Bridging Ages, Bridging Worlds

by BlueDWarrior

SS1-2: Spike's Gaiden 2

=== BABW: Spike’s Gaiden ===

=== Part II: Nature of the Beast ===

[ May 1, ???+1 -- En-Route to Iral-au-Tran, Eastern Dragon Territories ]
===========================================================================

Cool. That's what most nights in the Dragon Badlands, as most outsiders called it, were. Luna's sky was clear and full of stars, as a magical fire flickered, keeping Rosethorn and Spike warm underneath their sleeping blankets. Spike fidgeted around as Rosethorn decided to lay right next to him. Spike still had no idea how to act in the presence of a lady (dragon); at least now, though, he managed to speak without stuttering.

"So Spike, why don't you tell me more about yourself. I mean, we're out here on the road together and all," Rosethorn asked of her travelling partner.

Spike sighed heavily, taking in the crisp air of the desert night as best he could. "Well, it's hard for me to really remember anything soon after I hatched. The most I could remember was a lot of sucking on my tail like a pacifier, and following Twilight around like a pet instead of someone's abandoned child."

Rosethorn noted the sudden spike of anger in Spike's voice from the last few words he spoke. Abandoned? I can't think of any Dragon that'd abandon a whelp to Ponies unless the situation was truly dire...

"Excuse me Spike, but what might you mean by 'abandoned'?" she asked.

Spike was starting to get riled up just thinking about it now. "I dunno, just something about dragons being so possessive. And then the fact that I’ve hardly seen any dragons until the last couple of years just kinda tells me I was abandoned to Celestia or the Royal Court, or something..."

He's one of those whelps, I see... but there are no records of any of those abandoned eggs ever hatching except his... and there are only 3 of those eggs besides his on record anyway... the way it sounds, it was like those guards told him she made a run every few months or something... Rosethorn thought to herself.

"It's, it's just hard - ever since I really started thinking about it since I left the Equestrian Checkpoint. I've just had all this time to think about just who and what I really am. And... I'm coming up blank. It's burning me up inside. I didn't say anything about it yesterday because I was so busy with my reading and with, well, you. But it's coming back now, and with a vengeance," Spike said, his snout half-buried in his curled up knees.

Even though we aren't the most personable species, we have an immense pride in our heritage... To the point where I wonder if it's something that's just embedded in our souls... Now Spike, ever since he technically became an adult, has probably been struggling with the fact he knows next to nothing about our heritage... But it's not like I can take 20 or 30 years to teach him personally... What to do? Rosethorn thought to herself, as she sat up against Spike's cart.

I'd love to follow Rosethorn, and anyone else she knows, for the rest of however long... But I got to get back to Twilight and the others... but I got to know just what I can do... just who I am... and if any of the rest of them can help Princess Celestia... What am I gonna do? Spike thought to himself as he looked up at Luna's night sky, trying to divine some answers for himself.

"Spike, are you on any sort of schedule when it comes to arriving at Karrak-za-Jalve?" Rosethorn asked, resuming the tone of a teacher dealing with a troubled child.

Spike looked over at the face of Rosethorn, and most noticeably her eyes. They looked so warm for a reptilian creature, long maligned for being rather cold and icy. "Well... honestly... no. I don't want to stay out here years and years though. But there are some questions I need to answer for myself, before I can ask any of other Dragons."

Rosethorn's smiled a wide, fanged grin at the answer Spike gave. "Well, we are heading towards Iral-au-Tran. Why don't we just take an extended stay there, say a week..." she began, as she moved in on Spike and draped her long arms over the young dragon's shoulders as she leaned against his back and side.

OH CELESTIA, WHY IS SHE DOING THIS NOW!! Spike thought at the sudden invasion of personal space.

"I want to start teaching you so many things... so many points to start from..." she said as she leaned in, her voice sultry, and her snout right alongside Spike's.

Spike didn't say anything, as he stared out into nothing in particular.

"Um... Spike, would you mind answering my question?" Rosethorn asked of the dear Dragon. His only response was a soft thud against the ground and his blanket. His mind froze like a computer attempting to process one command too many.

A shame too, a few years older and he might be more willing to play along – it’s always more fun that way. But I’m letting my little fun get in the way of my actual job, and there are a lot of things I will have to start teaching him. And I won't have that much time with him... at least not for this particular go around... Rosethorn thought, as the warm eyes suddenly became very, very cold and calculating.

[ May 4, ???+1 -- Iral-au-Tran, Eastern Dragon Territories ]
===============================================================

"Iqual Diyan!" Spike shouted as a fountain of water quenched a flame in one of the larger practice rooms at the Iral Training Hall.

