Chapter Twenty 【Sunset】
⁂
Returning to the castle was a surreal experience. It hadn’t been that long since I’d stormed out in anger, and being brought back under guard, in a way, brought up a feeling of apprehension that wasn’t warranted.
Probably.
There was no sign that Princess Celestia had suspected the truth. Having my name come out of the naming spell in some form of ancient draconic translation had been a stroke of luck. The princess had obviously recognized it, but by the way she’d acted, I could only guess that she’d come to the conclusion that I’d died and been reincarnated.
It… wasn’t entirely not true. There was a bread knife back at the house that was proof enough of that.
A tartarus-damned bread knife.
Our small procession split up once we were inside the castle. Princess Celestia took Twilight off to give her the grand tour, leaving me to be carted off to whichever corner of the castle was going to serve as my nursery.
Idly, I wondered if the plan had changed or if I’d just been left out of the loop. If it was the latter, then I wasn’t the only one. The changeling who had taken over as Twilight’s father during my incubation certainly hadn’t seemed to be on board with the situation, and I kinda agreed.
Twilight had asked me back when this had all started if I would be able to put my past with Princess Celestia behind me and I had no intention of going back on my word, but moving back into the castle made me… feel things. We’d had a good thing going back at the house and I’d been looking forward to using my new claws to conquer those damned stairs. What on Equestria had possessed Twilight to abandon her lab, her assistant and her autonomy to come live in the castle?
I couldn’t make much sense of it.
Now, if Twilight had been kicked out to protect Shining Armor’s mission… or just because no one could stand her… that I’d have no trouble believing.
This was going to be a long foalhood, wasn’t it?
I drifted off to sleep while trying to remember what baby dragons were actually called.
⁂
It turned out that not only was five years a long time to spend in cribs and strollers, but it was also more work than you’d expect. As much as my changeling body had been an insidious prison that hadn’t truly been under my control, I’d really taken it for granted. You never really appreciate how much inane baby babble it actually takes to figure out how to shape out different sounds and train them into your muscle memory until you have to consciously dedicate time to practicing it. For every hour of development I was able to skip thanks to already having a working knowledge of the Equish language, I’d probably wasted two more burned out on trying to recover a skill I’d already learned once.
Walking was similar, but it came more naturally and wasn’t as onerous to actually practice. My biggest roadblock in achieving bipedal locomotion had been not actually knowing that I’d been aiming for it in the first place. Apparently that was a thing. I’d been unconvinced until Princess Celestia had explained in the most ridiculous baby-talk that dragons only tended towards quadrupedal in their adulthood.
No, infancy was not a simple or easy period, even for the infant. At times, I still felt more like a disabled pony than a baby dragon, and it was all I could do not to be more of a terror to the staff than I already was. Even so, it was usually after those times when I was at my lowest that the maids came to wonder how I’d managed to chew up yet another chandelier.
…
Look, I’d declared my intent to climb the shit out of the house as a dragon and I wasn’t about to let a change of venue stop me. It wasn’t my fault that marble is actually a relatively soft stone that was easy to dig my little baby claws into.
All in all, I was not, as you might expect, a very well behaved little lizard, but then, I’d been a surly teenager to begin with and I’d never handled boredom well. It was enough to drive me up the walls. Literally.
Hence the chandeliers.
I think what baffled the castle staff most was the fact that I gnawed and chewed on the chandeliers, but I refused to actually eat the damned things. I remembered what I’d read about dragon diets and I wasn’t about to fill up on pride and… whatever else a gold and jewel-encrusted light fixture actually represented, no matter how good they tasted.
In the end, there was just one problem with that. See, I hadn’t actually put any thought to what sort of thing it was that I actually wanted to eat and make my hoard out of. Sure, I might have been overthinking things for that stage of my development, but I couldn’t be sure. All I knew was that the things that I ate would have some level of permanent effect on my mind and my magic, and the greater the value, the greater the effect.
I’d rather be safe than sorry.
Of course, the greater issue was that even if I’d known what it was I wanted to eat, it wasn’t as if I’d had any way of actually communicating that information to the poor ponies who were taking care of me.
