Hiking to the tunnel opening took most of the afternoon. I sat at the mouth of the tunnel for an hour at least, both to catch my breath and to collect my thoughts. The fire on the bog wasn’t raging like before, but the curtain of white smoke it created was still there. I was outside of Equestria, cut off from my friends by almost all measures.
Rainbow Dash was home now, completely safe and probably really angry. Hopefully she wouldn’t come after me again. It’s not as if I asked her to shadow me this whole time. It was nice to sit around last night and talk, but that didn't mean I needed a babysitter. I figured jumping the bog all by myself would’ve proven that to both of us. Instead I felt even worse than before. Maybe she was right. Maybe I was just a little baby who’d made it this far on luck alone.
Warm air blew out of the tunnel, and a wisp of black smoke followed. Somehow this entrance, a black abyss bigger than the side of a house, was more menacing than the mountain it burrowed into. Still, the only way I’d complete my mission, and find out if I really was a baby, was by stepping into the dark.
I walked, very slowly at first, out of the sunlight. I kept a hand against one of the walls and soon found myself tracing my claws along the deep gouges that lined it. This was more than a convenient spot to take a five-hundred-year nap; dragon claws had created this tunnel and presumably whatever it led to. Maybe I was on my way to some sort of sparkling palace, like a dragon version of Canterlot. More warm air blew past my face, along with the unmistakable scent of dragon breath. Despite all of my fears, I started walking faster.
The tunnel felt nearly as steep as the mountainside. Each footfall seemed to last a little longer than it should have, making me wonder if I was about to walk off a ledge. Blasts of my fire breath gave me fleeting glimpses of the rock in front of my feet and the wall next to me, but nothing more. The tunnel’s opposite wall was lost in the darkness, and I was starting to feel like I might be next.
“S-snap out of it, S-Spike. It’s just dark, that’s all!”
I pulled Applejack’s hat out and set it on my head. There wasn’t any sun to keep out of my eyes, but the tunnel couldn’t exactly get any darker. I ran my hands along the brim, took a moment to think about how soon I’d be back home, and reached out to put my hand back on the wall.
Except the wall wasn’t there.
My footsteps stopped, and my heart nearly did the same. “W-where am I?”
A fresh blast of hot air nearly knocked me down. I retreated a few steps and finally found the tunnel wall, or at least a wall. The ground was flat here, and at this point I was too turned around to tell which way I’d come from. The only thing I knew for certain is that I’d left the tunnel and entered a cave.
Something big stirred in the darkness nearby, as if the mountain itself were flexing its muscles.
Then I heard a voice, a voice so deep that it shook the ground under my feet with a mere whisper.
“What are you doing in my cave, you—” the next blast of air traveled into the cave instead of out “—dragon! Is that a dragon I smell?”
I nodded at first, and was relieved to realize he couldn’t see me. “Y-yes! I-I don’t mean any harm! I-I only wanted to talk.”
I could feel the other dragon’s stare piercing through the darkness. “Hmmm… Your talk isn’t that of a dragon; why have you trespassed in my domain, if not to plunder my hoard?”
“I… I… I th-think we might be related. M-my egg was found around here, and—”
“Come closer.”
“Huh?”
“Closer! I smell that you are dragon, but not clearly enough to know if you are of my brood.”
My eyes were useless here, but I still stepped towards the sound of the voice.
“Yes, that’s it. Come closer still. Closer that we might sense each other.”
The dragon sniffed me again and nearly pulled off my hat in the process. “Hmmm. You are like no dragon I have smelled before, but there is something familiar. Perhaps if I…”
The whole cave shook, and two points of green flickering light appeared in the darkness: beads of fire from the dragon’s nostrils. I could see the outline of his face: purple and green scales, sharp teeth, and two green eyes that shone brighter than the fire illuminating them.
The dragon’s mouth curved into a smile. “Why, you are barely a whelp fresh out of the egg. Still… Your scales… Their coloration is unmistakable.”
I looked down at myself. “It is?”
“There is but one purple and green bloodline left among dragonkind, and I am its head. If your egg was taken from this cave, you are my own. You are my son.”
All the questions I hadn’t been able to think of before came to me at once. There was so much to ask, so much to say, and yet all I could do for the moment was smile. “I’m… I mean, you’re really my dad?”
The massive head nodded. “Yes. I recognize the scent of your mother now, an aroma I had nearly forgotten.”
“What… happened to her?”
Air gusted all around me, but not from the dragon’s breath. Two massive wings created a gale and stopped it just as quickly.
“Let us not speak of such things, not before I know the reason for your sudden return to the nest.”
“Me? I-I don’t really know much. I was hoping you could tell me. Princess Celestia found my egg near your mountain five hundred years ago. She thought it was abandoned, so she brought it back to Canterlot and tried to hatch me. It’s a long story, but… Well, I’ve been living with ponies ever since, and I came here to try to find out where I came from.”
