The Ten Million Year Hello

by Bandy

Chapter Six

The shell of the atmosphere embraced him as he flew back down to earth.

On a whim, he tapped the barrier to see if he could fly back out into space. The shell made a thunk sound like heavy plated glass. Good thing he hadn’t tested that at full-speed.

The adrenaline from the fight melted away over the next half hour. He glided over the fiery blip of the Crystal Empire, past the wastelands, all the way down to Equestria with its multitude of new kingdoms, finally landing in the one place pony urbanization hadn’t touched in the past nine hundred years: the Everfree Forest.

There, beneath a rocky overhang at the bottom of an ancient gorge, with only stoic songbirds and buzzing insects for company, Spike laid out the three spellbooks. Anticipation made his stomach clench. Nervous puffs of smoke drifted up from his nostrils. This was it. One by one, he cracked open the plaster seals protecting the books.

Almost immediately, he realized something was wrong. The weight of the plaster concealed an odd hollow quality to the books. The bindings were genuine, but when he tried to run a finger through the pages he realized they weren’t books at all, but boxes made to look like books.

Inside each one of them was a note and a glass vial filled with clear liquid. The first, from Flurry Heart, said:

THE REAL TRANSFORMATION WAS THE JOURNEY YOU MADE

jk lol. mix all three vials together and drink it. Don’t spill any, unless you want a ten-foot pancreas in an eight-foot body.

I’ve included a list of all the good dragon-friendly restaurants in CE. If any of them are still around, pay them a visit. If I’m still around, pay me a visit too. Love you lots

flurry

The second, Starlight’s, included a bag of powderized empathy cocoa in a magically-sealed bag. Her message read:

Spike,

It was an honor being your godmother. I infer from your reading this that you still value your connection to pony society. No matter what else you’ve heard, hold onto that attachment. Feelings of dissociation and isolation trend upwards in dragons as they age. You’re no normal dragon, but it’s still completely feasible to fall prey to these feelings over time. Ponies privy to the existence of this serum have had lively debates on the ethics of freezing a dragon’s age in order to allow them to participate in “small-creature society.” No doubt you’ll catch some flak from the powers that be once you go through with this.

Screw them.

~ SG

Spike opened the final false book, expecting something long-winded and erudite from Twilight.

There was no letter. Just the third vial and her old Mister Smartypants doll.

---

The anxiety got worse. He set the vials next to each other and stared at them until he lost the light. The phrase, ten-foot pancreas in an eight-foot body danced around his mind in circles.

This was not how things were supposed to go. There was supposed to be a spell, something replicable. He was going to find Banshee and cast it on her--after he’d cast it on himself.

He looked up at the moon. Was she still up there? The thought of dragonfire dripping over the dust-frosted surface of the moon, turning it to glass, the loneliness, the lack of air, the stifling void all around, the pain of unending mortal injury--

He sucked in a breath. His ears were ringing. For a split second he thought he saw something on the moon, a spot of orange that flickered and went out. It had to be his imagination, though. Had to be.

Spike stared at the vials a little while longer. Then he gathered them up and placed them, along with the letters, into his underwing bag, and stepped out from beneath the overhang. He cupped his hands together and blew dragonfire into them. Keeping the flame alive in one hand, he spun his index finger around in the flames until they condensed around his claw. Then he drew a straight line in the air. The flames lingered, floating in the air.

He set to work drawing a spell rune, a series of concentric interlocking circles and right angles enclosed within a larger outer ring. When he finished drawing, he leaned in and blew a soft kiss of dragonfire into the very center of the rune.

The whole thing flared up in a rush of heat and light. A long, ghostly tendril of magic flew upwards into the sky and disappeared among the stars.

A moment later, the whole sky exploded with dragonfire. Tall columns of green flame shot into the sky like aurora borealis. The flames went higher and higher, until they licked the barrier between earth and space, heating it until it glowed. Noonday shadows danced across the slumbering hills.

Spike didn’t stop to watch. He took off for a deserted hill outside Ponyville, where the grass was short and the view was wide. The arc of light thrown off by the city lights reflected in the low clouds above. The insects were back, singing over the low thrum of distant autocarriages.

There, Spike mixed the three vials together and waited.

---

Long after the dazzling dragonfire display had faded, Spike noticed a mote of light flickering in the otherwise motionless sky. The flicker grew brighter and more defined, until it seperated into a column of fire surrounding a dot, and the dot grew larger until it became a tiny dragon, and the tiny dragon drew closer, and the faint far-off whoosh wasn’t actually just the wind in his ears, but a drawn out, full-belly roar.

