It Should Have Been Me
-It Should Have Been Me-
We live in a village called Ponyville. A surprisingly large village, about twenty or so families living here. It sits inside of a protected valley, the mountains on each side making it almost impossible to see our houses or our fields from the air. There’s only one way into the village too; a skinny trail that snakes its way up the side of the Everfree mountain to a snowy pass.
We’re actually very lucky, with all the chaos in the world around us, we seem free from it. Where other villages and cities have to live in servitude, we don’t. Our village lives peacefully and ignorantly in our little valley. Not that we aren’t afraid like the rest of the world anyway.
Fear keeps us from being found. Fear keeps us alive. Fear keeps us on the tips of our hooves. Fear means no parties, no lights lit after dark unless all the windows have been blacked out, and absolutely no leaving the houses after the sun touches the horizon. Fear is the norm for our entire village, if you’re not at least somewhat scared you’re seen as stupid here.
Rules. Regulations. Expectations.
That’s been the story of my life for as long as I can remember. The Heartstrings family lives in fear just like everypony else in Ponyville. There are days when I just sit shaking in fear of what could happen. Everyone has their own personal fears. Me, I just don’t want to be treated as property one day, that’s my biggest fear.
I’m afraid that a gryphon raiding party could swoop in and burn down all our houses. That they’ll make all of us watch as they kill the stallions and then they’ll rape us and leave us to die in the valley. I’m afraid that a minotaur slaver will find us and sell us to the highest bidder. And that I’ll become a slave to some nasty, fat, old bureaucrat in a province far away from here.
But all of us are afraid of one thing in particular: the dragons.
Nopony knows exactly how it happened. Some blame it on Tiamat, the mother goddess of monsters. Others say that they’d just been sleeping in the middle of the earth until some Diamond Dog miners accidentally woke them up. Whatever reason, they’re here, and they’re the ones that rule the provinces. The dragons call the places that they own provinces in some sort of resemblance of government, not that there’s much of one.
Most of the dragons are actually pretty passive, and it’s rare for them to fight openly: As in fire and claws and such. Most of the time they use the ponies in their provinces as political playing cards. Espionage, cloak and dagger, that stuff. We’re the pawns in their big chess game. They make deals with ponies for fun too, ones that usually end with a pony in servitude or dead in some gruesome way.
But some are downright evil. I’ve heard stories that a dragon a few provinces to the South eats virgin mares, takes them as sacrifice in return for not destroying everything in its province. Another one, a couple provinces to the West, makes the ponies toil in an iron mine so that he can eat the metal. I don’t know why they need to do that stuff. As far as I can tell they do it for fun.
Thankfully, we usually don’t have to worry about that. One time a Manta flew over, though. It took an entire day for it to pass, and the entire village was petrified for weeks. A Manta is a type of massive, ray shaped dragon. They’re big and really slow flyers, but its tail could probably tear another dragon in half.
I don’t know all of them, but those aren’t the only kind of dragon. I know there are Drakes, which are the size of a one room cabin. There are Wyverns, those are about the size of a wagon. There are the Dragons, they’re about the size of what we’d consider a mansion, but more like the size of a two or three roomed house. Then there’s Wyrms, they’re these long bulky things that eat their way through rocks.
Those are about all the ones I know about, but I think that gets the idea across. There are lots of dragons, lots of provinces ruled by their own dragon, and each one run differently by the dragon that owns it.
Of course, knowing all of that doesn’t help me right now.
Right now, I’m sitting inside my best friends house, holding her hoof and trying to make her comfortable. She’s sick, and practically comatose. She can’t move and she can barely even talk, she gets chills and her fever is boiling. And there isn’t a fucking thing I can do.
They don’t call it ‘Death’s Kiss’ for nothing.
The cabin is mostly dark. Most of the houses are built without windows at all. But it’s a good kind of dark, it’s respectful. A few candles burn in the corner, a bucket of mostly clean water reflects back the flickering light in a strange sort of starscape. There are three beds in the cabin, one for her parents, one for her sister and her grandmother, and the one that they moved in for her when she got sick. There really isn’t much else to say about the place. There’s a rug that’s probably been in their family for generations, a rusty sword hanging over the door, and a trap door leading to their pantry.
