As the moon moved back to its rising position, Midnight Darkscales threw back his head and laughed like a maniac.
The mayor had flown down to the main level of the main hall by this point, and was hurriedly gathering the members of Lord Lumin’s Guard that had come with him to the festival.
“Seize him!” he shouted, pointing a talon at the black Ultima Dragon. “Only he knows how to get Lord Lumin back!”
The squad of heavily armed and armored soldiers, almost chiefly composed of Dragonesses, started charging their breath weapons, flying swiftly towards Darkscales.
“Give it up, dust motes!” Darkscales cackled madly as he quickly charged and fired his own breath weapon. A cloud of nightmare dust that triggered hallucinations, fear and confusion hit his would-be assailants, sending them flying about helplessly, screaming in panic. A smug, self-satisfied grin spread across Midnight’s face as he observed the ensuing havoc.
Apple Slice watched the “battle” for a little bit before turning away and groaning in frustration, the sight of Lumin's personal guards, the most elite military unit in the world, so easily defeated being too much for him. Draconia's finest, beaten by a blast of purple dust.
Not missing a beat, Nightfall spread his wings, and Wishful climbed on his back before the two took to the air and flew quickly towards the library, the wind whipping past him as he hastened.
Prism Slash turned his head just in time to notice Nightfall zip away, narrowed his eyes angrily and shouted, “Hey! come back here! Don’t run away!”
Nightfall either ignored or didn’t hear Prism’s call as he sped towards the library, just barely visible against the backdrop of the night sky.
“Um, Nightfall?” Wishful asked, glancing around nervously as buildings zipped past. “We need to stop Darkscales, and he’s the other way.”
“You were up most of the night, Wish,” Nightfall replied, focusing more on not colliding into obstacles than talking, his steely gaze trained on the building ahead. “And you’re still called a filly for a reason.”
Stopping only long enough to open the library door, Nightfall rushed inside, completely forgetting about shutting it in his haste to figure out some way to stop Darkscales. Wishful climbed off his back, and shot him a worried glance as he paced back and forth across the library floor, the gears almost visibly turning in his head.
Nightfall stared across the room at a reading table loaded with half-open books, which were, for once, annoyingly useless in this case. “Ugh! The Components of Balance were used to defeat Darkscales before, but I don’t know where they really are!” Nightfall growled in frustration, pulling at his head fins. “How can I stop Midnight Darkscales without the Components of Balance?”
As he turned around to consult his assistant, Nightfall instead found himself snout-to-snout with a very angry Prism Slash.
“And just what are these Components of Balance supposed to be?” Prism Slash seethed, baring his fangs, almost causing Nightfall to instinctively recoil. “How did you even know about Midnight Darkscales when none of us did? Are you working for him? Huh?”
“Hold yer horses, Slash, he ain’t workin’ fer the enemy,” a familiar voice suddenly cut in, Apple Slice appearing from behind the Fairy Dragoon and pulling Slash back to the ground. “But he does know quite a bit more about this than we do.” Turning to Nightfall, he narrowed his eyes and said, “Care to enlighten us, Nightfall?”
Another familiar white Dragoon stepped out from behind Apple Slice. “I’ve seen the Components of Balance before, if that’ll help,” Extraordinaire interjected, raising a claw. “I saw them on display at El Dragado Castle!” The tailor smiled smugly, as if he’d easily solved their problem.
“Those ones are fakes,” Nightfall said with a shake of his head, Extraordinaire’s smile fading into a frown of disappointment. “Lord Lumin showed me a secret spell that can detect any kind of magic, and when I used the spell on the ones in the display, the only magic I detected was a magic decoy spell.”
“By the way,” Nightfall asked, suddenly noticing that in addition to those three Dragoons, two more were present off to the side: Timidwings and Goody Gumdrops, “how did you all get in here?”
“You left the door open,” Goody replied, Nightfall faceclawing in embarrassment. “You were having a panic attack, so those of us who weren’t mad at you decided to come help you out!” After pausing for a second, the pink Dragoon added, “Oh, and Slash tagged along, too.” Prism Slash grumbled something incoherent in response.