Rosethorn looked on with a smirk that would have easily rivaled Celestia when in her scheming mode. He is a total natural when it comes to Draconic Invocation... He would have definitely made it into the Sage's College if he were hatched under normal circumstance... Although, he still needs work on properly regulating his mana output... Hrm, I suspect all that time with that Equestrian Prodigy has rubbed off on him...

"Whenever you are ready to return, I hope I can meet that Twilight Sparkle that you speak so highly of," she said to Spike as he started reading over the next set of chants to practice.

"Well, like I said. You don't spend your life around a study-bug like her without learning quite a bit on how to process information yourself. I just hope I'm performing these chants right, sometimes they come out all weird, at least compared to how the book says they should," Spike replied.

Rosethorn put a claw underneath her snout to think for a few moments. "Well, some of it has to do with your mana regulation. The chant or phrase is necessary to invoke a spell, but you also have to offer up the right amount of mana when you do. Otherwise the effect will not match what the texts or instructor indicates." She looked around for a bit, to make sure that no one else was watching listening to them, before she continued.

"Also, your body has heavy imprints of a mana completely foreign to this world. When we are in a more secure location, I need you to tell me everything you can about whatever that strange energy was when you underwent Flash Puberty."

Spike replayed in his mind the horrible pain he went through, as his body morphed from his usual whelp-self into a true young adult. So much so that Rosethorn noticed Spike appearing to go into a trance thinking about it.

"Excuse me, Rosethorn to Spike... I swear you have a very bad habit of zoning out anytime I talk about that strange, foreign energy..." Rosethorn said as she shook her head at her new student's habits and attention span.

Spike finally shook his head loose as he came back to reality and the current time. "I'm sorry Rosethorn, but anytime I think about that day, it's like... like my mind is being pulled back there to actually relive that incident. It honestly scares anytime I think about it for too long."

Rosethorn clasped her hands around Spike's shoulders, not to tease him like a few nights previous, but to legitimately comfort him. "I can suspect this entire scenario is difficult for you. Not only do you have questions to answer for yourself, but you have other questions to ask on someone else's behalf. But, as you said those nights ago, we have to take care of this first. You can't very well appear in Karrak, not sure of who or what you are, now can you?"

"No... not if I want to make a good impression to the Council of Elders, anyway," Spike said, as he went back to practicing some more phrases for Invocation.

Indeed. We are rather insular and detached for a supposed central governing body... Rosethorn thought to herself.

"Anyway, the thing you have to remember is to consistently pull the same amount of mana every time you want invoke another spell. That way you achieve a consistent effect. The more you do it, the more consistent you will be while in a fight or battle."

"I see... I guess it's something you have to kinda feel out, yeah?" Spike said as he stood at the lectern in the room, reading over some more phrases.

"Yes and you have to consistently practice at it," Rosethorn added.

Now I know that there is an alternate form of mana emanating from that other world. But I cannot make any solid conclusions until I can get him to use it naturally. If I try to goad him into it, I may not get the best results… Rosethorn thought to herself; she needed to get Spike comfortable enough in his own skin before he could start exploiting that foreign power.

[ May 12, ???+1 -- Iral-au-Tran, Eastern Dragon Territories ]
=============================================================

It was nearly nightfall in Iral-au-Tran, as the Dragon pair were standing at the West Gates ready to embark towards the next town. Rosethorn was brimming with confidence after watching just how well Spike was taking to his Invocation Lessons. She wondered if Spike was truly a natural caster, or if he just learned that much from all his time with Twilight.

As he and Rosethorn walked along the path to their next campsite, Rosethorn suddenly held out her arm, signaling the young dragon to stop.

Damn, I knew tonight was a ‘stay-at-the-inn’ night… that’s what I get for ignoring my first instinct… she thought, chiding herself as she looked for any signs along the ground.

“Rose, what’s the problem? I mean I thought we could have made it to our agreed upon campsite but only if we moved at a brisk pace,” Spike asked, as he unharnessed himself from the cart.

“We’re going to be delayed. We aren’t alone on this path,” Rosethorn said, her voice terse as she took a wide stance along the ground, murmuring to herself as she did.

Spike drug his cart in between himself and Rosethorn, as he began to feel the ground starting to rumble beneath his feet.

“What’s going on? Why’s the ground shaking like this?” Spike asked, as he could swear he heard barking coming from the ground.

