off. He didn't notice the confused look that Spike was shooting at him until the dragon asked him, "what are you doing?"

"Danged velcro...- what;'s it look like? I'm trying to take this saddle bag off- urg! I hate straps!"

Spike rubbed an arm awkwardly and replied, "well, uh, why don't you just use your magic to take off your saddle bag?"

Harry stiffened for a second, then relaxed when he remembered that this place was actually more free with magic then his old world. It was one of the things Merlin shared about this place. 

"I would- urg!- but i don't know the spell for something like that-damn it!"

"A spell? why would you need a spell for something like that? Just use your horn."

Harry stopped struggling and turned his full attention on Spike.

"What? My horn?"

Spike was looking pretty concerned now, "yeah, the one on your head?" he pointed to Harry's head.

Harry reached up with a hoof and felt around until he came into contact with something that was indeed protruding from his head, something slightly on an angle but otherwise straight with a sharp tip.

Harry forgot about his saddlebag and turned sharply, galloping for the river.

he looked in the still dark water and for the first time really took in his reflection.

his coloring was something he was already fairly familiar with, the pale silvery pelt and the dark black mane and tail, since that was the only thing he could determine about himself without a mirror. That, and that he was a pony. 

The equine staring back at him though was far from the pony he envisioned himself.

His eyes were the same death curse green as he remembered, though this time they were ridiculously large and rounded, set a little farther apart then he was used to, but at least worked (he was glad to be without the glasses). His legs were long and somewhat skinny, his body was lean but scrawny, and his mane and tail were messier and with greater abundance then his human rat nest. Oh goody.

He was also a unicorn. A flippin' unicorn! why hadn't Merlin said so!?

He was about to go grab Merlin's book and drag him out by his beard and demand answers when Spike's sudden presence distracted him.

His new traveling companion was giving him a concerned look and he asked, "are you alright?"

Harry took a few breaths before he said stiffly, "of course! I was just...confused is all, stress of all trip, never mind me I'll just..." his excuse, especially lame as it was, was interrupted when Spike came over and patted Harry on the shoulder and guided him back to camp saying "Come on, I'll give you a hoof."

Spike helped Harry remove the straps, pausing to briefly marvel at the velcro fastenings, which Harry hastily explained away as a local invention from where he was from. Spike's gasp once the saddle bag fell away from his torso, revealing his upper body and flanks for the first time again made Harry tense and mentally groan 'now what?'

"What?" Harry asked turning his head to stare at his own arse (briefly marveling at the coolness of being able to do that). He didn't see what had bothered Spike though, everything looked in order, at least he thought so? did he have saddle bag pelt or something?

"Oh, well..." Spike rubbed his paws, "well, its just...not that there's anything wrong with being a blank flank, of course not! Its just your obviously older then its usually..." Spike's voice trailed off, claws awkwardly scratching the back of his head.

"Then is usually what?" Harry asked, eyes narrowing.

"Well, usually when a pony is your age...you are at least a teenager right?"

"Yeah?" Harry asked slowly, "So?"

"Well, it's just by the time that a pony is your age, they usually have...," his voice lowered even more, "have their cutie mark." 

Harry frowned in confusion; what was a cutie mark? It sounded like some sort of kindergarten grading system or something.

"Never mind!" Spike said hastily before Harry could ask, "it's none of by business, it doesn't make you any less a pony...so lets get some shut eye huh?"

Spike exited the conversation by dragging Harry's saddle bag to rest by his own bag on a stick (huh tropes do exist, a bag on a stick, really?) and snuggled in with his back turned to the still confused Harry.

It was like an awkward scene from a public school boy's changing room after revealing something unintentionally embarrassing.

Harry sighed, deciding to save the mystery for tomorrow and curled up next to the baggage. Yet again bemoaning the fact that his nice comfy tent, where his nice warm blankets an fluffy pillow, will remain unused thanks to his lack of fingers to put it up.

ooo		ooo		ooo

Spike turned over and looked at the curled up pony using his own saddle bag as an uncomfortable pillow ,and feeling a spurt of sympathy for the other pony, who must not have packed well for his super long trip either, before sighing and pulling back the coverings. 

"Come on, its not long until the Falling of the Leaves, its a bit chilly at night."

Both  feeling awkward, but obviously bowing to the weather conditions, he squeezed in beside the dragon. Harry eventually nodded off, exhausted from the long walk and the past eventful 24 hours.

Spike meanwhile took a little longer to fall asleep.

His brain was in overdrive as he mentally chewed on the conundrum, the alarming conundrum, that was one unicorn called Hairy.

Why had he not used his magic to remove his saddle bag? why did he act surprised when Spike mentioned his horn and defensive about his magic? 

Then there was the way he talked, saying things like Damn, Person, what were those things? Why did he miss-say common everyday words like "everypony" into something like Everyone? And what about his cutie mark!?

It's possible, Spike reasoned, it was just a foreigner thing. He did have an accent that he couldn't really place, so that could account for the odd words and miss-sayings. Zecora was from far away and she talked differently as well. 

The horn thing though? that was a little harder to explain. He was fairly certain that all unicorns could do magic, no matter how little, or else why be born with a horn? Though he supposed that Harry could be like Scootloo and not able to use his inherent magic like other unicorns the same way he suspected that she couldn't with her wings like other pegusi?

It was possible, but then why had he not known he had a horn in the first place? he had definitely been surprised he's had one.

Then a horrifying thought occurred to him and his eyes widened.

What if Harry had been cursed?

Spike had seen numerous instances of ponies whose minds and bodies were altered by magic, such as Discord making his friends opposite from who they were, or that time when Shinning Armour was being controlled by Queen Chrysalis, or when the Chrystal Kingdom, an entire Kingdom! Lost their memories. Even Twilight had done it by accident with that spell from Star Swirl the Bearded when she switched their cutie marks on the day she became an Alicorn. It may account for the blank flank as well. Maybe he lost his memory of even having one?

'poor guy,' Spike thought to himself, 'If that's true, I can't risk leaving him alone, even outside of Croup Crossing, he might even wander off and get into more trouble!' granted he seemed rather stable, but with a curse you never know.

Spike turned over and looked at the young stallion's sleeping face.  

He knew that if he stuck around to help Hairy he would miss the gathering of the dragons. He was already way behind because they could fly, and he couldn't, and they'd had a day ahead of him before he had left Ponyville. If he stuck around to help Hairy he was going to miss his chance to figure out what kind of dragon he was.

But he couldn't leave somepony to fend for  himself when he obviously needed help, and this, Spike was sure was at least part of who Spike was. No matter how it hurt to give up his goal to join the other dragons.

Resolved to this decision, he snuggled down and fell into a deep sleep.