“Now, I’ll just recharge these every four hours, and you’ll stay strong and healthy for a long, long time!” Twilight’s horn lit up the night as her magic carved curved sigils into Spike’s scales. Lines of force traced the carvings, pouring energy into the dragon’s body. The spell was Twilight’s own invention, a shield to hold back the years.
The ground shook as Spike took a breath. The spells made it easier, but he still labored to fill his lungs. “How long is a long time, Twilight?”
The princess’s eyes fell. “About another fifty years, until the runes stop working.” She looked up. “But I’ll think of new ones! I’ve got Golden Arrow and his best battalion working on taking the Idol of the Everlasting out of changeling territory, and once I have it, I can drain its magic for another century! If my calculations are correct, the idol should slow your aging by eighty-six percent.”
Her mouth contorted itself into a forced smile. “And my alchemists think they might be able to squeeze a bit more out of the elixir you’ve been taking! And the archaeolinguistics team is working on a new translation of the Litany of Tambelon! It might be a dead end, but I think we could repurpose some of its rituals to help…”
“Twilight.” Spike’s growling voice cut her off, his deep tones shaking the crystal of the castle walls. “When are you going to stop?”
“What? What do you mean, stop?”
“Last century you were… ‘recharging’ me every few weeks. Now it’s every few hours. I don’t remember the last time I ate something that wasn’t soaked in that ‘elixir.’” His nostrils flared as he took another breath. “I’m getting old, Twi.”
Twilight stood up on her hind legs, resting her forelegs on his hand—it was as large as she was now. “Nonsense! Dragons live long, healthy lives; it’s just some extra help, like those vitamin pills ponies take, just something to make you even stronger…”
“Twilight.” Again, his voice silenced hers. “I have lived a long life. But this isn’t healthy anymore. I’m a sinking ship, and soon you won’t be able to bail the water out fast enough.”
His eyes, large and wet as murky ponds, tilted up to the moon. “I’m going to be gone someday. And I want you to be ready.” Spike closed his eyes as he sighed, his heavy breath filling the room with the smell of smoke.
When he opened them again, he saw Twilight crying.
She was everything to him—mother, sister, caretaker, and friend. Now she was crying, and Spike knew that that would not do. His wing stretched over her, sheltering her with impenetrable scales and leather skin.
Twilight’s lip quivered.
“Come on, Twi. You’re supposed to be a princess, not an old dragon’s personal nurse.”
“You’re right, Spike. I’m the Princess of Friendship, and I can’t be that without my first friend!” Her quavering voice betrayed her fear, her quaking lungs, her quickening pulse. “I-I still need my number one assistant. Spike, I need you. Please, stay.” For the thousandth time, she cursed that Spike had grown too large for her to hold him. “For me.”
She tried to stroke his house-sized head with her wings. “It’s going to be okay. I’m going to make it all okay.”
Twilight woke with her mane soaked in sweat.
“Dozing off, are we, princess? Well, I suppose it’s for the best.” Discord smirked, his nose still buried in a Saddle Arabian scroll. “You certainly do need your beauty sleep.”
The alicorn wiped drool from her mouth with a dirty wing. “How long was I out?”
“A few hours. ‘Course, you haven’t slept since you got here last Monday, so it was probably well-deserved.” He slithered through the air towards her. “Take a gander at this.”
Twilight’s eyes wobbled as she tried to focus on the papyrus Discord shoved at her. “What am I looking at?”
“The line that starts with loaf-duck-horseshoe-squiggle.”
Her tired brain worked overtime to translate the hieroglyphics. “It’s an… embalming spell?”
“Not quite. Looks like the pharaohs had some insight into reanimation, too. Of course, most of these ingredients are illegal, but I don’t think that’s going to stop either of us.”
“No good. Reanimation isn’t going to cut it, not unless you think a few shambling corpses can replace my friends.”
When Discord had agreed to help, she’d felt like the sun was shining for the first time in years. Finally, there was hope. She didn’t know how he did it, but Discord could summon up books even she’d never heard of.
Now, she wasn’t so sure. Day after day she spent without sleep, just like she did before she came to Discord. And day after day, she found nothing.
“It’s close.”
“It’s not. Shoving new life into dead tissue is possible, sure. Doctors do it all the time. But I don’t want new life. I want old life, my friend’s old lives, their souls. Reanimation won’t bring back the memories, just put a new pony in an old body.”
Discord dove into a pile of parchment and pulled out a half-torn page. “What about this? Some old mare wrote it. Starbright Sleazy, I think? Or maybe Starry Glimmer. I don’t know, unicorn names all sound the same to me.”
Twilight grabbed the page from his claw. “Time travel? Over a five thousand year range?”
“Yeah, I know. Not enough energy in the universe. But what if we…”
“No, Clover’s Law of Life-force Conservation forbids it, even if we could somehow harness infinite power.”
“Well, you know what they say. Laws are meant to be broken. I’m sure I could pull a few strings, bend some rules.”
“Suspend Clover’s Law? That would—” Twilight’s eyes glazed over as she performed a few mental calculations. “—annihilate all matter in the galaxy several times over. Even if you could do it, which I doubt.”
Her head flopped down onto a book. “We’ve tried everything, Discord.”
“Oh, not quite everything. I can always conjure a few more books, we can flip through them together…”
“More books aren’t going to help.”
The draconequus sucked in air sharply. He’d known it was bad, but this was worse than he could have predicted. Twilight, saying books wouldn’t help?
The princess continued. “And look what we’ve done. We’ve turned Fluttershy’s cottage into… into a lab, filled it with dark magic and poisonous herbs and an elephant on a unicycle.” Her hooves rubbed water from her eyes. “Not the most honorable way to treat your friend’s grave.”
She was shivering again. Boiling potion cauldrons kept the cottage hot, but Twilight still kept shuddering. Something inside her was frozen, had been frozen ever since she saw her friends fade away.
And Discord would not allow that.
“Twilight, try to get some sleep. Even alicorns need it.”
“What? No, I don’t…”
It took barely any magic to get her to slumber. A quick snap of Discord’s fingers, and she fell back onto the book, drooling in deep sleep. He needed her out of the way. He needed to keep her in the dark.
There is one thing we haven’t tried, little pony. But you’re not going to like it.