“Diamond Dogs, there must be a pack holed up around the city somewhere, and a raiding party just found us,” Rosethorn said, her tone very serious as she looked around the ground.

The ground suddenly burst forth with a cloud of dark brown and orange, as five Diamond Dogs were positioned around the two dragons and one very valuable storage cart. The howling, while brief, was maddening to Spike, who hadn’t been victim of a Diamond Dog raid in earnest – only having dealt with Rarity’s kidnapping in the past.

The lead of the raiding pack was wearing goggles over his eyes, with glowing paint across the frames. “Give us all valuable, or we take!”

“Like we are going to give yo—“ Spike started, before he was cut off by Rosethorn.

“And if we give you our gems, will you leave us be?” she offered instead, not wanting to overtly antagonize the Dogs.

One of the other Dogs walked up to the lead and whispered something in his pack’s tribal language. While the two dragons couldn’t exactly see it, they could tell by the way the muscles around the top of his face moved the lead’s eyes were wide.

“Cart! You give us cart now! No questions!”

Rosethorn appeared initially confused, until she remembered something that Spike had told her previously, but in passing. “Spike, what is this cart made out of again?”

Spike didn’t think about his answer, especially how it might have just done what Rosethorn was trying to avoid at first. “Titanium, it’s titanium alloy as far as I can remember…”

“GIVE! YOU GIVE CART, OR WE TAKE CART!” the lead raider shouted, almost devolving back into some combination of a growl and a howl.

“You know all that practice we’ve been doing for the last month, Spike?” Rosethorn asked, with a bit of a smirk on her fanged face.

“Yeah… wait what, don’t tell me…” Spike asked as he suddenly looked very nervous.

“You’re about to get a crash course in combat!” Rosethorn shouted as she slammed her tail on the ground, causing a tremor that made the Diamond Dogs around the cart momentarily lose their footing.

Good Celestia, she’s fast… Spike thought as she saw Rosethorn sprint out to clothesline one of the stumbling Diamond Dogs, left in awe by her sheer speed.

“GIVE! GIVE OR WE TAKE!” the Dogs on Spike’s side of the cart shouted, as they all began to rush him.

Oh no, oh no ohno… ok um… wide area fire… wide area fire… Oh I can’t remember… SCREW IT! Spike thought in his mild panic, until a phrase appeared in his mind.

“PROC WAVE!” he shouted as he swept his arm around in front of him; round Draconic runes, in the same green as his natural flame, mixed with red, angled Terran runes. Following the motion of his arm, a wave of flame erupted from the ground, creating forward blast of heat and flames, singing one of the advancing Diamond Dogs and causing the other two to hold in their advance.

That’s not a standard spell… in fact… that’s not even standard mana he’s using. Could that be the power of the other mana at work? Rosethorn thought as she watched her charge trying to learn on the fly how to use his combat spells, while she had one of the Diamond Dogs in a sleeperhold.

“Trick! Your trick not scare us! Your cart will be ours!” the lead raider shouted, as he tried to rally the other unsigned Diamond Dog to his side, taking out what appeared to be a bone-tipped spear that was sectioned in half… until it was affixed to a pole that was being carried by the Dogs that was nearly the same height as Spike and Rosethorn.

“Be careful Spike, those bone spears are a lot harder than they look!” Rosethorn shouted; as she used a wind spell to send another Diamond Dog flying away a good couple dozen Lengths.

It’s just bone, what could it do aga-- Spike thought to himself as he dodged backwards from the first spear slash, watching the gash it created in the ground from just barely scraping it.

“What in the heck are those things made out of?!” Spike shouted, thinking bone should not be able to gash the hardened and dried earth they were walking on as much as it just did.

“Bone of our ancestors. Very strong, strong as many metal. Diamond Dog eat metal, make bone hard as metal. Common knowledge to Dragon!” the apparent assistant to the lead raider explained, in a tone that felt patronizing to the purple Dragon.

Great, he doesn’t even know me and he’s making fun of me for not knowing what’s up… Spike thought, as he tried to search his mind for some kind of defense mechanism in case the spear did catch his scaly skin.

Ugh, I didn’t have time to teach Spike the reinforcement spell for his dragonscale. He’s nowhere near old enough to have eaten enough gems to naturally have a defense mechanism against their Iron-Bone weapons… Rosethorn thought as she suddenly saw the fault in her initial lesson plan.

Okay… let’s… try this! Spike thought as another phrase resounded in his mind. “Crystal Gravok!” he shouted aloud, as his body began to glisten. He hardly had any time to do anything other than put his arms up in defense after he shouted his spell, the now green Terran runes and his Draconic invocation mixing along his skin.