I… might have gotten myself a reputation as a picky eater, among other things. I mean, I would eat regular food on the occasion they’d give it to me, but nothing excessively expensive, which was its own problem for a growing dragon. For a couple of weeks after I’d been hatched, the only source of valuables in my diet were stethoscopes, since I’d already shown a taste for those and I couldn’t really claim that I thought that they’d have a negative effect on me.
But… what did I want? What kind of magic did I want to do, and what kind of dragon did I want to be? I’d had a particular talent for fire spells as a pony, but I’d only rarely had a chance to actually use them. There was a lot more to magic than burning things down, and even so, as a dragon I would pretty much have that covered no matter what I did.
They’d stopped giving me wooden cribs after the first three had mysteriously burst into flames in the middle of the night.
That said, stethoscopes were a nice contrast of tastes and textures, but while a little altruism or whatever the medical field represented in symbolic dragon magic terms wouldn’t hurt, I didn’t actually want to take it much further than that. I’d make a horrible doctor, and I’d wanted to stay that way. I hadn’t been willing to change myself to become Princess Celestia’s little alicorn princess and I wasn’t going to start now… ignoring all the ways I’d already changed since I’d thrown my lot in with the changelings.
No. To put it in cutie mark terms, I wanted… well, I wanted the cutie mark that Twilight Sparkle had given herself. I wanted a cutie mark in magic, full stop. I didn’t want to specialize. I wanted to explore everything that dragon magic could do.
So… what could I hoard and eat to make that happen and how could I get them to actually give it to me? It would have been simple if I could have spoken or if Twilight hadn’t decided to drag me along with her to the castle, but things were never that simple. If we’d still been living with the changelings, I’d have had all the solidified magic I could eat, even if scarfing down something the consistency of lukewarm jelly wasn’t entirely pleasant on its own, let alone the fact that my previous experience being force-fed it had ended rather badly. Instead, with things as they were, it would be a long time before I got that chance for good or ill.
Probably ill. I had little doubt that trauma was stored in the soul.
Unfortunately, reflecting on the options I didn’t have hadn’t gotten me any closer to coming up with a solution. The world would be much simpler if things worked like that. Eventually, the compromise I came to was, somewhat ironically, the chandeliers.
More specifically, it was the fruit thereof.
Light crystals were crunchy and went well with a truffle butter reduction. Of course, as a dragon, everything went well with a truffle butter reduction. Or saffron. Or foie gras. Look, it wasn’t my fault that expensive things tasted good to dragons and just in general. I tried not to gorge myself.
I tried.
Eventually, after several dozen light crystals went missing, the castle staff got the message and started bringing me enchanted things for dessert. It wasn’t exactly the message I’d been trying to send, but was close enough, and in hindsight, actually the better choice as plain crystallized magic was actually kind of bland.
Yeah, I could see the changelings impoverishing themselves trying to raise dragons.
⁂
My room in the castle wasn’t far from Princess Celestia’s, but the two couldn’t have been any more different. Hers was mostly as you’d expect, full of antiques and finery. Even some of her stationery was older than most of the laws of Equestria, provable by the fact that much of it still bore the hallmarks of her first royal stationer, Gilt Leaf.
My room, on the other hand—and I was still getting used to having hands—looked more like a warzone between two sides who believed in a scorched-earth policy. I mean, you could say that about most foal’s bedrooms, but in my case, the soot and melted marble made it a bit more literal.
Look, there was no proof whatsoever that I’d have burned down Twilight’s house if we’d stayed there.
More than the damage, though, was what it lacked, which was pretty much everything. There were no rugs, no tapestries. Nothing delicate or in any way flammable. It was, in some ways, as close to an empty cave as it was possible to turn a room of the castle into. It was a sanctuary that no ambassador or foreign dignitary had ever set hoof in, nor would they ever, in no small amount because it was, at this point, entirely impossible to make presentable.
In my defense, the overall emptiness, at least, was only mostly my fault, and I hadn’t actually done any significant damage in the past year or so. I was happy with it as it was, which only made the current situation more of a chore.
“C’mon, Spike,” came a playful voice from the door. “Let’s get going. You’re just moving rooms, not leaving the castle.”
A very large part of me inwardly groaned, but I said nothing. My name was Iskloreat Valignat Ixenvorel, but nopony called me that. I’d wanted to go by Ivi, but nopony called me that either. No. For five long years it had been “Spike” this and “Spikey-wikey” that. Before I’d been able to speak, I’d tried acting up any time somepony called me by Twilight’s stupid nickname, but they were all too dim to get the message.
