//------------------------------//
// Answers and Consequences 
// Story: The Rise of Species: Dragons 
// by Zarmflamekin 
//------------------------------//

	“Uh, care to explain that a bit further Twi?” Spike prompted.

Twilight sighed. “Well, as you could probably guess, I wrote to Princess Celestia before breakfast today with both a simple, yet complicated question. That being, where you came from.”

“But, I came from Canterlot. Twilight, that’s the easiest thing there is about me.”

“Yes, as an egg, you were hatched at my entrance exam. But that’s not exactly where you’re from, unless there had been a dragoness who had given you up there.” Twilight looked down at the scroll with a small chuckle. “But the scroll probably wouldn’t be this big if that was it.”

Spike thought back to when Twilight left to write her letter and pondered, but couldn’t find his answer, so he asked. “What made you write to Princess Celestia about me?”

“Well, you said you felt that you had gotten a message in your dreams from somepony that wasn’t Luna, so that was one point of concern. But when you told me he had said ‘welcome home’, I began to wonder what that would mean to a dragon. It’s not like we’ve seen dragons settling down anywhere specific, or at least, not for long. So, to claim anywhere as home, I found that a bit odd. In the end, I wound up asking Princess Celestia where she found your egg.”

Spike eyed the rather fat scroll. “That seems a bit large for just a simple place.”

Twilight nodded, a smirk appearing a second later. “Apparently, you had quite the journey as an egg. To start, in technicality, you’re pretty much older than anypony you’re ever going to meet.”

Spike sat back in shock at that statement, but quickly leaned forward in his seat, setting The Life and Fall aside in thirst for this radical claim. “What makes you say that?”

Twilight took the scroll up in her magic and began from the beginning. “As written here, Celestia and Luna found your particular egg 1,016 years ago along the edge of the Badland Mountains without a scratch on you.” Twilight chuckled. “And apparently you looked tasty.”

It took Spike a second to get what Twilight had said before moving to the back of his chair in abject horror. The Princesses had tried to eat him! Before he had even been born, he might not have had a chance to live. After that moment of horror however, Spike calmed down a bit. He was here, apparently over a thousand years later, but he wasn’t going to come down from that heightened state for quite a bit. “S-S-So what did they d-do?”

Twilight gave an apologetic look as she began to paraphrase again. “When they found they couldn’t break you open, Starswirl, and yes," Twilight glanced back to Spike before he could ask. "Really Starswirl, berated the two for their rash action of trying to eat a strange egg for lunch. When he found out where they found you, he deduced that you were a dragon egg that had somehow been lost from your nest. Celestia and Luna went back to try and find where you had rolled away from, but they couldn’t find where you could have come from because they couldn’t even find the remnants of a nest. So, they decided to try and hatch you themselves.”

“And we can see how well that went.” Spike gestured down to his present state, making Twilight smile.

“Yes, well, they tried everything they could think of. And, in all honesty, either you’re the luckiest egg to ever exist or dragon eggs are sturdier than I could possibly believe. They tried the obvious of lying on top of you, as awkward as that was for them. They tried prompting you out with growth and aging spells. And apparently in frustration had tossed you in their fireplace to see if they were simply insufficient to help.” Both Spike and Twilight had a chuckle at imagining the frustration of the Princesses. “Eventually, Celestia gave up after Luna was banished as she turned to double duty. You were apparently forgotten for a good two hundred years before somepony found you in the back of the pantry, apparently having had the same idea the princesses did. He tried a thing or three from his expert cooking skills, but had about the same amount of luck cracking you open. After that point, Celestia had just plain given up on ever thinking you would hatch, so she had another idea. So you began a life of being a futility test on and off for the next eight hundred years where we met.”

“What do you mean by ‘futility test’?”

Twilight looked up from the scroll. “Oh, right. The last test to get into Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns is a futility test. The unicorn is given what is consented to be an impossible task like leaving a room without moving, getting to the end of an endless hallway, or sorting a crate of rice by length. These, of course, can be done, like the first being solved with careful teleportation, but that one was quite a bit before teleportation was taught as a common mid to high level spell. Your egg was apparently a fall back if the school had just had their last futility test beaten. The point of the test being to show the proctors just how outside of the box somepony could think or try before admitting defeat.” 

“Which you obviously couldn’t let happen.” Spike smirked, but only got a sad look from Twilight in return.