“OWWWWW! My spear… my arms!” the lead raider shouted, as he dropped his spear, which appeared to chip against Spike’s suddenly reinforced scales. His forearms and hands were limp, as apparently the shock from the impact of the spear against Spike’s skin caused him to lose all feeling past his elbows.

“Stop, stop all! Leader is hurt! We must retreat! All back in tunnel!” the assistant shouted, as the other three Diamond Dogs pulled themselves up off the ground, as best they could, and drug themselves back to the tunnel to go back to wherever their pack had set up camp.

“Speaking of arms hurting, my left arm feels like someone just slashed me with a razor,” Spike complained, as the adrenaline finally left his system and the pain kicked in.

“Let me see that,” Rosethorn said, the tension in her voice leaving about the same time the Diamond Dogs did. “No injury as far as I can tell; we just need to clean this out and wrap it. All kinds of bugs live in the sand and dirt, and I’d like to avoid having Celestia’s prized pupil’s adopted brother laid up in the hospital with an infection.”

-----

An hour or so had passed, allowing the travelling duo some time to decompress from the attempted armed robbery; and having finally reached the midway point to the next town, they decided to go ahead and set up camp. After a few more minutes of setting up the sleeping canopy, the two sat around campfire, taking in Luna’s night sky over the patchy savannah that made up the Badlands near Equestria.

“You know, I always thought the Dragon territories near Equestria were actual desert; Like rolling sand dunes and everything, similar to Central Zebracia. Then again, before my little… incident, I honestly didn’t give it a second or third thought,” Spike mused as he laid on the ground on top of his cloak, staring at Luna’s Moon as it drifted along its intended path.

“You are a very thoughtful drake - most others your age, be it your calendar age or equivalent to your physical maturity level, really don’t care one whit about the history of the Dragons, or our current status. Most of my classes when I do actively teach are populated by Dragons that are at least a hundred years old. Of course, that’d be like teaching freshmen in a Pony college relative to our lifespans,” Rosethorn thought, as she rose from her lounge on the ground to a seated position, opposite the campfire from Spike.

The notion of 100 only being ‘young adult’ in Dragon terms stupefied Spike, which was evident in his face, and caused Rosethorn to elaborate on her latter point. “Oh there I go just running my mouth without any context. Alright, Spike, let’s have a little question and answer session: how old do you think I am?”

Spike was stymied; clearly at a loss for words as, from everything he heard from Rarity, you NEVER asked a lady her age. And here was his guide asking him to actually guess it. He searched his mind for a few moments more for an answer, before he finally came up with one. “Two… hundred I guess? I’m not really sure.”

Rosethorn laughed uproariously, Spike stunned (again) by just how loud she could be. “Oh, dear precious little Spike. Let’s try one-thousand three-hundred and eighty-four [1,384], as of the fourth moon next year, or I guess… April is the modern Equestrian name for it? Never did like naming months…”

“What? You’re over a millennia old?!” Spike replied, utterly shocked.

Rose giggled a draka-ish giggle, sounding a lot a female Spike’s age (at least as of a couple of months ago). “Yes, I was hatched in the last century, roughly, of Discord’s reign of terror. A Thousand Years of Insanity, almost literally; it’s great wonder how we Dragon Scribes managed to keep the records we did all though that time. Though, I can wait to go into more detail at a later time.”

Spike was still trying to process the fact the Dragon before him was just as old as the Princesses, and yet looked just as young as them too.

“Second Question, Mr. Spike: how old do you believe the Council President, Wraithwind, to be?” Rosethorn asked, materializing a small blackboard in her hands.

Spike stumbled and searched silently, before offering his guess. “Ok, well if you’re almost fourteen hundred, then I’ll… um… three thousand?”

“Not the worst guess I’ve had – the actual answer is four-thousand, nine-hundred, and ninety-six years [4,996],” Rosethorn replied, showing the answer in numerical form on her miniature board.

“He’s… he’s five-thousand years old almost?! That’s older than every nation that exists!” Spike exclaimed, thoroughly shocked by the amount.

“By an ‘half’ an order of magnitude no less. Equestria, as it is presently constituted, has only existed for a scant over a thousand years. Some of our scholars argue that political conflicts between Princesses Celestia and Luna led to Luna’s, thankfully temporary, fall in becoming Nightmare Moon. Personally, I believe it is both simpler, and yet a lot deeper than that,” Rosethorn mused, as she began drifting again in her explanations.

