Chapter Seven
Father of Dragons

In which appearance and appellation are reconciled
to a surprising degree,
several risky and unsatisfactory plans are debated,
and there is an unwelcome mention of stairs.

May 4th, 1014, Early Evening
Onboard Nebula, holding station above
the Dragon's Teeth range

Somehow, I was aware of my throbbing headache before I regained consciousness.

I was in my bunk with heavy blankets covering me up to my chin. It felt like there was something wrapped around my horn as well. The shutters had been closed and the only light came from a lantern on my desk, leaving the cabin dim. Rainbow Dash sat beside the bed reading. Her breath puffed out in little white clouds, which was odd.

"Head hurts," I said. My breath made clouds, too. I took in a deep breath and winced, but my question was answered; the cabin was extremely cold.

"Don't try to get up," Rainbow said, marking her place with a scrap of sailcloth and closing the book. "I'll go get the doctor."

"It's okay," I mumbled. I pushed a hoof out from beneath the covers and shifted onto my side. "Why is it so cold in here?"

Rainbow Dash crossed to my bedside and pushed my hoof back under the blanket. "It's not okay, Twi! Just stay there." She went to the door and stuck her head out. "Somebody get the doc down here. Twilight's awake!" I winced at both the volume of her voice and the sudden light that flooded into the cabin.

"What I need is to be brought up to date... and some aspirin." I considered casting a pain relief spell, but decided to wait until I got the okay from the doctor before using my horn. Magic burnout can be a serious matter. "Where's Ket? I need a status report."

"She's wrapped in, like, a gazillion blankets next to the galley stove. I guess bugs don't handle the cold very well."

"You know very well... wait... you're stalling me! You need to tell me what's going on right now!"

She stopped smiling and shoved me back down. "As beat-up as you are, I don't think you can out-muscle me, Twi. You'd better not try to use your magic, either. Your horn is kinda cracked and all singed-like." She grimaced. "Look, just relax and I'll tell you what I know. Mr. Fairlead can fill in all the details later, but he's pretty busy right now."

It was then that Doctor Woundwort came in and began fussing over me. I told Dash to keep on with her report, and grudgingly let the doctor poke and prod.

"We scraped bottom dodging the mountain but didn't wreck anything too important. Thing is, we dumped every last drop of our ballast and went up like a rocket. Mr. Fairlead thinks we must have set some kind of altitude record." She smiled at that. Of course she did. She'd probably envy a pony who won a "Most Spectacular Non-Fatal Crash" award.

"Anyway, we had to vent a whole bunch of lifting gas to keep the cells from popping, and to keep us from, like, bashing into the moon. So that means if we try to go back down to cruising altitude, we won't be able to stay there for very long. Fluttershy says she can land us soft, but we'll need to get more gas and ballast before we can really go anywhere."

I craned my neck to see past the doctor's shoulder. "How far can we get by using the engines to stay aloft?"

Dash shrugged. "I dunno. There's some deal with the engines not working so good up here, and the power crystals are, like, way low on energy, but that's not the big problem."

"No... well... yes, doctor, but I just need some painkillers to get me on my hooves. I have to formulate a plan."

"You need to stay in your bunk and get some rest, captain," the doctor insisted.

"Ya ain't gonna win that fight, doc," came Applejack's voice from the companionway. "Twi thinks I'm stubborn, but I could take lessons from her." She came into the cabin accompanied by an absolutely divine smell. "Help her sit up, doc. Pinkie Pie sent some medicine."

The doctor grumbled but did as he was told. Applejack held the steaming mug up to my mouth so that I could sip from it. Most medical professionals wouldn't classify a cinnamon and nutmeg cafè latte as a proper pharmacological treatment. More fools, they. The coffee and a hooffull of aspirin had me feeling much better pretty quickly.

The doctor finally admitted that I was physically well enough to go about my business as long as I didn't try to fly or put any strain on my left wing. My magic was another matter. "Don't use spells at all until you get checked out by a specialist," he warned me. "You could risk permanent impairment."[1]
----------
[1] Yes, the doctor, who (like most of the crew) believed I was a unicorn mare twice my apparent age, could examine my wings and horn in quick succession without realizing there was anything odd about the situation. The Just Don't Think About It component of my disguise spell worked so well because ponies seemed to have that particular mental quirk as part of their basic psychological nature.
----------

Short of killing me outright, there wasn't any damage that I couldn't eventually recover from. But I needed to be healthy in the short-term and if that meant not using my magic for a while, I'd have to accept the limitation. I had to get my crew out of this mess and safely home.