“Okay, I’ll give a summary of what I know,” Nightfall sighed, motioning for the other five Dragoons to sit down while Wishful finally closed the door. “I’m Lord Lumin’s personal student, and after studying a book, I ran across the legend of Midnight Darkscales. The book was an abridged version, though, so I didn’t have all the information I needed until I found the unabridged version here yesterday. It gave me more information, including that the Components of Balance were used by Lord Lumin to seal his brother in the moon one thousand years ago, but it didn’t give the location of the real ones anywhere in the book—”
Nightfall was cut off by a sudden, loud squeal, followed by a pink blur dashing back and forth across the room.
“Ta-daa! ’The Components of Balance: a Complete Guide to the Artifacts of Legend’,” Goody exclaimed while waving a book with that exact title in Nightfall’s field of vision, who just stared at it in disbelief.
“Where was this book?” Nightfall asked, still stunned.
“Where else but under ‘C’, silly goose?” Goody replied with a smile and a shrug. “I mean, this is a library, right?”
He blinked, then faceclawed yet again. “Okay, you’ve made your point,” Nightfall sighed while cracking the book open and skimming through it. “Okay, there are six Components, but only five of them have actually been located,” Nightfall said, summarizing the book’s text to speed things up. “The first five are Empathy, Joy, Sacrifice, Integrity, and Fidelity. The actual name of the sixth is a mystery, but with the five assembled, applying a spark should summon the sixth. The five known Components were last found in the Ancient Palace of the Royal Dragon Family.” Nightfall blinked, looked over the page again, and even skimmed the index before muttering, “That’s odd. The book doesn’t give an actual location for the Ancient Palace.” He groaned, shutting the book. “Now how exactly are we supposed to find the palace if nogon in Draconia knows where it—”
“Um, I know where it is,” Timidwings piped up. Everygon turned round to stare at him, and he mumbled, “Well, what’s left of it, anyway.”
“Where is it?” everygon asked at once, their voices overlapping.
“I saw it once in the Wild Woods,” Timidwings replied quietly.
“You actually went into that dreadful place?” Extraordinaire gasped in shock. “Alone?”
“I was trying to get a rare flower for some medicine, but at the first fork in the path through the woods, I turned left when I was supposed to turn right, and I eventually came to the ruins of a massive city with a rundown castle in the center,” Timidwings explained quietly. “There’s many things in that city that I didn’t stay around to take a look at, possibly including monsters.”
“An entire ruined city is in the middle of that creepy forest?” Prism Slash gasped. “Who knew?” He grinned, “I bet nogon’s explored it yet! Think of all the cool old stuff in the city, especially in the castle itself!”
‘Woohoo! Let’s go!” Goody exclaimed, already starting to head for the door.
“No,” Nightfall said with a shake of his head. He couldn’t put these dragons he’d only just met in danger like that. “I feel I have to do this alone. Sorry.”
“Nuttin’ doin’, pardner,” Apple Slice said with a shake of his head. “We sure ain’t lettin’ a friend of ours go in there and get himself killed.” Placing a claw on Nightfall’s shoulder, he added, “We’re stickin’ with ya ta the bitter end!”
The others nodded in agreement, and Goody appended, “or if the end is sweet, too! Hmm, sticky and sweet makes me think of marshmallows! Wait, now I’m getting hungry,” he added after, prompting an eye-roll from half the room.
Nightfall sighed and nodded. Even if he barely knew them, they apparently wouldn’t let him go alone, so he might as well take the five grown dragons along. But he drew the line at the next one who he knew would ask to come along.
“Nightfall, I’m going, too!” Wishful Legend said firmly, moving back into a sitting position and crossing her forehooves in front of her in a stubborn gesture.
“No, you’re staying here to hold down the fort,” Nightfall ordered. “I may not be your father, but I’m still your caretaker, and I won’t allow you to get hurt.” She was a little filly, not a fully grown dragon like the other five. Gwynnia only knew what would happen if he let Wishful get in harm’s way.
“We were only going to stay here until the festival was over, remember?” Wishful shot back. “And Darkscales has disappeared! He’s not going to attack the library! What would he want with it, anyway? To look for ‘Tyranny 101: A Ruler’s Guidebook’, or something like that? I don’t think he’s going to be trying to get in a bit of light reading in between sending guards screaming for their lives. And if I did have to ‘hold down the fort’ against him, what do you really think a Unicorn filly like me could do against him, anyway? Ironically, the safest place for me right now is with you, Nightfall, and the others, for as you said yourself, you won’t allow me to get hurt.”