There was a small chance that I’d been hungry and grumpy and trying to complain about a dozen other things using the same methods, but that so wasn’t my fault.
Oh, and Princess Celestia winced any time she heard my real name. As in, she actually visibly winced. That probably had something to do with the castle staff’s unanimous adoption of any alternative.
“Yeah, yeah,” I grumbled, giving the empty room one last look and turning away. The weirdest part of moving out was not having anything to take with me. I hadn’t been allowed a hoard yet for reasons that should probably be obvious and represented in numbers of bits I’d cost the crown without any additional power or size to my name, so that meant I had no possessions to speak of.
“Hey! Cheer up! You and Twilight are gonna have a whole tower to yourself! Aren’t you excited?!”
River Breeze was a sky blue pegasus who’d been taking care of me since the very first day I came home from the hospital. She’d been timid back then, barely out of school and still holding onto some baby fat. Now, she’d shed all that and grown into a chipper mare who loved taking care of ponies and dragons and felt no shame in being largely stereotypical as both a pegasus and a maid.
I liked her. Originally, I’d tried to get Twilight to replace her with a changeling. Twilight had agreed, but it hadn’t actually happened. She’d been denied any more resources and spent the days and weeks afterwards grumbling about the stupid hive mind and its stupid queen. Really, it would have simplified so many things, but it had worked out in the end and it was all water under the bridge now. In hindsight, there was something nice about having nice, honest, real ponies around, no matter how inconvenient it was for them to be in charge of me.
“Ehh…” I hedged and made a kind of shrug. “I guess. It’s nice and all, but lately Twilight’s been…”
“A teenager?” River Breeze finished for me as she lifted me up onto her back. “Yeah, I getcha. Seems like she’s frustrated about something, but she adores the princess and the princess says she’s doing really well. You ask me, it’s the princess that should be frustrated. She’s been trying to get Twilight to make friends, but it’s just not happening. It’s got her concerned, after…”
After me. There was a certain amount of irony in that. Still, I had to play along. “After what?”
“Well…” River Breeze glanced behind us to make sure she wasn’t overheard. “We don’t talk about it in the castle since it bothers the princess, but before you were hatched, the princess had another student. I mean, she’s had plenty over the years, but this was the one we all got to know.
“She was… not that different from Twilight, really, except where Twilight just ignores ponies who aren’t the princess, Sunset Shimmer always made it super clear how little she thought about you. Not always with words… but she wasn’t shy with them either.”
I couldn’t help but shrink inwards at being described like that. I knew that I hadn’t been a nice pony—I’d known it back then, too—but it still wasn’t a great thing to hear. I’d like to think that it would have helped me if I’d heard it more back then, but I knew better. I was remorseful, not stupid.
“So, what happened to her?” I asked.
I felt River Breeze shrug under me. “Nopony but the princess really knows for sure. By the time I got hired, they’d fought pretty regularly over things. Lessons, mostly. Sunset always was chomping at the bit to learn more, and I heard the princess tell her more than once that she wasn’t ready. I’d guess that one day, she’d either had enough or she went too far.”
It was sobering hearing it put so succinctly, but that really was the gist of it, wasn’t it? Back when I’d first met her, Twilight had told me that nopony should have been surprised that things had finally come to a head, and looking back, I guess it really had been obvious to everypony but the two of us.
Or maybe it had just been me.
“So, you think Twilight…?” I prompted, leaving the specifics unsaid.
River Breeze shook her head nearly hard enough to dislodge me. “Oh, no. Celestia no. Twilight’s a good kid, she just… needs to lighten up a bit and get out more. A lot more. At all, really. I know she spends weekends at home once in a while, but you never actually see her with Moon Dancer and her friends. But hey, at least she’s got you.”
That was fair. Of course, I’d mostly gravitated to Twilight because it’d allowed me to plop myself on the floor next to her and read magical theory while giving anypony who looked in on us the impression that I was just mimicking her, but I was pretty sure that was about as close as Twilight came to being friends with anyone anyway.
I was a little disappointed in her, to be honest. My time as a changeling had changed me, and my time as a dragon had forced me to learn a certain amount of patience. Not a large amount, by any means, but it was better than nothing. Along the way, I’d gotten to know a significant portion of the castle staff, like River Breeze, and, like River Breeze, I’d grown and matured at least a little.