"Mr. Fairlead," I called out as I came on deck. "Can you apprise me of the situation?"

He had been standing in the waist, peering over the starboard rail. He jumped a bit at my words and turned, giving me a crisp salute. "Yes, captain!"

"Capt'n on deck!" somepony called out from the quarterdeck. That made me jump a bit. I had gotten used to that sort of thing long ago, but the yell went through my aching head like a knife. I glanced around as I walked over to my First Mate and saw that everypony on deck was watching me with hopeful expressions. We were in a tight spot, no doubt about it, and they were all looking to me to get them out of it.

"Rainbow Dash gave me the gist of our altitude problem," I said to Fairlead as I joined him at the starboard rail. "I take it we don't have any reserve gas?"

"No ma'am. We hadn't loaded any of the gas cylinders we'd bought or recharged the power crystals when we saw your distress flare and didn't think we should waste any time."

I didn't nod for fear of feeling my brain bang around the inside of my skull. "Absolutely correct, Mr. Fairlead. I take it there's some reason we can't ground and make repairs while I figure out some way to get us some lift?"

He opened his mouth, paused, and then closed it again. He lifted a big spyglass in his magic and pointed it at a steep angle over the starboard rail, inviting me to take a look with a motion of one hoof.

It took me a moment to realize what I was seeing. The airships below were so tiny that it was only when I used the spyglass that I could make out that they were battleships. It appeared that the entire airfleet of Marezambique was pursuing us.

"No ma'am. I doubt that any of the Sultan's craft could make anywhere near this altitude anyway, but I'm pretty sure they don't know we're up here. They wouldn't think a craft that looks as old as Nebula could manage to fly so high, and we've slung sails below her keel as camouflage, in case any of the zebs think to look up. Ms. Fluttershy offered to try to scrape up some cirrocumulus, but as there aren't any other clouds in the sky, I figured it might backfire on us."

"Good thinking, Mr. Fairlead. Any reason why we can't run at this altitude until we get into neutral territory?"

"We can try, but a lot of the non-pegasus crew are altitude sick already, and we don't know what the winds are like up here. Nopony's charted the high currents in this region, so we may hit some heavy contrary flow that'll exhaust what little energy the crystals have left or take us where we don't want to be. It'll be a couple of days before the hull is repaired, so a water landing would be a very bad thing."

"Any good news?" That was awful of me. He had done an excellent job keeping things together while I napped, and didn't deserved my snippy comeback. I could blame my aching head, but I should be able to be gracious even when out of sorts.

"Well, there's other news. Something I'm sure you will be interested in, captain." He led me to the larboard rail and gestured to the desert below.

From our height, nearly the whole of Marezambique was visible below us, and I could see that the Dragon's Teeth mountains had been only partially well-named. As I had suspected, we had flown through the jawbone. The skull was off to one side, in a position that suggested it had fallen off the jaw in the direction of the Sea of Sand, to become partially buried there. The vertebrae ran in a line out toward the horizon to gradually disappear beneath the waters of the Eastern Sea, and I could make out rocky ridges along the coast that looked like a gigantic outstretched claw emerging from the water. It was so mind-bogglingly enormous that, without our high-altitude perspective, I didn't see how anypony could have recognized the whole for what it was.

And what, exactly, was it? Had the mountain range once been the skeleton of a living dragon? I could hardly credit the idea, and the part we had gotten an all-too-close view of had certainly been granite rock. But then, so had I at one time.[2]
----------
[2] I'm truly thankful for my wonderful friends. Having my last words be, "Oh, so that's what a cockatrice looks like!" would be awfully embarrassing.
-----------

Mr. Fairlead floated the spyglass over to me again, and I took hold of it between my hooves. The rock showed a great deal of weathering, but there were convincing details that remained as worn-down lumps. If it was some sort of crazy ancient sculpture, it was a ridiculously detailed one. The frontal process of the left zygomatic bone had collapsed at some point in the past, sending tons of rock cascading into the eye socket. There seemed to be several sizable sand dunes at the bottom of the socket as well, though the shadows cast by the lowering sun made it hard to be sure. If there had once been an eye in that socket, it would have been big enough to enclose all of Canterlot Castle.