Nightfall’s head was spinning from the barrage of intelligent quips from the Unicorn filly, and he finally slumped to the ground, dumbfounded.
“You’re not supposed to be able to out-logic me!” he whispered in disbelief.
“You raised me, you know,” she said with a wink. “I just learned from the best.”
“Fine, you can tag along,” Nightfall said with a sigh and a nod. “But you have to stay close by me, alright? Don’t stray from the group. If I tell you to hide, you hide, nevermind me. If I tell you to run, please, keep running and don’t look back.”
“Sure thing,” the Unicorn replied solemnly while climbing onto Nightfall’s back. “Let’s go!”
Right outside the window, a blue and red nebula swirled about before zooming away to the woods itself.
Once concealed behind a cluster of trees, the nebula reformed into Midnight Darkscales, who muttered to himself, “So, he did have a champion ready to stop me! I didn’t think I’d have to get rid of the Components this soon, but I knew they’d never been moved.” Chuckling wickedly to himself, Darkscales continued his monologue. “My brother thinks he’s so smart, but he overthinks things. He thought that I would think that he would have them moved for safekeeping, so he left them in the last place he thought I’d ever think to look.” The wicked Dragoon sneered before finishing with, “Sorry, Lumin, but I’m going to have to make you watch your own champion fall.”
Vanishing into nothing, Darkscales warped to the heart of the sun, where his brother was bound by heavy chains of darkness in the midst of the fiery core.
Lumin looked up, clearly not expecting his captor to be back any time soon. “So, have you come to your senses and decided to set me free, Umbra?” Lumin asked with a hint of hopefulness.
“Quite the opposite, in fact,” Darkscales snickered with a shake of his head. “I know you left the Components in Mother and Father’s old castle. You overthink things, Lumin.”
His brother’s eyes went wide. “So, what are you going to do?” Lumin asked, worried. He had been certain that leaving the Components in the place where the two of them battled would have kept Darkscales from finding them.
A magical screen appeared in front of the two brothers, showing six Dragoons and one Unicorn filly on their way to a forest.
“I overheard them talking, Lumin,” Darkscales whispered excitedly. “I thought you might have prepared a champion to fight for you, and you did!” Thinking for a second, he added, “But, I thought either the champion would fight for you the moment I showed myself or take a long time to get the Components because they’d be amassing an army. I figured I’d either be defeated on the spot, or I could take my sweet time establishing myself as King before destroying the Components.” Pointing to the screen, he suddenly switched to a flat tone and stated, “But this way, it looks like we both have a chance to win,” suddenly, he cackled madly as he continued, “But you and I both know that a snowball has a better chance of surviving an active volcano than they do of defeating me. Farewell, Lumin! Enjoy the show! I’ll come back from time to time to check up on you until I win.”
“Nightfall, please don’t fail me,” Lumin whispered as his brother warped away once more.
At the entrance to the Wild Woods, a tall, seemingly natural arch of two twisted and gnarled trees, the seven of them stood gazing towards the beginning of their path. “So, besides Timidwings, nogon here has ever gone inside this place?” Nightfall asked, breaking the silence.
“Why, of course not!” Extraordinaire huffed in exasperation. “Just look at the place. It’s unsettling, and nogon would go in there without a very good reason.”
There was a strange sort of power radiating from the forest, ancient and unsettling, Chaos and Order seeming to refuse to stay equal, cycling back and forth between which one held dominance. Even from outside, it felt like an enormous trap waiting to be sprung on them. There could be anything waiting for them, between the tall trees so twisted and misshapen they looked like they’d been bent by some unnatural force. It was even darker beneath the forest canopy, almost solid blackness in between scant patches of moon and starlight.
Despite this, Nightfall looked the Woods over and said, his voice slightly shaky, “It does look kinda creepy, but I bet that’s just because it’s dark.” Motioning for the others to follow him, Nightfall said, “Let’s go. Lights on, Wish.”
“Roger!” the Unicorn said with a salute before shining a green spotlight from her horn forward, lighting up some of the area ahead, but not by much.
Nightfall lit up his own horns, and two purple beams of light shot forward from them.
Extraordinaire sighed and added his own blue beams to the mix, and they soon had five beams of light illuminating the path ahead.
“Now, everygon stay on the ground for now,” Nightfall suggested, glancing up at the trees. “It’ll be easier to keep a good field of vision if we stay in a group.”