Twilight… hadn’t.
It seemed very odd for a changeling.
⁂
River Breeze and I met up with Violet Rose at Twilight’s new tower. Violet Rose had been the prim and proper violet unicorn at the hospital, and while she was still prim and proper, the smile she gave River Breeze and me was slight, but genuine.
“Everything went well, I take it?” she asked once we reached speaking range.
“Yep!” River Breeze chirped. “Room’s empty, and there were no surprises.”
“Got all my luggage right here,” I added, miming myself holding an invisible suitcase.
“Excellent,” Violet Rose remarked, scanned down her list, checked something off and took another moment to make a note.
I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at the excessive pageantry. “Can we just get this over with? It’s not like I have anything to put away, but I’d still like to get settled in before Twilight gets back and starts demanding books.”
Violet Rose adjusted her glasses. “Yes, well. You’ll be glad to hear that that is finally going to change.”
“Eh, it’s fine,” I said, waving the matter off. “I don’t actually mind being her librarian.” Also, I’d signed myself into servitude for an unspecified amount of time in exchange for power and something close to immortality, so there was that. The changelings had less to hold over me now that I was no longer a changeling, but they were still a widespread conspiracy of shapeshifters who I had no way of identifying. I wouldn’t say I was scared of them, exactly, but I also had no intention of making an enemy of them.
“You are barely five years old, Spike,” Violet Rose chided, and my eye twitched at the usage of that name. “It is frankly amazing that you are even capable of fulfilling such a role. I suspect there is magic of some sort at play in the way you seem to absorb knowledge from that young filly. That does not make it fair or appropriate for her to treat you as nothing more than her assistant.” Violet Rose pursed her lips, which then twisted into a hint of a smile. “But that is not the matter at hoof that I was referring to.”
I blinked and tried to rewind the conversation in my head to remember what I’d missed. My eyes widened and I looked up at her with unbridled hope. “You mean…?”
“Yes, Spike.” Twitch. “You’re nearing the age when we’d normally be sending you to school, and it would be a crime if you weren’t able to start experimenting with your magic the same as any other filly or colt. We believe, and the princess agrees, that you’ve been well enough behaved that we can trust you to keep a small hoard.”
“Yes! Finally!” I cried, pumping my pudgy little fist in the air and doing my best not to cackle. Cackling would give the wrong impression. Not necessarily an incorrect impression, but it wasn’t the one I wanted to give. In excited haste, I scrambled and jumped off of River Breeze’s back, stumbling into a run to the door of the tower only to run into the very mare I’d just dismounted.
“Woah woah woah!” River Breeze said, blocking the door and warding me off. “Hold on a sec. There are gonna be a few rules.”
I couldn’t help but squirm in place, dignity be damned. This was what I’d been waiting five years for. I’d traded my life and my freedom for this.
“Yes,” Violet Rose agreed. “It is a given that you will, of course, be expected to maintain your current record of good behavior, including any ‘accidents,’ be they accidental or not.”
“You’d actually be better off taking responsibility, even if they are,” River Breeze added. “Accidents mean something’s out of control, and that’s a problem.”
Violet Rose gave River Breeze a short, unamused look before addressing me again. “While I wouldn’t encourage either lying or taking too many cues from Twilight, that is indeed where the rules lead us. We’ll start you off with three small items of your choice and see how things go from there.”
“We’re mostly worried about keeping you a manageable size,” River Breeze explained further. “From what the princess has been able to get out of the dragons, we can only guess at how any single thing will affect you, so it’s all going to be trial and error. We pretty much expect you to focus on things that give you as much power as possible while keeping you all cute and cuddly, so there’s no need to try and be sneaky about that. It’s too bad, too. I thought it’d be great fun to take you to live with the dragons for a few years, but they’d have had you bulking up until you were looking down at the princess, at least!”
“Quite,” Violet Rose agreed, giving the impression that there were probably a few more reasons beyond size that that plan had been rejected. “More importantly, you also need to avoid any large changes in your hoard. Accumulating too much too quickly will actually retard your development by spreading your essence too thin.”
River Breeze nodded along. “Trust us. You don’t want stretch marks on your soul.”