Without slowing down at all, Banshee lowered her shoulder and plowed into Spike, knocking him backwards across the field. Molten rock and soil sprayed everywhere. Every blade of grass ignited simultaneously, leaving the two dragons at opposite ends of a fiery wasteland. The bright lights of the Ponyville skyscrapers disappeared behind a curtain of choking smoke.

“Remember me?” Banshee sneered.

Spike said in a calm voice, “I remember you.”

Her eyes narrowed, fixating on his neck. She dug in her heels. Her tail flicked from side to side, equal parts counterweight and blunt force weapon.

Ever so slowly, Spike reached under his wing.

Banshee pounced. Spike waited, still as stone, until she was just a few lengths away before backhand chucking the vial of serum at her chest.

The vial shattered on contact. The liquid inside sublimated into a cloud of choking grey smoke. Banshee stumbled in surprise, but her momentum was too great, and she went careening into Spike at full speed.

The cloud of smoke consumed them both.

---

A moment passed.

---

The smoke cleared. Dawn broke through. A soft, soothing breeze put the fires to rest. The heat seeped out of the soil. It was a cool morning.

Spike found himself on his back. Banshee lay on top of him, coughing out the last of the smoke, clearing her watery eyes.

She looked down. Her eyes met Spike’s. She let out a little, “Oh,” and leapt off him. As she moved, her chainmail shattered into a hundred pieces and fell to the ground.

Banshee let out a cry of alarm and clutched her chest. Her alarm turned to confusion as she clutched a patch of newly-formed scales where her wounds had once been.

Her knees started to tremble. She opened her mouth, but no words came out. She clutched the remnants of her chainmail in her fists.

“I wore that for three hundred years.” Her voice was flat, but her eyes brimmed with tears. “I. I need it.” She clutched it to her chest. “I need it back.”

Spike nodded and started to collect the pieces around him. She hissed and tried to swipe them from his hands only to tumble sideways to the ground. The pieces she’d already collected went flying.

She didn’t stop Spike from helping after that.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” she said as she combed through the dirt.

Spike shrugged. “You were in pain.”

“Yeah, but what about you?”

“If I gave up on someone who really needed help, then what kind of pony am I?” The words held an odd note of bitterness to them. He glanced at the glittering glass of the Ponyville skyline as the realization of his own actions dawned on him. What he’d lost in that puff of smoke.

The stack of shattered chainmail grew steadily, until they had a pile almost knee-high stacked up in the grass. As the search wound down, Banshee said, “I haven’t been completely honest. About who I am.”

“I know.”

She froze for a second, then continued searching. “Then what’s my name?”

“Banshee.”

“My real name.”

“Your real name is what you say it is.”

“That’s not--” she groaned. “You know what I mean.”

“A lot can change in three hundred years. Why not a name?”

She mulled over his answer for a few minutes before replying, “I gave myself that name when I first put on this chainmail. I thought, if things had really changed that much, then why not change everything? Clean slate. I think...” She and Spike both reached for the same piece of chainmail. Their hands touched. They drew away, unable to meet the others’ eyes. “Can you call me by my old name again?”

Spike smiled. “Sure thing, Smolder. Can you do something for me too?”

She nodded.

“Keep me company when I can’t move anymore.”

Smolder threw her arms around Spike. “We don’t have to wait that long.”

Comments

[Odd_Sarge]

Great imagery and prose throughout. I'm especially big on how unique your approach to fleshing out the world came out; chapter 2 was very well-done in that regard, as it captured the concept beautifully. The characterization of the pair was pretty stock solid overall, but it did feel a bit rushed here at the end: a little bit more time (yes, I see the irony) for talk, and that ending would feel a lot stronger.

[The Guy Who Writes]

This was well-written, far better than your run-of-the-mill fanfiction in terms of storytelling and skill with the English language. Which means that I finally have the privilege to remark on the content of a story.

That said, the plot was a bit of a MacGuffin fest, and the "A story about coming to terms with yourself" part in the description completely gives away the ending. As for the moral of the story, I didn't like it. At all. As a transhumanist, I do not approve of simply accepting that which can be improved/fixed/changed by advancement.

Ponies privy to the existence of this serum have had lively debates on the ethics of freezing a dragon’s age in order to allow them to participate in “small-creature society.” No doubt you’ll catch some flak from the powers that be once you go through with this.

Screw them.

I am one-hundred percent with Starlight on this one. Screw condescending, affluent idiots telling others from their lofty perches to accept crappy fates. Which means, in the context of this story, screw Celestia and that big dragon in the cave. Defeatists, the both of them.