With that, the seven of them passed under the archway and into the forest, leaving the openness of Dragontown’s outskirts behind them.
They made their way along the rough, winding path, always keeping close to each other, out of caution as much as common sense. Beyond the area ahead of them illuminated by the magical light, they could practically see nothing, shadows flickering at the edges of their spotlights like an inky outline as they proceeded. It was almost unnaturally quiet for a forest at night, the only sounds audible being the creaking of the trees, their footsteps against the packed dirt of the path, and their own, slightly fast breathing. There was little wind beyond a light breeze, but it still was starting to feel colder and colder, their breath misting in front of them as they walked deeper and deeper into the woods.
The near-silence was soon broken by Nightfall. “So, it was the left fork instead of the right one, right, Timidwings?” He asked as they came upon a fork in the path.
“Yes,” Timidwings replied softly, trembling a little and glancing back over his shoulder. “I-It’s to the left.”
“To the left we go, then,” Nightfall announced, and they continued down the path, only to soon find themselves on a thin overhang spanning the edge of a chasm. He stared down, unable to tell how far down the bottom was in the darkness, but not especially willing to find out, either.
“Well, good thing we can fly if we really have to,” Prism Slash remarked, dismissing the chasm below as nothing more than a minor obstacle. As Nightfall stepped back away from the edge, a cloud of purplish dust blew in Nightfall’s face, and the overhang started to crumble beneath him.
His vision took on a deep violet tinge, and the very air seemed to waver and oscillate around him, as if it were liquid and he was the center of a ripple. A wave of crushing fear spread through his mind, his wings locking in place of their own accord. Nightfall’s eyes went wide with panic, and he started to skid down the slope to his doom, just barely noticing the sound of his fellow dragons shouting in alarm and one filly shrieking in terror. He tried to simply use his wings to fly back up, but his wings wouldn’t respond. “My wings won’t work!” he screamed, panic quickly overtaking him. “Help!”
Back in Lumin’s prison, Darkscales suddenly reappeared, giggling insanely.
“That was easy!” he chuckled. “I just used some of my nightmare breath on your prized student, and now his brain thinks his wings won’t respond to him, so they won’t! I just had to break the overhang after that, and now your student and his Unicorn friend are going to fall to their deaths!”
“You monster!” Lumin snapped, straining against his bonds.
“Now now, let’s see how this turns out,” Darkscales said before turning his eyes back to the screen, watching in anticipation with baited breath.
“Ah’ve gotcha!” Apple Slice shouted as he dove for Nightfall, grabbing him with one claw. To both their dismays, however, Slice slammed into the cliff face, spraining his own wing and rendering it unusable for the time being. Grabbing a root with his other front claw and holding on for dear life, Slice watched as Prism Slash saved Wish from her demise and flew back up to check on Goody and Extraordinaire, who were both nursing minor injuries. Looking around, he noticed something else and smiled to himself as the root started to pull out of the cliff.
“This root ain’t gonna hold us both fer much longer,” Slice told Nightfall, turning his head to look Nightfall in the eyes. “Yah’ve gotta let go, or we’ll both fall.”
“But if I let go, I’ll still fall!” Nightfall screamed, his eyes wide and locked on the Dragoon above him, as he tried his best to cling onto the other dragon, swaying dangerously. “Are you crazy?”
“Ah’m plum serious, here,” Slice replied firmly with a shake of his head, his reassuring gaze meeting Nightfall’s fearful one. “Yah’ll be fine, Ah promise. Ah ain’t ‘bout ta lie ta yah just ta save mah own scales. Ah’m speakin’ Gwynnia’s own truth.”
“Okay,” Nightfall breathed and closed his eyes before he responded with a nod, still a little nervous. “I trust you on this...” And he sincerely hoped he wouldn’t regret it.
Nightfall let go, and he opened his eyes just as something yellow swooped down to him and caught him. A few seconds later, Slice also dropped, causing the yellow thing to grunt as it caught him, too.
The yellow thing turned out to be Timidwings, who had a very strained look on his face. “Sorry, guys. I usually don’t carry anything as big as another Dragoon. Especially not two at once.”
“Then let’s get back up there,” Nightfall said, gasping as he tried to calm his racing heart and looked back up at the cliff.
Timidwings set the two Dragoons down and lay down to rest his wings and catch his breath. “See, Ah ain’t ‘bout ta let hogwash come outta mah mouth,” Slice said with a smile once they had reached safety again.