“Or anywhere else,” Violet Rose added, garnering startled looks from both River Breeze and me.
⁂
It was hard to believe, but the tower was actually impressive enough to distract me from thinking about my hoard-to-be. It was, essentially, a live-in library, but the focus was more on the live-in than the library—not that it skimped on either. Almost the entire top half of the structure was dedicated to a collection of wide open spaces and half-floors absolutely packed with books and bookshelves. There were several different nooks with couches and coffee tables, at least one lab station that I could see and the entire south wall was one big, multi-pane window over a hundred hooves tall.
I was a bit taken aback. I’d never had anything like this when I was Princess Celestia’s student. Admittedly, that was probably a good thing, but it stung all the same. This was, in a way, very real proof that she hadn’t trusted me out of her sight. Proof that she hadn’t thought that I was ready.
I mean, aside from all the times that she explicitly told me that I hadn’t been ready.
Also, I probably would have taken it as a rejection since I’d kinda sorta probably been looking for a mother figure in her back then, so I’d preferred living close to her.
Yeah, that… hadn’t worked out in my third life. Aside from the fact that my soul was nearing twenty years old and aside from the fact that running Equestria gave her very little free time, Princess Celestia could never quite manage to forgive me my name and the things it reminded her of.
Specifically, my name reminded her of me, which was entirely unfair considering all the effort I’d gone to in order to become an entirely different species.
Oh, sure, she hadn’t been avoiding me or anything. She was as kind and loving as she’d always been, but we weren’t close. I’d never cried myself to sleep under her wing in this life, or crawled into her bed after a nightmare. Part of it was that I hadn’t done much of those things at all since my rebirth, but even so, what comfort I had sought had come from River Breeze, Violet Rose and occasionally other members of the castle staff.
Twilight Sparkle, of course, need not apply. That was probably obvious, but I’d tried it. Once.
But anyway, yeah, the tower was pretty spectacular and I would probably enjoy living here. All I had to do now was not burn it down and keep Twilight Sparkle from doing the same.
Living with Twilight again… might be a challenge. She’d branched out into real magic since becoming the princess’ student and had been using everything she learned to inform her continuing improvements to Shining Armor and herself, as had been the plan. She still hadn’t solved the magic color issue, though, and her continual failures in that direction were one of the direct causes of her deteriorating attitude. Lately, she’d gotten a reputation for refusing to listen to anypony but the princess about little things like the dangers of experimental thaumaturgy. Admittedly, she was usually right, but most ponies were able to look past that.
It was going to be an interesting few years.
As I continued my tour of the tower, something began to bug me. As much as I liked the place, it didn’t really feel like I belonged here. It wasn’t just that I was a secondary consideration compared to Twilight, either. I’d gotten used to that to the point that I would no doubt be unrecognizable to the old me. No, what was really rubbing me the wrong way was the fact that that the part of me that was so enamored with the tower was the part of me that remembered being a pegasus and was counting the days until my wings came in as a dragon. The practicalities of it, on the other hand, left something to be desired. The grand, open spaces that made it so great… well, they were Twilight’s and they wouldn’t really make for good hoarding anyway.
I had learned humility. I hadn’t learned to share.
It was a wrench, but I eventually settled on a room just below the open area of the tower. It was smaller than the room I’d had in the castle, but not small, and it had a walk-in closet that would be the perfect place to hoard… whatever it was that was going to end up in my hoard.
I guess I should have given the specifics some thought, huh?
⁂
“Spike? Spiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiike?”
As much as the name still grated, I only really properly hated it when it was her saying it. Or shouting it. Or shrieking it.
Those last two are different, trust me.
It made sense, really. Twilight was, after all, the one who had come up with it in the first place.
“Spike!” the surly changeling disguised as a purple unicorn shouted once again, finally showing up at the door to the room that I’d chosen. “Spike, we just moved in. Why are the light crystals from the big chandelier missing?”
“No idea, Twilight,” I told her with an innocent, guileless smile. A slight tinkling sounded from underneath me as I shifted my weight.
Yeah, well, I’d had to start somewhere.
⁂
“Hoarding gold is for chumps,” I declared with a grin, holding my first success out in front of me.
The girls all crowded around the café table to get a closer look. “It’s a light crystal,” Moon Dancer deadpanned.