The apparent age of the range, based on the evident erosion would place it well before….

Dragon. Ancient, gigantic dragon. Information from several sources suddenly clicked together in my brain. I reflexively tried to teleport my private logbook from my cabin, and gasped as a lance of pain shot through my horn. I dropped the spell before the vortex had even started to form.

"I'm fine, Mr. Fairlead," I said, "A thought just struck me, and it was a heavy one."

I ran a few more calculations through my head. I glanced up at the quarterdeck. "At the turn of the glass, bring the girls to my cabin. I'll want to discuss our options."

Mr. Fairlead allowed himself a slight smile. I could see that he assumed I was working on some clever plan to get us all out of the predicament I had put us into. I wasn't looking forward to the moment he learned that I intended to drop us right into the middle of our enemy.

"You should go back to bed, dear," Rarity told me in a patient voice that one usually uses on truculent foals. "You're not thinking clearly."

Mr. Fairlead just sat there, stony-faced. He wasn't the sort to go against his captain, but I could see he was mentally making out his last will and testament.

"Look," I said, as calmly as possible, "we just don't have many viable options. We can try to run north for Neighrobi, but it's a long ways, and we don't have nearly enough energy to get there, even if we don't have to buck headwinds. Or we can try and find a jetstream and let it take us… somewhere,and hope our lift gas holds out. But those are very risky gambles."

"Yes, it is, but there's another consideration that you didn't let me get to." I hesitated. I had sent us haring off after this particular goal several times now, and none of my efforts had gotten us anything but trouble and empty hooves.

"Yes?" Rarity asked. She accompanied her mild prompt with a graceful lift of one eyebrow that clearly said, "You'd better make this good, darling."

I reached over to the little table beside my bunk and grabbed my big notebook. I opened it and awkwardly flipped through the pages with my hooves until I came to the passage I had remembered while on deck.

I cleared my throat and began to read a particular part of the ancient poem I had copied down. "'The twisting steps lie beneath the gaze of the Father of Dragons. He guards the way…'"

"Oh come on!" Rainbow Dash interrupted me with a shout. "The Labyrinthine Stairs, again? How many moons have we wasted chasing that fairy tale?"

Rarity frowned. "Perhaps now is not the time for treasure-hunting, Twilight. We are in an unfortunate situation and survival should be our first priority."

I closed the book. "I've always thought that passage was a metaphor, but right beneath us is a gigantic dragon skeleton that's a near match for the literal meaning, and we know the Stairs are somewhere along this coast. The Old Equuish word that was translated as 'gaze' could just as well be 'eye.' This is the closest we've ever gotten!"

None of the faces around me wore sympathetic expressions. "Alright. Suppose the Stairs aren't there. My plan is still the best chance we have. Getting us down into the eye socket where we'll be mostly hidden and protected will be a tricky bit of flying, especially at night, but Fluttershy can do it." I looked at her, and she nodded immediately. "Once we're down and get the top of the envelope covered in sand, it'll be almost impossible to spot us from the air. We will have the days we need to repair the hull and let me recuperate enough to use my magic again. That soft sand will work almost as well as water for ballast and there's a good chance I'll find the right sort of minerals to generate at least a little bit of lifting gas. The unicorn crew can trickle charge the power crystals even if I don't recover the use of my horn."

"If the Stairs are there, they'll give us a way to retreat. If they're not… there should still be a cave where the optic canal enters the skull. We've still got the Eye of Rushwa to bargain with, and if they're completely unreasonable, I've still got the Talisman of Night as a last resort."

"I think it's a good plan," Fluttershy said quietly. All heads turned toward her and she ducked her muzzle, letting more of her mane fall across her face, but she kept speaking. "I don't know how the cold is affecting Nebula in general, but it can't be good for her, and we've lost some altitude since this morning. I think we'll only be able to stay in the air for a couple more days at most. If we have to land in the open desert, the Sultan's airfleet will be able to see us from leagues away. We'll be helpless."

I nodded my thanks to her and said to the others, "If anypony has a better idea, I'd like to hear it."

"Alright then," I said, getting to my hooves. "We fill in the rest of the crew, wait for darkness, and then make a run for it."

The Twilight Enigma

by iisaw

7 Father of Dragons