Nightfall nodded, before his mind turned back to the next most pressing problem; the reason he had fell in the first place. “My wings still won’t work at all,” he remarked, feeling them with his claws. “I have no idea why.” Everything in his vision, including his friends, was still tinged violet and slightly distorted, seeming to waver between blurry and incredibly sharp before settling somewhere in between.
“Let me check, Nighty!” Wishful exclaimed as she galloped over to him, visibly unharmed besides a couple scratches. Lighting up her horn with magic, she first scanned his wings and said thoughtfully, “Well, everything seems normal, but I think I have an idea.” Touching her horn to his forehead, Wish paused for a moment, then nodded and said, “Your wings actually work just fine. You’re being affected by some kind of confusion-based breath weapon. Somegon did this to you, and I think I know who. If it were anygon else, I could purge it, but all I can do is lessen it a tiny bit. You’ll have to wait for the rest to wear off on its own. Sorry, Nighty.”
Wishful channeled more magic into her horn, then forced it into her caretaker’s skull. Her magic had a partially calming effect, slightly loosening up his wings, but not enough for them to be of any use, as well as removing some of the violet tint from his vision and making it a little more stable. After that, she gave Nightfall an apologetic smile and moved on to check on Slice’s sprained wing.
As Wish worked on Slice’s sprained wing, she used a bit of her Unicorn magic to relax the muscles in the wing and get them back in working order.
The others only had minor cuts and bruises, so the group continued on after Nightfall got his wings working again.
Back inside the sun, Lumin breathed a sigh of relief while Darkscales ground his teeth in frustration.
“They got lucky,” Darkscales spat. “That’s all that happened, Lumin: dumb luck. And luck eventually runs out. You’ll see!”
With that, Darkscales disappeared again, still fuming.
Further along the path, the group continued their walk in silence once more. But this time, they were considerably more wary, keeping their eyes trained ahead, but glancing off to the sides in case danger appeared. But none were as wary as Nightfall, the effects of the nightmare dust still lingering stubbornly. Shadows seemed to move amongst the trees, strange shapes moved across the corner of his eyes, colors were washed out to various shades of muted violet, and the outlines of the trees were as sharp as the lines of a pencil sketch. But worst of all, he felt the previous sense of terrified confusion weighing on the back of his mind, waiting to reappear if he didn’t force it down.
Every sound, no matter how small, nearly startled him. He kept glancing over his shoulder, expecting something to be right behind him, only to peer into the darkness. But, frankly, nothing there was more frightening to him than actually finding something, as the images his mind conjured up about what might have been there... well, they weren’t pleasant. His breath, and that of his friends, sounded unnaturally loud in his ears, and his heart beat like a bass drum inside his chest. The cold air felt heavy and oppressive to Nightfall, as if the atmosphere was slowly preparing to crush him in its icy grip, just biding it’s time.
To put it simply, Nightfall was having the worst trip of his life.
As the path was starting to become smoother and less winding, the sound of trees cracking and bending reached their ears. The group froze, as a loud thudding could be heard coming closer and closer, like the sound of a great weight being lifted and dropped on the forest floor again and again. Nightfall raised his head to see a massive shape stepping into his field of vision, right in the middle of the path. A chill went through him as he slowly looked further up, the shape becoming clearer and clearer in the light from his horns until it stood out in sharp, horrifying relief against the shadows of the forest. A great, hulking creature looked down at them with large, almost phosphorescent green eyes and let out a bloodcurdling roar. It had multiple serpentine heads, and when one roared, they all did, the trees quaking and groaning in cacophonous unison. It had to be seventy-five feet tall at the least!
“A hydra!” Nightfall exclaimed, trying to force down the terror trying to take hold of him, “we’ve gotta get past it somehow!”
Taking a moment to recover from the shock, Extraordinaire charged his own breath weapon before launching a stream of tiny, razor-sharp diamond particles at the hydra.
“Take that, you brute!” the white Mystic Dragoon shouted, before the hydra merely shrugged off the attack and responded with multiple streams of fire aimed straight at him. Extraordinaire tried his best to dodge the attack, but one of them still managed to singe his head fins a little. “Ah! My fins!” he exclaimed, feeling them with a claw. “Well, at least this’ll grow back in a day or two, so I won’t have to hide it with a combover for very long. Better my head fins get burnt than anything else, anyway.”