Outside, I can hear the sounds of the village going about their businesses. I can hear the ringing of the blacksmith’s hammer on his anvil. He’s one of the only ponies in town with an actual hearth that’s normally lit. I can hear a couple of ponies discussing a trade of some sort as they pass, I think it had to do with some sheep’s wool and some butter or something. I heard a few foals running past earlier, yelling and chasing each other as they played.
But Bon-Bon is dead silent. We’ve been best friends since we were foals, even though I’m a unicorn and she’s an earth pony. We always looked out for each other, and we always found a way to help each other no matter what. It was love, in a way. We loved each other a lot, we were practically family in all but blood.
That red mark on her cheek sealed her fate, though. And there was nothing I could do about it. That rose shaped mark on her fair fur, it was Death’s Kiss, there was no mistaking. And as far as we knew, the only ones who knew the cure for it were the dragons, and there weren’t any around here. I don’t even know how a pony gets Death’s Kiss, it just shows up.
Eventually, I let go of her hoof. Not that she cared, she was mostly asleep. I reached into the bucket of water, pulling out the soaked rag with my hooves. It would have felt wrong to use my magic to comfort her. I wrung it out into the bucket, watching the water splash back and create all new constellations in it.
With a short sigh, I used the wet rag to wipe away some of the sweat from Bon-Bon’s brow. I used it to wet her eyelids as well, not wanting them to get too dry by themselves. Even though they were closed, her eyes could still get dry. It was just another one of the ways that Death’s Kiss made you miserable before you died.
But Bon-Bon was always a stubborn mare. A few days ago she wasn’t as tired and was a little more active. She would deny that she was sick at all, even as she tried to hack up a lung. It was going to work against her however, she’d suffer for a long time with it. The village doctor called her a fighter, said that if anypony could fight it that it would be her. But he was just saying that, a little white lie to make Bon-Bon’s little sister, and me, happy.
She groaned quietly as the water dripped near her ear, trying to turn her head away from the cool water. “Sorry, Bon-Bon. Go back to sleep,” I said, putting a gentle hoof on her shoulder as I wiped away some of the sweat under her chin. She groaned again, probably some rebuttal that would have been clever if she weren’t so sick and exhausted.
I should be the one that’s sick, not her.
She’s a hard worker, and she never complains about it either. Sometimes I think that she likes all the work that she does, she’s always so happy and level-headed. She even does more work outside the fields, helping make treats for the foals. Not like me, the lazy unicorn that once let half a flock of our sheep wander off while she plucked at a beat up old lyre. I’ll never live that day down.
If anypony had to get sick, it should have been me.
I dropped the rag back into the bucket, swirling it around and soaking in more water to it. I wished that I could help her, more than just washing her off and sitting next to her. Maybe I could talk to the village doctor, Redheart being the only pony here who knew anything about taking care of hurt ponies. But I probably couldn’t take care of her that well anyway.
But, honestly, what could I do? There aren’t any spells that could just pop the sick out of her and put it somewhere else, at least none that anypony in this village knew of. I just wish there was something I could do. Sometimes I just wanted to curl up and cry. There was no future here, for the sick or the healthy.
Ponies still talk about cutie marks and destiny like they’ll actually do something significant beyond getting the next harvest done on time. But there’s no destiny here that anypony could be proud of. And at this point the only thing that I think would possibly be worth doing is if I could somehow find out how to help her. But I’m not smart enough to do that kind of stuff, curing diseases is a practice that has long since been lost.
It should be me there suffering, not her.
The creaky wooden door opened to my right, shining blasphemous rays of sunshine into the corners of my vision. Golden Drops walked in, quickly closing the door and reinstating the gloom of the one room house. Golden Drops is Bon-Bon’s grandmother, although she’s never looked as old as she’s claimed to be. Bon-Bon’s real name is Sweetie Drops, I started calling her Bon-Bon as a joke and it kinda stuck.
“You should go home, Lyra,” she said, setting down a fresh bucket of cold water. She has one of those classic old lady voices, and it throws off the idea that she could be younger. She smiled gently at me when I stood, me nodding in return but not really saying anything. “It’s alright, dear. I’ll look after her. You look tired, you should go home,” she said again, nodding to me as I passed her toward the door.
“Take care,” I said half-heartedly as I got to the door. I slipped out as quickly as I could so that there wouldn’t be too much light inside. I squinted as the sunlight met my tired eyes, shivering slightly as the cool air cut through my fur.
If I could take Bon-Bon’s place, I would have in a heartbeat.