The fire doubled in brightness, and for a moment the gale winds returned. “Ponies! They dare to steal the egg of an elder dragon?”
“No, not steal! Celestia would never do that!”
The dragon’s face drew closer. “I’ve awoken to a better world indeed, if ponies have learned respect at last. When I first went to sleep, they were the worst of the insects, infesting the land with their nations, laws, and cities… corrupting the young and weak with their grand talk of ‘civilization.’ ”
“But—”
“A true dragon is not of their fleeting world of night and day! A true dragon may sleep through the rise and fall of the insects and their empires, wanting only for that which endures: a hoard and a brood.”
My questions felt even smaller than I was, but somehow that didn’t stop me from voicing them. “If dragons don’t have cities, how do they meet? Don’t they ever see each other?”
“The want of a brood may call a young dragon to migrate, but that is all. The life of an elder dragon is solitary… contemplative… nigh eternal.”
“That’s… that’s just so different. I don’t think I could ever do that. I know I’m a dragon and everything, but I couldn’t ever just sleep on a pile of gems for centuries. I’d miss all my friends, and they’d miss me.”
The cave rumbled with the dragon’s laughter. “Gems? Jewels are but candy, devoid of the life-giving magic that sustains we elder dragons through the millennia.”
“But what else is there to eat? Ponies just eat plants and they don’t live forever… unless you count Celestia. And why do you keep saying elder dra—”
A claw crashed down next to me. “This is the ignorance that comes of living among insects! You are of my bloodline, one of the oldest and purest of dragonkind, one of the few keepers of true immortality. Speak no more of these ‘ponies.’ They feed off the ground, and to the ground they return. Elder dragons require more than mere plants and gems.”
I shrank down to the ground and wrapped my tail around myself. “I guess I just don’t understand.”
“You will.”
Fire, as hot and bright as the noonday sun, scorched the cave’s ceiling and set half a millennium’s worth of moss and cobwebs ablaze. Suddenly I could see everything, and part of me, to this day, wishes I could unsee it.
The cave wasn’t in a palace, although Canterlot could’ve easily fit inside it. A single stone pillar covered in scorch marks supported the ceiling in the very center. If I hadn’t stood there myself, I never would’ve believed such a massive cave could even exist, especially with the upper half of a mountain above it.
The dragon, my father, took up most of the cave’s interior. I could see echoes of myself in his massive frame, and yet his wings sagged, and his limbs shook under his weight. I was looking at a version of myself aged thousands of years: an elder dragon and his version of a hoard. There were no gems. There was no gold. Instead, my father sat atop a pile of bones, all scoured perfectly white like only dragon fire could manage. Every eye socket in every skull stared at me from ages long past in one final expression of agony and horror.
I tried to speak, but my tears wouldn’t let me.
The dragon spoke instead. “In the light I recognize you at last, whelp. I should have smelled it from the start, even more than the stink of insects.” He stamped a foot down on the bone pile. “You smell of our failure!”
“No… I can’t be your son, I c—”
“How long have I tried to forget that day! The day when the pony explorers came, when the mere presence of their foreign magic disturbed the egg forming in your mother’s belly.”
I backed away until I was against a wall. The dragon came closer, each footfall rattling the bones on the ground. Suddenly I was looking down his snout and into those big, uncaring eyes.
“Yes, that must have been you. The tiny little egg, half the size of its brothers, not even good enough to feed to the other hatchlings. Had I known that ponies would dare try to hatch you, I would have done much more than throw your egg to the buzzards.”
I pushed him away with all of my pathetic might. “Well they did! I’m alive because of them!”
“Feh, what life? After a month out of your shell you should have been a giant and a terror among ponies. Instead you remain a wingless runt that the ground will reclaim in mere decades, just like the insects that robbed you of your dragonkind legacy!”
My watery eyes darted to the tunnel that led me here. “Then… I’ll go, and I’ll never come back! I’d rather live with ponies than be a monster like you anyway!”
I slipped off one of my pack’s shoulder straps and swung it in front of me. I thrust a hand into the main pocket for one of Twilight's magic vials. I was ready to quit. I was ready to run away and never look back.
Smoke erupted out of the dragon’s nostrils. “You shall not leave! I will not let such an insult to my bloodline walk the earth!”
My hand closed around something made of glass, something too big to be a vial. I threw the jar to the ground and ran.
Thunder reverberated through the cave as Rainbow’s raincloud escaped the confines of the smashed jar. I heard the dragon growling with annoyance, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that my hand was back inside my pack, and this time I’d found one of the two vials I had left. All I had to do was pour it over myself, and I’d be back home.
As I held up the vial, the light glinting off it vanished. I looked over my shoulder just in time to duck under the spiked dragon tail speeding towards my head. I hit the ground hard, but the vial didn’t. The swipe from the dragon tail had flicked it out of my hand, sending it spinning through the cave. I caught sight of it just before a brilliant flash of light overtook the stone pillar supporting the ceiling.