“Stop,” Timidwings said quietly, but nogon heard him.
“Don’t worry folks! Ah got this!” Apple Slice said while readying a lasso and charging up his own breath weapon, slight waves of air flowing between his teeth before launching a concussive shockwave at the creature, stunning it long enough to throw his lasso around all of its necks at once, which had all bunched together from the shock.
“Gotcha!” Slice said proudly. “Ah just knew Ah could use that fer somethin’ ‘sides just shakin’ apples outta trees! Sorry ‘bout this, but Ah’m gonna have ta hogtie ya, so—”
Slice cut off when the hydra snapped the lasso with ease and roared again, spittle flying in Apple Slice’s face.
“Stop,” Timidwings said again, speaking a little louder.
“I’ll take it from here, Slice!” Slash said before zipping into the air and zooming around the hydra’s heads.
Slash taunted the creature as he flew around it. “Can you keep your eyes on me? Let’s see how long you can last! I dunno, but your necks are gonna get twisted real—”
Slash cut off when a head suddenly lunged for him, smacking him out of the air.
“Gah!” he exclaimed, slamming into the ground with a dull thud.
“Stop!” Timidwings spoke up, but in the commotion, he still was unheard.
Nightfall watched his friends confront the hydra, one by one, wanting to intervene. But the malignant influence of the nightmare dust once again kept him rooted to the spot, fear poisoning his mind and spreading through his veins. The sounds of his companions were muffled in his ears, the roars of the hydra extremely loud in contrast. They seemed to be shrinking, and it, growing, everything zooming in and out of focus. He wouldn’t be helpful here, in this state. It would be so easy to run...
A raspy groan reached his ears, and Nightfall quickly shook his head, his vision clearing somewhat again. He turned to see Slash lying on the ground beside him, struggling to get back on his feet and swaying slightly.
“Slash, you okay?” Nightfall asked, concerned. Fear or no fear, he didn’t want to see one of his friends injured on his account.
“Eh, I’ve had worse,” the Fairy Dragoon chuckled before clutching his side and grunting in pain. “Ow.”
Nightfall felt a twinge of shame go through him; he’d stood there, and done nothing. It was his turn to face the hydra, dust or no dust. He gulped before stepping up to confront the multi-headed creature while Wish started to prepare her magic as backup.
Snarling to hide his unnatural fear, forcing it back into the very back of his mind, Nightfall lowered his head to charge up his own breath weapon, magenta light slowly building in his mouth while his horns lit up, adding crackling purple energy to the light building in his mouth.
Before he could fire, though, Timidwings shouted “STOP!” finally catching the attention of everygon and the one Unicorn.
Nightfall jumped, startled and immediately cancelled his attack, smoke rising from his nostrils as he was forced to cough. The immense backlash of cutting off his breath weapon’s charge hit him like a heavy slap to the face, his thoughts clearing. Colors returned to normal, sounds became clear again, his unnatural fear abated, and his vision snapped into natural focus. After sighing in relief, Nightfall turned around and asked, “Timmy? What is it?”
“She’s hurt!” Timidwings exclaimed, pointing a talon at the hulking creature, which looked somewhat less intimidating when it didn’t look three times larger than it was. “I can tell! She’s still an animal, and I understand them!”
Nightfall raised a claw to protest that this wasn’t some harmless little bunny hopping by, but the retort died in his throat. “Okay, you can give it a shot,” Nightfall sighed after a pause, motioning for Timidwings to approach the beast.
Timidwings nodded, and slowly flew towards the hydra, who roared again.
Surprisingly not flinching, Timidwings said, “Shhh… I’m here to help. Can you show me where it hurts?”
The hydra’s many heads blinked in surprise, but all the heads then nodded in unison and moved apart, revealing its main head, the one that controlled the entire body, as well as controlling the rest of the heads.
Lowering the center head, the hydra revealed that the head it had actually been protecting the whole time had multiple dark spines puncturing it, resembling those of a porcupine. However, a porcupine’s quills couldn’t penetrate the hide of a hydra, so it had to be something different.
“Oh, you poor dear!” Timidwings cooed, gently rubbing the underside of the main head’s jaw, the creature whimpering in pain. “Now, this’ll probably hurt, okay?” The hydra nodded. “But after they’re all out, you’ll feel much better, understand?” The hydra nodded again.