The Drop’s house is probably one of the more humble houses in the village. A simple thatched roof with a few flowers braided into it for luck, and warm wood-framed walls. Its pantry is only partly underground, a small wall of tightly packed wood sealed with black tar shows underneath the house’s stilts. A small porch stands as the entrance to the house, a small set of stairs connects it to the path on the ground.
I stepped down those creaky stairs, feeding a familiarly tiny tendril of magic into my horn and lifting the old, beaten wood of my lyre. It slid into its respective pocket in my saddlebags almost instinctually, I’d never removed them when I came to visit Bon-Bon. My hooves felt too heavy as I started down the old dusty path, a small spattering of snow and slush decorating the sides. It was getting too close to winter, and I still hadn’t gotten a new scarf after I lost my last one.
All the paths are covered overhead with the branches of trees so that they’re even harder to spot from the sky, even the fields are mostly covered thinly with a few trees. The five pegasi families are mainly in charge of making sure that there is a constant minimum coverage of clouds over the village. We’re all so clever with how we hide ourselves, and we all take such pride in how well it’s done.
Which made it all the more surprising for me when I found everypony in the village center. With all the regulations and careful planning involved to keep us all hidden, large gatherings were practically a taboo. There couldn’t be anything wrong with the well, so this had to be something pretty darn big for them to abandon that policy.
I walked forward carefully, gently pushing myself through the ponies there. I mumbled a few ‘Excuse me’s and some ‘Sorry’s as I did, trying to find a glance at what was so enrapturing. The crowd grew more and more rowdy as I got closer to its center, the item of attention becoming closer with every pony I pushed past.
When I pushed past the last pony, I saw something even more surprising than a crowd in Ponyville; a stranger in Ponyville. He was a dark blue unicorn, the sweaty mane and tail that clung to him was a much lighter blue. He looked exhausted, starved, and half mad with shivering. Underneath a thick coat I could see a pair of saddlebags lined with chainmail, but most of his body was hidden from view. Somepony had brought him a mug of hot water, and he sipped at it shakily without responding to anypony.
Everypony talked a once, making it impossible to tell who asked what or what they asked at all. It seemed that for every pony gathered around him, each had a hundred completely different questions about him. His ears were pressed flat to his blue-white mane, he ignored them and continued scowling into the warm water.
“What in tarnation is goin’ on out here?” a distinctive voice demanded, slicing through the din and drawing everypony there to a pause. “Don’t ya’ll realize the racket yer makin’?” she asked, the crowd parting as she approached. Applejack strode through the ponies, glaring at them as she passed.
Her stetson hat, passed down from her parents who both died from pneumonia a few years back, sat duly on her head. Her piercing green gaze was one that was respected with a heavy weight around here. She was the strongest mare in Ponyville next to Rainbow Dash and held it with a certain pride as she walked, whether or not she would admit it.
“It’s a stranger, Applejack,” somepony said, their voice followed by a murmuring agreement. That statement was able to draw her to a pause, making her normally steady hoofsteps falter.
She passed in front of me as she approached the stranger, waiting for him to look up at her. I don’t know why he suddenly decided to be more responsive. Maybe he thought that Applejack was our leader, or maybe he thought he could make more headway by talking to her instead of trying to answer all of our questions at once.
“Alright, pardner,” she said, keeping a stoic expression on her face as she did. She looked the part of a sheriff taking an outlaw to the jailhouse, not that we had one. “Why don’t ya’ll come with me, and yah can answer a few questions while Ah get something proper for yah ta eat,” she said, nodding kindly to the stranger. Her words were enough to make most of the ponies around us start to wander off.
That was one of the funny things about our village; everypony would make a fuss over something, but if it didn’t involve them and somepony said they would take care of it, they lost interest. That’s mostly because here, when somepony says they’ll do something, it gets done. Especially if an Apple says that it’ll get done.
If my local history is right, then the Apples were the first real settlers here. Once they’d established a farm here, and an apple orchard too, other ponies had come. And as it were, the Apple family was still sort of the unsung leaders of the village. Even though we didn’t really have a mayor or a leader or anything, an Apple was about as close as it got to that around here.
Applejack in particular was a pony that got things done, and did it well. It was no real surprise that she’d taken charge of the situation. “Lyra, ya’ll come with me,” Applejack said, the stranger starting to stand so that he could follow. “And somepony go get Rainbow Dash, too,” she ordered toward the crowd, already turning back down the road leading to a different end of the village proper.