Spike, just stared into the sky, as he tried to let the staggering numbers, insofar as age was concerned, settle into his mind. “Say Rosethorn… I, um… just how long does a Dragon live… anyway?”

Rosethorn sighed heavily, as she just drew a pair of Equestrian question marks on her blackboard, to show the lack of clarity in the coming answer. “This answer might seem like a cop-out, but it is the best one I can give you: it is completely undefined. There is a reason why some other creatures argue that Dragons are semi-divine, our bodies don’t age on a normal curve. While we can be killed by a mortal just like any Pony or Gryphon, if you left us completely alone, we’d basically live until we became so bored with life we just… retire. I’ve been trying my entire scholastic career to nail down just what exactly causes a Dragon’s body to biologically degrade and die like any mortal, when it seems totally resistant to aging triggers through most of its life. Yet, nothing - I haven’t been able to come up with any kind of sensible answer.”

“I… a lot of things start to make sense now…” Spike said, as it looked like he was starting to genuinely tear up.

“Wait, what do you mean Spike?” Rosethorn asked, as she came around the campfire to comfort the sniffling young dragon.

“Why it seems like Dragons always seem to be alone. There is no telling if you will outlive you care about; or if you’d die well before they did, and leave them suffering the rest of their lives. At least with the Princesses, they know their lives functionally infinite, so they can plan around it. They can at least come up with a way to cope… we can’t. We don’t know if something will kill us at fifty, or if we will become suicidal at 200, or if we will live, like you, well into four-digits,” Spike replied, the tears starting to stream down from the corners of his eyes in earnest now.

“I… I don’t know what to say…” Rosethorn offered tepidly, not sure of how to deal with someone emotional like this.

“I… I just don’t want to see them fade away… Twilight, all the friends we’ve made over the last few years. I… I could easily outlive them, their children, their great grandchildren. I just don’t, I don’t know…” Spike stammered, choked up by the tears.

Rosethorn hugged him tightly, realizing what exactly he was going through. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be harsh or cruel, but time is something that flows differently for us, just like it flows differently for the Princesses. I just want you do one thing for me, if you do nothing else in your hopefully very long and fruitful life.”

Spike sniffled before he responded. “What? What is it?”

“I want you to enjoy every single moment you have with your friends and family. I want you to enjoy it as much as you can. And when they do pass, I want you to never forget them, and don’t look back on their lives with regret for what you could have done. A Dragon lives true to their desire, and leaves no regrets behind when they do pass from this life – at least… that is how I think of things.”

Spike started to calm down some, as the words of the much older dragoness began to settle into his mind. “I’ll… I’ll try. But… I don’t know… I can’t really talk to anyone but you or the Princesses about how to deal with this.”

“Then just do that for now. Whenever you feel overwhelmed, talk to me or your Princesses. Too many dragons try to carry the burden of time alone, and that is why we turn out the way we do. If only we could realize as a species that we have each other and our fellow travelers in life to help share our … perhaps we wouldn’t be so misunderstood…” Rosethorn responded, as she looked at Luna’s Moon along with Spike.

-----

“I wonder what she’s doing with Spike right now. The path going directly to Karrak only takes a couple of weeks if you are going in a relatively straight line…” Luna mused, watching her heavenly orb slowly move in its prescribed arc.

Celestia joined her on the balcony, holding a cup of tea in her telekinetic grip as she was winding her mind down for the evening. “No telling, she’s probably taking any lack of communication about us needing him back immediately as license to teach him about being a Dragon.”

“Do you think she’s going to tell him about how Dragons are like us, in some sense, in that their bodies don’t have a predictable pattern growth or decline?” Luna asked, as the two of them sat before the rail of the balcony, looking at the stars flicker and twinkle in the midnight-blue and purple sky.

Celestia sighed, as she remembered all of the things she learned of and from the Dragons during her time living with them. “I am not sure how she could avoid it, given how Spike is just like his adoptive sister, and will ask any question that comes to mind. Nevertheless, someone his age, if you will, shouldn’t be naive about death. It comes for us all, even if some of us may know the being that acts as its shepherd for our worlds.”

“Nothing lasts forever?” Luna asked, looking at her sister with a combination of inquisitiveness and concern.

“For all but a few, no. And for us… it’s an open question,” Celestia responded, a thoughtful look on her face as she sipped from her tea cup.

===== - =====

Author's Note:

[1] Zebracia is the analogue to Africa, and ancestral homeland for all Equine-derived races, though only the Saddle Arabians maintained Earth horse like porportions (save fully-realized Alicorns)