“Okay, I’m going to get rid of them, now,” Timidwings told the hydra. “Stay calm. The pain will only mean you’re getting closer to feeling better.” The hydra squeezed all of its eyes shut tight in anticipation of the pain, and Timidwings grabbed the first black quill and started to pull. The hydra cringed and whimpered, but it didn’t attack. When the first quill was removed, the Hydra sighed a little, then tensed up again as the yellow Fairy Dragoon pulled out another quill, then another, and another, repeating until ten quills were on the ground and the hydra’s head was free of puncturing quills.
The hydra nodded in thanks, licked Timidwings’ cheek, then walked away, almost sounding like it was humming in happiness. Each head produced a different pitch, making it sound like the humming of a choir fading into the distance.
As soon as the Fairy Dragoon turned away from them, the quills suddenly turned into smoke before vanishing entirely, as the other Dragoons—and one Unicorn filly—surrounded Timidwings and congratulated him.
“That was awesome, Timmy!” Prism Slash said, giving his fellow Fairy Dragoon a hearty slap on the back. “We all thought it was trying to kill us, but you saw it was in pain the whole time!”
“I didn’t know what was causing the pain, to be honest,” Timidwings admitted modestly. “I just noticed that she was in pain and could use some kindness. That’s all.”
“Even I didn’t notice the signs, and I’ve read all about such creatures in books!” Nightfall said. Granted, I was too scared at the time to do much thinking at all, he thought to himself.
“Well, you can’t learn everything from books, you know,” Wishful giggled. “Lord Lumin told you that many times, but you just wouldn’t listen to him.”
Nightfall tried to respond, but the words died in his throat, being replaced with a cry of, “Oh, books, how could you betray me like this?” Everygon responded to that with chuckles.
“Okay, let’s get going again,” Nightfall said, blushing in embarrassment. The others agreed, and they continued on, once again using magic to light the way.
The seven of them wandered deeper into the forest once more, the atmosphere feeling less oppressive without the taint of the nightmare dust in Nightfall’s mind, but still unsettling. It wasn’t getting brighter, as the scarce patches of moonlight that had been visible earlier on the path were nearly gone here. It was more akin to light shining through a keyhole into a dark room than actual illumination now. As they walked along, the light mist that had followed them for a good several minutes began to grow thicker. Soon, the separate clouds of rolling white mist formed into a nearly impenetrable fog, so thick that the light could barely cut through any of it.
“Ugh, I can’t see a thing in this fog!” Extraordinaire grumbled from somewhere on Nightfall’s right. “Does anygon have a way to produce more light?”
“I do,” Nightfall replied. My Greatest Skill is magic itself, so I still have the breath weapon an Emblemless Mystic Dragon has; with some modifications, of course. “I can alter my breath weapon with my magic to give it different effects. I’ll produce a few flares with it. Just a minute.”
Nightfall lowered his head just like he had against the hydra before Timidwings stopped him, magenta light once again forming in his mouth. This time, though, when his horns lit up, instead of crackling energy building up with it, the light turned a brilliant purple, almost white, and after opening his mouth, he launched a ball of magic energy from his mouth forwards, which landed, producing a white and purple flame that cleared the fog around it for several feet in every direction, but didn’t burn anything. After he repeated the process three times, resulting in four areas of light that the fog couldn’t penetrate, they found they were in a clearing.
“Okay, I can see the path ahead,” Nightfall told the others, “I’ll produce more flares if needed, but be aware that unlike a normal breath weapon, customizing mine actually does consume some of my magic reserves. Now, let’s—”
“Get out…” Multiple voices cried at once, echoing unnaturally. “This is our domain… Leave us alone!”
“What was that?” Prism Slash asked nervously, glancing around as if something was about to jump out of the fog. “Was it just the wind?”
“Ah don’t think so, pardner…” Apple Slice muttered. “We’re in trouble. Ah can feel it.”
“LEAVE THIS PLACE!” multiple ghostly voices cried at once as a group of skeletal dragons appeared from the midst of the fog. They had bone-shaped horns and ethereal matter replacing everything that would be flesh on a normal dragon, everything else hidden beneath cloaks of varying dark colors. Their ghostly eyes were incredibly wide and unseeing as they lashed out at the air in front of them, slowly approaching the group of six Dragoons and one Unicorn.