Applejack must think that this is pretty big if she’s getting Rainbow Dash. She’s the pegasus in charge of keeping the weather normal and keeping the cloud cover so that we’re constantly hidden from the air. She and the rest of the pegasi who help her are doing what’s considered the most dangerous job in our village, and the one we rely on the most.
But I think that the only reason that Applejack wants me to come is because I’m one of the only unicorns here even vaguely versed in more than basic magic. The Belle’s are the only other talented unicorns in the village, and they work the textile mill by the river. Our family has an extremely small library of magical texts, only about ten or so books of varying degrees of knowledge in them, some of the only knowledge of magic we have.
I sighed inwardly, falling into step behind them as Applejack led us toward town center. The stallion, who still remained absent of an introduction, walked with a slight limp, exhaustion hanging on him like a heavy, wet blanket. I should have been worried, scared out of my wits about the prospects of how the stranger got here.
How had he even found his way here in the first place? The path was supposed to be so well hidden that nothing could find it. If he found it, could somepony else find it? And what happened when he left, which he more than likely would once he was rested and restocked, would he spread the word about our little haven? If he told somepony who wanted to make a deal with a dragon, they could trade the information and give us away.
But I was still overwhelmed by Bon-Bon’s sickness, I was simply exhausted. Emotionally and physically drained. I simply followed robotically behind them, waiting for us to reach the town hall. It was more of a mead hall in the way it was built, meant to be a stronghold and a place for ponies to sleep and eat together. Unlike in ancient days though, when ponies sang poems and drank until their tongues were loose enough to move each other’s hearts, it was a silent place for ponies to try and forget the world outside.
The sloped roof came into view only a few moments later, the well not being far from the hall anyway. Swirling decorations that were meant to have been painted bright colors to resemble sweets and happy thoughts were simply stained a dark color, while still beautiful in their own right, the lack of color made it slightly depressing. We stepped through the doors, leaving the bright overcast outside and stepping into the warmth of the sloped ceiling.
The ceiling was high above us, rafters carved with various bubbly designs but still dyed with that dark stain. Candles burned on various tables or on the walls, spreading yellow light in small circles around the room. It felt … orange to me, like the room was in a haze of dim, lazy orange.
“Take a seat, pard’ner,” Applejack said tiredly, she was still friendly toward the stranger, but seemed already done dealing with him. I knew that she was worried, all the concerns I’d ignored raging through her. It was up to her to make a decision that would be both fair to the stranger and beneficial to the village.
It was a hard job. I wasn’t jealous of her.
“While we wait fer Rainbow, why not tell us yer name there fella,” she continued, taking a seat at one of the many long tables. The stallion sat next to her and I walked around to sit across from them, something told me that I’d prefer to be in a place where I could back away fast from him.
“Pokey Pierce,” he stated simply, his eyes turning to us with a tired, examining gaze. His dull golden eyes seemed to take in everything, cold and examining. I had the very sudden feeling that something was squeezing my chest, and not in a good way. It was a sort of fear, one that shook me to my core. There was something very … dangerous about him, it scared me like anything else, only it was staring me in the face.
“Have something to warm you up, AJ!” a chipper voice interrupted, shaking me out of the frozen state I’d found myself in. Pinkie Pie, probably the only truly happy pony in all of Ponyville, slid a mug of something bubbly in front of Applejack.
Pinkie’s classically too-bright colors nearly glowed in the low light of the candles spread randomly among the tables. She was one of the only things keeping this town from pulling itself apart, her cheer easily infectious. Her mood had always been the thing keeping everypony from turning into babbling messes in their homes at night.
“What about you, Lyra? Anything you want?” Pinkie asked, turning her beaming smile onto me now. She was wearing a dirty apron, thick material that one wouldn’t normally use as clothing. Yet, there it was.
“Do we still have any coffee?” I asked, hoping desperately that there was still some of the precious plant left from the harvest months ago. It was a crop that wasn’t grown much here; next to the more necessary crops there just wasn’t any room. Ponies scrambled to get some every year when the plants flowered.
“I think the cakes have a teensy bit left, but... I know we have hot cocoa though! And how about you mister strange stranger pony? Do you want something to drink, or a snack?” she asked, her smile never wavering. She still managed to display an extremely chipper attitude while remaining at the respectful amount of caution that had been drilled into everypony here from birth. I didn’t understand how she could possibly still be cheerful next to this pony, something was just … wrong about him.