“It’s something I should have learned then, instead of in the Crystal Empire.” Spike was going to say something in comfort, but Twilight shook her head. “But that’s getting off topic. What your egg had done was shown that no amount of spell weaving or brute force was going to hatch you. Apparently the answer was instead brute magical force.” Twilight chuckled, but Spike was still a bit upset from her earlier comment. “But shortly after my little outburst, I got curious on what I had done and checked up on you, much to my parents and Celestia’s dismay, as they had no idea what a baby dragon could do, and I wasn’t particularly thinking. And apparently from there, you imprinted on me.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Spike rolled his eyes, just about catching up in the conversation. “I don’t see you as my mom Twilight.”

“Be that as it may, you couldn’t go two seconds with me out of sight when we were younger. You may not see me as a ‘mother’ figure, but younger you surely saw me as the ‘protector’ figure, as misguided as that may be.”

“Well, can’t fault the minds of the young now can we?” Spike smirked, making Twilight chuckle.

“Quite.” The short bit of merriment was left in the air, but Spike was still wondering what the other half of the scroll was for if Twilight already explained where he came from. Twilight was still looking at it, so he knew there had to be more, but she seemed to both want to blurt out what was on the page and burn the paper of its information forever.

“So… what’s the rest of it say?” Spike finally asked, tapping his fingers together. Twilight looked up with a finalized sigh.

“The rest goes into what dragons call ‘home’, and I’m not liking what Celestia’s saying.”

“Well, what’s ‘home’ Twilight? It can’t be that bad.”

With that, Twilight’s face grimaced. “Celestia seems to have it connected with the afterlife, Spike.” That gave both of them pause before Spike took a noticeable gulp.

“S-s-s-so I was met b-by a ghost? Am I being haunted!?” Spike began looking around, every shadow now beginning to look suspect.

“Spike, Spike, calm down, that’s what I’m not liking about this.” Twilight reached out and put a reassuring hoof on his shoulder. “From what Celestia has found with her talks with any dragon who was versed in the subject of history, dragons would only ever call one place ‘home’, and anywhere else that they lived would be ‘their nest’ or ‘their cave’. The only ‘home’ that any one dragon would recall was Tiamat’s nest.”

Spike now glanced down to the book he had been glued to all morning, now feeling a cold stone in his stomach despite just having fresh eggs. Had he picked this book out at random, or had something drawn him to it? And on thinking of that, Spike’s eyes seemed to glue to the middle part of the title. Gingerly picking the book up in both hands, Spike spoke in a hushed voice.

“Maybe they’re not talking about the afterlife Twilight.” Spike looked up as he turned the book towards her. “This book says ‘and Fall of Tiamat’, don’t these things usually say ‘Life and Death’ of a character? Or ‘Life and Times’? Maybe there’s a reason for the title.”

Twilight gave a concerned smile. “Spike that might be reaching just a bit. I may not like it, but half a phrase isn’t going to change what Celestia’s heard for over a millennium.”

Spike gave a wry smile. “Then let’s see what it says from the dragon’s mouth.” He said as he began to flip through the pages, landing on chapter thirty-four, The Betrayer and the Betrayed. Skipping a few paragraphs, Spike began reading aloud before Twilight could countermand him.

“Her power and wrath would not be matched by any. The carnage left behind Tiamat as she killed and consumed the realm was completely unlike her first landing, shredding forests and demolishing hills to find chimera and changeling alike, spreading the Badlands ever further. Upon reaching the sea once more, Tiamat was met by her five children, all with dead set determination in their eyes. They knew there was no reasoning with their mother, she only really knew or cared how to do one thing, and that was dealing death to all around her.

“As one, the five leapt into action to bring their mother’s rampage to an end. The fight lasted for days, neither side ever seeming to have one true advantage over another. While Pyrathy and his siblings had numbers, Tiamat had coordination. There was never a strike that hit more than once at a time. And as their battle raged through the skies, the creatures down below could only watch as the fight drifted further away, down the coast and slowly out into the ocean. It is told that Pyrathy and his kin had formed a plan within that fight and had begun to draw Tiamat back to the island of her birth. As they arrived, Tiervu and Animion drove Tiamat into the empty volcano, allowing Miserhaze to weaken the rock and Pyrathy to melt it, and letting Serenava reset the rock by cooling it with sea water. Tiamat would not be held down by molten rock alone, so she began to struggle and the rocks cracked. 