“I know!” I exclaimed, admiring my work. “Isn’t it great?”
Minuette, Lemon Hearts, Lyra and Twinkleshine, at least, all made the appropriate encouraging noises for a five year old with her first art project. Hah! The joke was on them.
I popped the crystal into my mouth and began to chew. The tingle of the lighting enchantment was weaker than the commercial type, but it also felt… warmer. I liked it. I guess homemade really did make a difference.
“So, wait,” Lemon Hearts said, watching me enjoy my snack. “Are you learning to be an enchanter or a chef?”
I waited until I’d finished chewing to respond. “Enchanter, but it’s better than that. I can make things that go in my hoard. It’s like… if you could use your horn to grow a better horn!”
The girls all looked up, giving their horns curious looks as they considered that fantasy. All except Moon Dancer. “Wouldn’t a dragon that hoards gold have magic to find more gold, though? Or be able to turn ponies into gold? Stuff like that?”
I blinked. “I—uhh…? Well… they’re still chumps.”
“Uh huh.”
⁂
Spending the day with Moon Dancer and her friends was fun. Sometimes it was nice to just go out, shop, chat and relax. In addition to my light crystal, I’d had five donuts, a milkshake and two bags of pretzels and I still had room to top up on magic at the Sparkle household… if they’d let me. They hadn’t been interested in emptying their reserves into my bottomless gullet yet so far, but Twilight had said they’d consider it now that I was actually allowed to begin experimenting with my magic. I’d tried to see if I could get a hint of what the decision had been from Moon Dancer, but I’d gotten nothing, and before I knew it, she was carrying me home at the end of the day.
To be fair, that wasn’t why I was there. Aside from just having a fun day out, what I was actually interested in was to see if there was any value in hoarding either love or magic.
I just also suspected that they’d be delicious.
The house was quiet in a way that I still couldn’t get used to. It had always been quiet, really, but when I’d been a changeling, there’d just been a sort of… background noise of the hive mind that I’d never really noticed until it was gone. Even though my nymph form hadn’t been able to connect to the hive mind, the accumulation of changeling magic in the house meant that there had always been something.
It was insidious and kind of disturbing if I thought too much about it. I did my best not to.
That said, there was a good reason for the house to feel quiet and empty. With Twilight living at the castle and Shining Armor in the royal guard proper now, the only changelings living here were Moon Dancer, Twilight Velvet and Night Light the Third.
I felt sorry for the adopted changeling, though at least she had the run of the lab. She wasted no time in taking me down the stairs, which were still the dirty, rough lumber they’d been during my stay. It wouldn’t do to give anypony the impression that the basement was under heavy use, so very little on the public side had changed since my short but memorable stay in the house.
The lab, on the other hand, had changed impressively. The three chrysalises that had been built during my time at the house still remained, but almost everything else was different. The cistern that Shining Armor had dug to contain the copious amounts of love that Cadance was all but bursting with had eventually proved insufficient and had been replaced by a circular shaft lined in honeycomb-like cells. The changelings had dug deep, seeking more and more space to store the seemingly infinite resource, and eventually broke into a network of crystal caverns beneath the city. They’d refused to expand on exactly what was going on with that, but if they weren’t using the caverns to smuggle love out to the rest of the hive, then they really weren’t very good changelings.
I was still admiring the rest of the lab and all the various bug science apparatuses I couldn’t identify when Moon Dancer shrugged me off like a pair of saddlebags and went to stand in the corner.
Oh. Right.
The real, changeling Moon Dancer was wearing a lab coat and examining a flask with a reddish-purple slime in it.
“Do you regret it?” the real Moon Dancer asked out of the blue, though I immediately questioned if it really was Moon Dancer or if it was the hive mind again. “It’s been five years. Where is the help that you promised? Solutions from another point of view, you said. Twilight Sparkle struggles tirelessly while you fetch books and make light crystals.”
The fire inside of me rose up until I could feel it in my throat and on my cheeks. “Yeah, well buck you too,” I shot back, certain now that it was mostly the hive mind that I was talking to. “You knew better than I did that this wasn’t going to be a quick solution.”
The changeling that was at least some percentage Moon Dancer gave me a long, flat look, then scoffed, placing the flask of slime back on the shelf before grabbing another one. “You didn’t answer,” she said, and somehow it sounded infinitely less ominous and hostile. “Do you regret it?”