“Any tea?” he asked calmly, emotion gone from his voice altogether. He spoke like a robot.
“Sorry, tea doesn’t grow so good out here. Not the right type of soil, you know? Uhm … We do have some honey mead if that’s any better,” she tried, breaking out into a fit of giggles. The stranger gave a smile that didn’t reach his eyes, nodding his approval of the offered drink. Pinkie gave another laugh before hopping off to the back of the hall.
“Why are yah all the way out here, Mister Pierce,” Applejack continued, taking a sip from her own mug of mead. She kept her voice calm, something that a stranger wouldn’t be able to tell though, was that she was watching every move he made. Applejack could be as cold and as fast as anypony’s blade.
“It was not my intention to find you’re little hideaway, let me make that clear first,” Pokey Pierce said flatly, turning his slicing gaze onto Applejack now. The room suddenly felt cold, and for some reason I knew that things could get very ugly if we got on his bad side. I only had to look at his neck to know it.
Muscle, thick and chorded with years of labor swelled under his hide. But I could see the snap that was behind it, it wasn’t the slow muscle of a workhorse, like Applejack. That kind of muscle moved fast, the kind of muscle that could knock a tree down, and three others before you even realized that he’d started kicking.
Whoever this stallion was, he could be a better fighter than Applejack was. And that was a scary thought, considering she was one of the strongest ponies in Ponyville.
“I was chased here … It drove me up the mountain and that’s where I found your pass. I lost it sometime after starting down that mountain,” he hissed, eyes narrowing in the only indication of emotion that I’d seen from him so far. It made a soreness crawl up my spine, like I’d somehow pinched a nerve in every vertebrae. “I think you have a dragon problem, ma’am,” he said quietly, barely loud enough for anypony to hear at all.
I froze up, eyes widening as his words hit me. A dragon. He’d been chased here by a dragon. There weren’t supposed to be any dragons around here, that was the whole point of hiding here! But according to him there was one prowling around the mountains!
A cup had appeared in front of me, half filled with black coffee and steaming. How Pinkie had dropped it off without me noticing wasn’t actually surprising, I think that my brain had stopped working at the word dragon. My hooves shot to it immediately, picking it up and pressing the cup to my lips. Without even thinking about the hot liquid, I tilted the cup back and swallowed a mouthful of the coffee. It was hot, and burned my tongue and my throat. But I needed it to shock me out of the fear that had stopped my heart.
“This had better be some sorta joke, pard’ner,” Applejack said coldly, any sort of calm or collectiveness gone from her voice. Anger simmered in her words, and I swear her eyes could have cut holes in steel.
“It’s not,” Pokey said, his voice flat again. I could only barely make out a sense of hate radiating off his next words. “He thinks I’ll forget. He thinks that I don’t realize like you haven’t, but I do. Nothing gets past me for long. He thinks his Mask will protect him, but I know where to look now,” he said, a sort of madness echoing off his words. I could feel it in the air around him.
“What do you mean, mask?” I asked, the words coming from my breathless lips without even a thought. I’d just said it, I hadn’t even realized I was speaking until the words had already jumped from me into the world.
“Majesty. Terror. Sagacity. Divine. Unholy. Masked,” he listed, instantly rounding on me with those ice cold, metal eyes. “These are the powers that dragons have, only one each. The Mask lets the dragon come and go, and be forgotten. But I won’t forget him, oh no. I know how to remember,” he said, moving one of his arms under his coat.
Suddenly, the material snapped into clarity to me. He was wearing a fur coat, actual fur. And if Fluttershy’s friend was any indication, it was a bear’s skin. But what he pulled out next made it seem all the more gruesome.
He slammed it into the table, the razor-sharpened blade impaling itself into the thick wood and displaying his gruesome prize. It was a toe, the severed claw of a dragon. It was huge and green scaled, the claw as long as my hoof was wide. The blade was pushed through a joint in the toe and came out underneath the claw itself, sticking it like some sort of unholy kebab. The other joint had been sliced off, a clean cut that almost made it look fake.
But the blood that still steamed as it rolled off told me it wasn’t.
“Holy mackerel!” Applejack shouted, jumping up and knocking over both their drinks. She stared wide-eyed at it, the same as me. I couldn’t take my eyes off it, it was hypnotizing and absolutely terrifying. Here, horribly and explicitly presented in front of me like some sort of vulgar decoration, was proof that our valley was on the verge of being discovered by the dragons.