"Upon his own realization that the impromptu prison wouldn’t hold long, Miserhaze began drowning the volcano’s crater with his mists, allowing them to sit and sap away the strength of Tiamat. Animion tapped into every sense he had ever consumed and began forming a viscus fluid to reinforce and seal the dead volcano up tight. Tiervu assisted Miserhaze by adding her own cloud of toxins to his mists to further weaken her mother and set her into a never ending sleep.

“But as the five rose above the island to make a final check that their mother would never rise again, there was one last, soul tearing roar that ripped through the five before all was quiet. They stayed until the sun rose the next morning, having kept vigil to make sure their mother did not wake before making their way back to the mainland.”

Spike looked up to Twilight to gage her reaction to the small tale. She still seemed to be a bit shocked from the impromptu story time, but after the shock seemed to end, she began to analyze the difference between her and Celestia’s assumption and what she just heard. Spike did the same as he continued to read the next part to himself.

‘As the five returned to the mainland, exhausted from their fight and wanting nothing more but to rest, all their thoughts seemed to turn towards their children instead. Any joyful laugh or cry of despair seemed to ring through their ears a thousand fold, until they all but crashed on the beach of the mainland. And it was only then, when they finally looked at each other to once again speak did they see what their mother did.

‘Their Mother’s roar had not just been a cry of defeat, but also a curse. Upon their scales, the siblings could see the lives of each other’s children as though they were watching each kelpi and changling with their own eyes. Their mother may not have ever spoken an intelligible word, but thinking upon that roar, something primal rang through them, and they understood the message.

‘Look upon these abominations and suffer.’

Spike read that last line at least five times, and each time he was caught on one word, abomination. How could she say that? To her own children? They were only the second generation of a being who was born from practically nothing. What could they have possibly done to be considered abominations to life?

And then a sickening revelation hit Spike that perhaps even Bold Venture, or even reciters had failed to pick up. Tiamat was born practically from nothing, and maybe, perhaps, that was the point. She was from nothing, and she had intended to make everything return there. The five heads of Tiamat did seem to cover everything, the living, the dead, the earth, the sea, and the soul. And she had made copies of herself to continue to do the same.

But they weren’t copies of Red, White, Blue, Black, and Green. They were Pyrathy, Miserhaze, Serenava, Animion, and Tiervu. They became their own dragons, and they lived outside their mother’s shadow of death. And they had been cursed for it. It wasn’t until a spot of water hit the page that Spike realized he was crying, which took both Spike and Twilight from their respective reveries.

“Spike, what’s wrong? What did you read?” Twilight asked, leaning in to be ready to comfort him.

“I-I found out why I saw the things I did Twi. It’s a curse.” Spike sniffed as he rubbed his eyes dry. “A-Apparently when they sealed Tiamat up, she cursed them to… to live and show the lives of the children they produced.”

“Well, that’s… an odd sort of curse. So they, what? Their scales play the lives of their foals for everypony to see? That’s not much-“

“It’s worse than that Twilight!” Spike snapped, making her reel back. Spike just looked back down at the page. “It…It looks like they hear all of it too. They might even feel it if Tiamt’s as bad as I can imagine. And from what I saw on Pyrathy, it can only get worse the longer they live as more and more generations come and go. I saw one where… where a dragon drooled over an egg and dissolved it, fetus and all. And the battling I saw, even just glances. To have to hear all of that? It should be maddening. And what about the other four? It’s not like Windigos and Changelings are a pony’s best friend. I’m sure Chimeras don’t have the most peaceful of lives, and Kelpi aren’t making the best of impressions.” Spike gripped his biceps with opposing claws. “But I think what may scare me right now, is how calm Pyrathy seemed with all of it. If it was a weird dream thing then it could have been symbolic, but to deal with a curse like that like nothing was wrong, I-I-I-I don’t know.” Spike’s voice dropped to a barely audible whisper to contest with Fluttershy. “I don’t know if I should see him.”

Twilight could only look on as Spike had his crisis, not sure what to do. She had never seen him get so emotionally involved as he was right now. Deciding on action, she quickly fluttered over to his side, scooting him over to snuggly fit the two of them on his seat and wrapped her left wing around him and squeezed him as close to her as possible. He was shivering, and he stayed as such for almost a minute before he seemed to accept the comfort around him and began to breathe slowly and steadily. Five minutes like this gave Twilight the courage to speak her mind.