“Dracoliches!” Nightfall exclaimed, for once more confused than intimidated. “But why are they acting this way? They rarely act territorial except when protecting the grave of a fellow Dracolich!” And I don’t see any graves around here, he thought.
Timidwings stopped cowering for a moment, peeking out from behind his wings. “Wait, they aren’t actually ghosts?”
“No, they’re quite alive. They’re a minor dragon tribe, like the more well-known Drakes. But Dracoliches have an ethereal and skeletal nature, and dwell in dark places like forests and caves; unlike the Drakes, who are aquatic in nature and live mostly underwater,” Nightfall explained, as the rest of the group slowly backed away from the advancing cloaked dragons.
“Leave at once!” a single Dracolich cried out with a vaguely feminine voice, seeming to be the leader from her position at the front of the group “We’ll destroy you if you don’t leave us alone!”
Suddenly, Goody bounced towards the leader, looked her straight in the eyes for a few seconds, and turned back to his friends with a small smile, “They’re not angry with us, guys! They’re scared of something! And you know what I do when I get scared?”
“For the love of Gwynnia, please don’t sing,” Prism Slash grumbled.
“Who said I was going to sing?” Goody asked, tilting his head in confusion. “A song might make it fun, but they’re terrified and there’s no time for a musical number! And I couldn’t find a lyricist on such short notice anyway… No, what I do when something tries to scare me… is do this!”
Goody burst out laughing, the bright, cheery sound seeming to lift the frightening atmosphere just a tad. The Nature Dragoon wiped a tear from his eye. “You see? Think of how to make what’s scaring you funny instead, and it becomes not scary anymore!”
“Who said that?” the Dragoness leading the group of Dracoliches demanded. “Are you the force terrifying us? Even our Hatchlings and Hatchlettes are crying out in terror back at our village, and almost nothing scares us! Not even this twisted forest!”
“Nope!” Goody said, grinning impossibly wide. “I’m gonna help you get over your fear!”
“We haven’t been afraid in so long, we have forgotten how to overcome it,” the Dracolich Dragoness said, her eyes still unable to detect anything but what was apparently scaring her and her fellow Dracoliches, “Please sir, whoever and wherever you are, teach us how to deal with fear!”
“First, what’s scaring you?” Goody asked.
“Something… not normal,” she replied. “A black Ultima Dragoon who threatens to disrupt the flow of night and day and oppress us, saying we have no power to stop him and that he’ll grind us to dust if we refuse to serve him.”
“Okay,” Goody said, pulling a thinking cap out of nowhere and putting it on his head. “I’ve got it! Imagine him in a clown suit trying to give you that same threat!” Goody started to giggle at the mere thought of it, and the rest of the group couldn’t help but snicker as well.
The Dracolich looked puzzled, but closed her eyes in thought before her face broke into a grin and she started snickering, too.
“You’re right!” she giggled, “As long as I keep that thought in my head, he’s no longer scary! Nogon could take him seriously like that!”
Turning around, the Dracolich leader announced to those following her: “Everygon! Try to imagine the one who has filled us with fear in a ridiculous way where there’s no way anygon could take him seriously!”
After a few seconds, a few giggles could be heard here and there from among the crowd, until the entire group of Dracoliches burst into laughter, some even slapping the ground in their unbridled mirth.
As the crowd’s terrified moans were replaced by cheerful laughter, the fog lifted, and the whole group was revealed. There were many of them, some as small as Dragonlings and Dragonettes, and every single one now had a smile on his or her face.
Turning back to look at Goody, the leader noticed his appearance for the first time, finally free from the panic that clouded her vision before.
“I and my clan thank you, sir,” she said with a bow. “My name is Rattlebones. May I have your name?”
“I’m Goody Gumdrops!” Goody replied cheerfully. “I’m happy to be your friend, Rattlebones. If you ever stop by Dragontown, I’ll give you a party!”
“Thank you for the kind offer,” Rattlebones replied. “I shall consider it, Goody Gumdrops. You have taught us a great lesson this day: humor truly is the solution to many problems.”
“Well, we’ve got to get going,” Goody said cheerfully. “We’ve got a really mean bully to stop. Bye!”
“Farewell,” Rattlebones replied with a smile before turning to her clan and motioning for them to turn around and return to wherever they came from.
“Great job, Goody,” Nightfall said as the group resumed moving forward. “I’m sure we’re almost there.”
With that, the group resumed following the path.