I couldn’t move. Maybe I felt the cup shatter in my hooves but I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t even tell if the precious coffee I’d just wasted had burned my legs as it fell to the floor. I knew I was shaking. I couldn’t stop. I could only stare at the huge green claw that was staring me in the face.
A rainbow tinged blur tackled Pokey Pierce to the ground in the silence. He made no move to defend himself as he fell and a rough copper blade pressed up against his horn. “You’ve got ten fucking seconds to tell me why you have a fake dragon’s claw,” Rainbow hissed, digging the tip into the base of his horn. Blue fur bristled with well trained muscle as she held him down, the stallion not making much of a move to stop her so much as to lay properly on the floor.
“It’s not fake,” I murmured, my lips trembling as I continued to stare at the claw. And it was true, I didn’t even need to look at the blood to know for certain. It was the feel of the thing, the magic in the air. He was right, it was an illusion matrix flowing weakly around it, making its displacement in the world’s fabric … almost not exist.
Everything took a place in the world, especially dragons. The world is a fabric, like a huge net stretched flat. When something sits on the fabric, when it exists in the world, it makes a dip in the fabric where gravity pulls it down. The older it is, the more powerful it is, the more ‘dip’ in the fabric. But the dragon’s claw seemed to shake in and out of its place, like somepony was trying vainly to hold it above, just barely touching the fabric in a shaky grasp.
The claw, and the dragon it came from, was enchanted so that nopony could remember it after they’d seen it. For all I knew, it could have walked past me on our way here.
“Whaddya mean it’s not fake, sugarcube? It’s gotta be, nothin’ can cut a dragon, you know that,” Applejack argued, standing up so that she could look down at the stranger. “You heard the mare, you got ten seconds to live, fill it with words,” she said, motioning for Rainbow to put more pressure on his horn.
He should have been in pain, massive pain with a cut like that near his horn. The base of the horn was extremely sensitive, nerves meant to help detect and control the flow of magic expanded out from the base of the horn there. But he didn’t seem to react at all to the gouge being carved out at the base of his horn. All he did was go back to that horribly detached expression.
“But a dragon can,” he said, pointing with a hoof to his saddlebag that was pinned under him. He didn’t even bother to look away from Rainbow as she pressed her knife into his horn harder.
Applejack was the one who moved, taking it upon herself to open the bag. The chain-link lined fabric fell away, and something equally as sick as what was pinned to the table rolled out. Another dragon’s claw, this one mounted and polished on top of a dagger's hilt. It was a knife made from a part of a dragon, that he’d used to cut off a part of a dragon.
“... How?” Applejack finally decided to ask. Rainbow’s knife fell from her hoof as she stared at it, finally freeing the other unicorn from the forced torture. “How did you get this?” Applejack repeated, fear seeping into her voice. I could hear it stretching her throat, it had already wrapped itself around mine.
“A Manta and a Steel dragon fought in the sky, the Manta cut the tip of the other dragon’s tail off and it fell into our village,” he said, a crazy glint in his eye. He turned them, the empty brass color glinting in the light, back to Applejack in that same, horribly detached way. “It was a sign, from Celestia herself. It came through my roof, impaling my dinner to the floor. I knew it meant that I was supposed to rid the world of as many of these demons as possible, so I have. I’ve killed three dragons already, and learned things that most ponies could only dream about,” he said, his voice distant, as if he were lost in the memory.
“No, it was a stroke of luck!” Rainbow protested, taking to the air with a defiant scowl on her face. “Everypony knows that the first thing the dragons did was kill both of the Princesses, anything else is just a stupid attempt to hold onto them,” she said angrily, expressing the common belief among pegasi.
“Of course you would say that,” he snapped, turning his steely glare to her as he sat back up. Blood, red and thick ran down his face, tracing a curve around his muzzle before disappearing under his chin. “And I suppose the head mare here is going to tell me that they couldn’t have done that because they’re too busy getting ready for a revolt to wipe out the dragon scum,” he sneered, turning a sickly grin to Applejack.
“Ah think we’ve heard enough outa yer foul mouth,” Applejack said, looking toward a pair of stallions sitting across the hall. She summoned them with a nod toward the stranger, both of the burly workhorses standing to come collect him. “We’ll keep yah overnight in tha blacksmith, but don’t be mistakin’ it as fergiveness. First light, yer outta here,” she said, her voice returning to a shakily placed harshness.