“It’s been a long time Spike, they could have found a way to deal with the curse, or maybe they slept through a lot of it if they could." Twilight said soothingly. "One thing we definitely have learned is how hard it is to wake a sleeping dragon.” She gave a, hopefully, warming smile, which Spike thankfully reciprocated. “And I may have been able to think of a place where dragons call home.” Spike froze once again, but Twilight continued as she tried to placate him with a petting wing. “If Tiamat’s nest is ‘home’, well, she only ever made one of those, didn’t she? So somewhere in the Badlands near the western coast there should be a place that would be carved out for a massive primordial dragon to have her hatchlings. Of course, it been well over two millennia since it happened, but I think the impression should be there, if not the actual crater she carved out.” Spike didn’t seem to be taking the news for the better, so Twilight just held him close. “If you really think that you don’t want to see them, we don’t have to. We can always wait until later.”

That seemed to get a reactive move from Spike as he pushed himself away and looked up at Twilight. As she looked down, she saw a determined and searching gaze in his eyes. He looked at her for what seemed like hours, but only a few seconds later he looked away. With a huff and a frown, Spike hopped off the chair and made his way to the door. “It always seems to be ‘for later’ around here. But this is Present Spike’s problem and we’re going to solve it now. Get what you think we’ll need and meet me out front in ten. I’m going to re-shelve some books.”

A bit taken aback by the sudden action, Twilight shook herself back to reality and teleported back to her room and began picking through a list for camping and a bestiary for the Badlands.

Spike went back to Hardly Researched and found the room to be a lot more breathable than earlier. He left Life and Fall on one of the spare corner tables to pick up for later and began looking for the place for Nestlings Nightly Stories. Finding the slightly disturbed dust, Spike lifted the book that fell sideways to fill the gap to put the book back, but noticed the cover for the first time.

Five dragons lay from head to tail in a ring, colored in the not so surprising red, blue, black, green, white. They all looked the same though, which Spike attributed to laziness. Deciding he had pulled the book out for a reason, he opened the book to a random story. It was basically what he had expected from picking it up, a short bedtime story on one page and a depictive illustration on the opposite page. This one being a lot more foal friendly than Life and Fall of Tiamat.

The one he opened up to was a better depiction of Pyrathy surrounded by other dragons who seemed to be very happy and cheering. Pyrathy himself looked very content to be used as a climbing surface. Spike glanced to the story and read the small excerpt.

‘Pyrathy and his siblings were happy once more as their evil mother was driven away and their children were safe. They partied day and night for three whole days in celebration and all of them thanked Pyrathy for his help. He smiled and said ‘If any of my children need me, they only need to ask.’ So know that if anything ever goes wrong, you need only to ask Pyrathy for help.’

Spike quickly shut the book and was a bit happier with starting with the other one. He slid the book back into its proper place and went to the window to properly close it, but he hesitated as he got his claw on the window shutter. Hardly Researched did have a fair view over Ponyville, just like the rest of the castle, but it also had a view of the lone mountain. A mountain that had housed a dragon for a brief moment a few years ago, and now somehow poked Spike on the topic of dragons.

This was it. This was going to be big, he could feel it. No lone dragon in the woods, no bullying teenagers with apathetic adults, but looking for the first nest of dragon kind. Spike let out a nervous chuckle, thinking how this must be what it felt like when an ordinary pony was to meet Celestia. And that thought made Spike dig his claws into the shutter slightly.

He was that ordinary pony now. He wasn’t a dragon amongst ponies, he wasn’t a close friend of the ruler, he wasn’t going to be anything special here. He was a baby dragon who felt he had a message from a primordial dragon. Spike began feeling more and more confused in his resolve. Did he really need to go? Did he actually get a message? Did he have to go? Maybe he’d get another dream. Maybe he didn’t need to go anywhere. What actually made him think Pyrathy wanted to see him anyways? He had only said four words to him. Maybe this could be Future Spike’s problem.

Spike slammed the shutters in frustration. Frustration mostly at himself. He had made a plan, and he was going to follow through on it. He was going to do his best to find Pyrathy or his ‘home’, and he was going to get his answer as to why he felt like he needed to see him. And then the phrase from Nightly Stories struck Spike.

“If any of my children need me, they need only to ask.”

Well Spike certainly had a question.

Why did Pyrathy need him?