As quickly as it had come, the fire in me guttered out. “…I think about it,” was all I was willing to admit right off the bat. “It definitely would have been the easier thing to do.”
“Easy isn’t always bad,” Moon Dancer observed, continuing to give most of her attention to whatever it was she was working on. “It’s easier to write with a pen than a stick.”
“Yeah, and the best tool for the job is still a tool,” I countered. “Some ponies can live with that. I don’t think I could. I wouldn’t have been able to trust the hive mind, even with the ability to shut it off. That’s no way to changeling.”
Moon Dancer paused what she was doing. “The hive mind would like to vehemently insist that changeling is not a verb.”
“It’s not a verb yet,” I corrected.
“If you wanted to make it one, you should have remained a changeling.”
“You know,” I said, aiming to get the subject back on track. “Light crystals weren’t my first choice. Enchanting is a pretty good broad-spectrum field of magic, but if you really want my help with things, there’s a more obvious solution.”
“You think you can twist your dragon magic to do what changelings do?"
“I think I’m a dragon and that means I can damn well do anything I want.”
Moon Dancer considered that for a moment. “That might be, but how do you plan on actually accomplishing that?”
“That… is a good point, actually,” I was forced to admit.
Seconds ago, I posted a one-shot titled The Dragon is in the Details. If you enjoy my writing, give it a shot.
A Sparkle-ling Perfection is funded on Patreon, where you can find up-to-date progress bars for all my fics—but all views, comments and upvotes are appreciated too.
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My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
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I had intended for this to be a two-chapter update, but my final editing pass turned out to be more productive than I expected. The good news is that I was able to add a good 800 or so words in the editing pass and clean a lot of stuff up, but the bad news is that doing so didn't leave me enough time to edit the next chapter. Expect the next one sometime in the next couple of days.
Well, I for one can't wait for the next chapter.
Gotta admit, I'd be a little peeved over being killed with silverware too. At least it was still a knife and not something truly humiliating like a spoon...
10003674
being killed with a oven pan would be pretty embarrassing.
I can imagine she saying that with the exact same amount of vitriol three thousand years into the future.
Now I'm divided between Sunset getting that channeling magic research up and running and the truth and conciliation with Celestia happening sooner rather than later. Those two really need a heart to heart
I'm sure this will never become relevant at all...
Hm; I wonder when she got the translation?
Ah, and timeskipping, it looks like!
"well, they Twilight’s and they wouldn’t"
Missing word(s)?
"She wasted no time in taking me down there, which were still the dirty, rough lumber they’d been during my stay."
...Something seems to have gone wrong between the first and second parts of that sentence? Maybe "down there" was meant to be "down the stairs"? Hm, though that would have some repetition with... let's see...
"at least she had the run of the lab downstairs. She wasted no time in taking me down there, which were still the"
"at least she had the run of the lab. She wasted no time in taking me down the stairs, which were still the"?
(Thought I'm not sure if the stairs were that; my memory's not currently clear one way or the other.)
"the blue, though immediately question if it really was Moon Dancer or if it was the hive mind again"
...Not sure what was meant to be going on there. "immediately I questioned if"?
And another good chapter! :)
Maybe I'm just daft, but I'm really not certain what exactly they're talking about here. Transforming? Eating love? Forming hive minds...? Probably not that one.
10005489
Changeling biological magic-science in general, I think. You know the engineering stuff to make more magical changelings that Twilight is working on.
Canon Spike hoards gems and he has teleportation magic and can’t track gems without Rarity.
10004542
at some point someone's gotta drop the shoe and reach out, though maybe after the nightmare moon or something. I'm not entirely sure they'd have a canterlot invasion in this setting
Whelps, in my experience.
"Well, the sun hasn't been blotted out by a dragon the size lf the moon, so either it doesn't work that way or other dragons are chumps who never thought of that."
Reasonable time skip... though Sunset standing in for Twilight's usual assistant seems to have made her even grumpier. Not surprising, but the hivemind seems to have locked her in a vicious cycle of futility, denying her the resources she'd need to get the best results on the basis that she hasn't yet achieved those results. Of course, that's based on Sunset's perspective. Getting a look behind Twilight's eyes at this stage of her life should be very illuminating indeed.