The stallions grabbed onto the stranger, standing him up and pressing into his sides so that he had no place to move. He was completely silent, a satisfied smirk on his face. I don’t know why, if he hadn’t started yelling about dragons Applejack might have let him stay in the mead hall and let him leave in the morning, now he had to sleep in the cold floor of the blacksmith’s shop for the night, most likely tied down with chains in a clear corner. For some reason, I felt like if he had wanted to, he could have easily killed both of them and left whenever he wanted.
My eyes flashed back to the sick trophy he had so proudly presented to us, his words suddenly shifting up through my mind. ‘I know how to remember.’ The claw. He’d taken it so that the illusion spell couldn’t hold onto him for more than a few fleeting moments, a reminder for whenever it tried to take hold on his perception of the world.
In a flash, without thought or care, I reached into my saddlebag and pulled out a small kerchief that I usually kept. The soft white cloth soaked in the dark, still hot blood of the talon. And before I knew it, it was back in my bag with none the wiser. A plan had already sprung into my mind, a headache edging in with the racing thoughts that were producing it.
You can make deals with dragons. Not very good ones, but they always keep their word. It’s some sort of curse on them; if they make a promise, they keep it. Or maybe that’s just a myth that seems very appealing. Either way, dragon’s know how to cure Death’s Kiss.
I already knew what I was going to do tonight, the book I needed already plastered to the back of my vision. I followed them out as they took the stallion away, turning away toward my house in the darkening light. I might have given Applejack a wave as I left, some warning about the curfew following me as I tried to make myself seem as inconspicuous as possible. But I didn’t really have the mindset to listen.
I was about to break the rules, big time ...
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Just dragons and ponies?
But where are the other species,
Most importantly the changelings?
3394817
He/she did mention other species. Gryphons, mostly, and Minotaurs, but it stands to reason no one would hear from Changelings, seeing as they were all banished from Equestria and probably also live in fear of the dragons.
To the author:
The only thig I don't like so far is that Pierce's first name is Pokey. I find it hard to take him seriously because of this. I can imagine others having this thought as well. Maybe just have him have tell people to just call him Pierce? Just a suggestion.
Great so far though, definitely going in my favorites so I can watch it.
3394986
Changelings fear dragons!?!?
I Fear Nothing!!!
*Charges at a dragon and punches it in the nose!*
....
........
...........
BAD IDEA BAD IDEA BAD IDEA!!!!!!!
*Is now afraid of dragons*
3395017
Probably would happen :P
By the way, it's widely known that the only thing dragons covet more than power is gold, and the Changeligs can only shapeshift into ponyfolk, therefore if the dragons isolate them, the Changelings are either living in a weak and fearful state or dead.
You know, since they couldn't feed off of the dragons' love of gold.
3395080
Who says changelings can only turn into pony folk?
ive read 50 or so changeling stories, and in 90% of them
changelings could turn into any living creature they see,
though the larger the creature the more difficult the transformation.
Changeling powers activate!
*Turns into a Baked potato*
3395106
Well who's to say that the dragons love other dragons anyway? The way the author describes them, they were created by Tiamat and whenever they encounter each other in the open it's a massive brawl.
Another thing, if the Changelings could morph into dragons, it would probably be physically exhausting and they would reveal themselves as Changelings when they claim rulership over the land— they're too proud to do otherwise.
3395145
But if dragons dont love dragons.... where do baby dragons come from?
Also i wonder if this story will involve Kirin,
as i have a particular fondness for the little pony dragon hybrids.
3395181
Well, there are baby dragons, so you got me there. Maybe there's some sort of magical event where a baby dragon appears at the peak of a volcano or something. Like the cutie mark appearing is magic, so maybe dragon egg creations are too?
I don't know man. Got me pegged on that one.
3395261>>3395181
I'll solve this for the both of you with simple fact!
Sex doesn't always have to happen with love as a part of the equation
3395271
I think a part of me just died when you said that.
3395271
I don't know about Soft Shell, but is considered that and decided that female dragons would probably be faster would be able to escape the males. If not, then I suppose then the matter of dragon rape is an issue which must be dealt with post-haste!
We should lobby our governments. Someone start an online petition! Oh, and contact Sarah McLaughlin (dear god I hope I spelled her name correctly) to make an ad campaign.