Chapter 1
I was sauntering through the marketplace, humming a tune I was working on to myself. Just a little bit of classical AA AB AC BC BACCX. Although I couldn’t really hum the X. “BLART!” I said out loud, trying to simulate the sound I was going for, but that was all wrong. “Blarrrrrrrrrt. Blaaaaaaaaaaaart.”
Of course the ponies were all giving me strange looks, but that’s all part of the master plan. I’m an artist, so I need people to know my name and think of me, and if they think of me as ‘that crazy pony that wanders around the marketplace going ‘Blart’’ then when they hear the final song and realize ‘Oh! That’s what she was going for!’ they’ll know who wrote it, even if someone else stole it.
“Blart?” I said to Rose, as I walked past her stall. She gave me that smile of hers, you know the one – that look that says ‘I’m tolerating your horrible behavior because I need to maintain a professional atmosphere, and besides, yelling at you would be stepping on Bonnie’s hooves’. I’m sure you don’t know the one, because she only gives it to me. Unless you’ve watched me visiting her stall, then you’ve probably seen it a lot. Also, you’re a creepy stalker.
“Or would it work better with more of a hiss, do you think? Blassrrrrr –“ I coughed, as something went down my throat the wrong way. I waved a hoof to let ponies know that I was okay, and not choking to death, then fell over twitching because I was totally choking to death on my own saliva. I guess that would be a unique way to die, which is also important for an artist to be remembered, but I was really hoping to put off the ‘unique way to die’ until next Twosday, at least.
“Lyra! I’ll save you!” cried a familiar voice, and then Spike was slamming his curled claws into my back. I’m not sure if it was really helping, but it did attract a crowd to watch me wriggle around in the dirt while Spike whaled on me.
Anyway, I didn’t die. I don’t know if it was Spike’s help or just that I finally managed to cough the stuff out, but eventually I managed to get my breath back, and I was going to tell Spike to stop hitting me, but it actually felt kind of nice. He’s a lot stronger than he used to be, now that he’s grown into a drake, but he’s still a lot weaker than a pony. Well, than an earth pony. When Bonnie hits me like that, it’s actually kind of painful, which is the point because she usually hits me when she wants me to stop doing something, although I guess if I was choking to death in front of her she’d probably try to save me.
Probably. Our relationship is a little complicated.
So, everyone was watching while I lay there gasping, with Spike pounding me over and over and over, and then I started to moan because it felt really, really good. “Thank you Spike,” I said, drooling a little into the dirt. “You’re really my hero, you know that?”
“Are you okay?” he asked, leaning down over me and putting his giant goofy face right up to mine.
I nuzzled him. “I’m fine. And actually I was kind of looking for you. I wanted to talk to you about something.”
“Oh?” he asked, sitting down as I sat up, and tilting his head slightly. “If it’s about last week –“
I looked around at the crowd of ponies staring at us. Some of them were wandering away, because I obviously wasn’t going to actually die, but some of the more gossipy ponies – like Rose – were watching us closely to see where this was all going. “I think we should talk in private,” I said. “Back at the library?”
===
Dragons give the most wonderful backrubs – those little claws of theirs are like being brushed with a mane-brush all over your body, only it’s not a stiff, unloving brush, it’s the animated claw of a living, breathing dragon, who takes as much delight in seeing you moan and melt under his claws as you do being reduced to a shivering puddle of pony.
You really need to try it sometime.
Anyway, I was lying on the couch drooling and incoherent from one of his famous back-rubs, when Spike asked me why I’d come over to see him. Which, really, was a question that answered itself, but I did have another reason than the normal make-out sessions.
Back-rub. I meant back-rub sessions.
“Well… you’ve heard the stories that are going around town about us, right?” I asked. I know it sounds like a rhetorical question, but Spike spends a lot of time indoors by himself, or with Twilight, who also spends a lot of time indoors. They both know Rarity, though, so they’re usually not that out of the loop. On the other hoof, sometimes Rarity remembers that telling stories about her friends or their pets to the friends and pets in question is a faux pass, so you can’t ever be sure.
“The ones about us being special someponies, or the one where I lured you down into the basement and ate you?” Spike asked, snorting out a quick puff of flame.
“Right! That one,” I said. “Although it was Twilight who lured me down into the basement. Was Rose telling people that you lured me down into the basement?”
Spike laughed. “Really, Lyra, I don’t know where ponies get these ideas –“ which kind of shocked me, since I thought everyone knew that I was the one spreading rumors about myself. It’s not that I’m a sad, lonely pony who’s desperate for attention. I’m a performer! A sad, lonely performer who’s desperate for attention.
Except for the sad part, now that I think about it. It’s hard to remember the last time when I wasn’t happy, at least in a general ‘this is my mood’ sense since I do sometimes get frustrated or bored. And ‘lonely’ doesn’t really describe me either, since I’ve got Bonnie back home, and Spike about town, and Rose and Minnie and Berry and Cherry and of course there’s always Pinkie Pie.
Anyway…
“Maybe we should fight fire with fire,” I said to him, lifting a hoof and kneading his chest. He’s scaly and warm, and it’s a really interesting combination, and I love the way the edge of my hooves catch on his scales as I rub them across his skin. I don’t just like him for his claws! Pretty much every part of him is just so different from a stallion. It’s fascinating. So I let myself be fascinated with his scales, and rested my chin on his shoulder, and said, “I think I’m finally ready to take the next step.”
“Lyra, I’m not going to eat you,” Spike said. “I like you. I don’t want you to die.”
And he’s smart, too! I used a cheesy stock phrase that implied I wanted to have sex with him, right after flirting with him, and he managed to keep track of the flow of the conversation and realize what I was actually talking about. Maybe more ponies should grow up as assistants to neurotic unicorn scholars? It’s something to try.
“No! It’s okay!” I said, fumbling about in my bag for the little wrapped candy Bon Bon made for me. “Look! I have this!” I snatched it back as Spike’s tongue snaked out for it. “No no no, I have to eat it, silly. It turns ponies into taffy!”
Spike raised one of… well, he doesn’t really have eyebrows, but he has these little folds in his scales where eyebrows would be, and they kind of look like eyebrows if you’re not looking very closely. I guess we can call them eyebrows. “How does that help?”
“Well, it means you can gnaw off a leg or even claw up my belly and it won’t hurt too badly,” I said, bouncing the candy on my hoof. “The active ingredient is marshmellow, with the ‘mellow’ hallucination rotated into the physical axis using worrywart and moonshadow, and then stretched into a taffy shape with this really weird bit of equipment that I don’t actually know how it works. The important bit is the shadow, though.”
“Oh,” Spike said, frowning a bit and scratching his chin. With his claws. I bet it works a hundred times better than scratching your chin with a hoof. “It’s a shadow transmutation? So since I’d only be eating the quasi-matter, it wouldn’t carry over after the spell wore off?”
I nodded eagerly. “My real body’s stored off in concept space, so I just pop back into existence completely unharmed.”
“Inside my stomach?” Spike asked, frowning.
“Well… you probably shouldn’t eat all of me,” I said, squirming a bit at the thought. But no, popping back into my normal vulnerable fleshy form inside of a dragon would be a terrible idea. Interesting, but probably ultimately fatal, especially since the duration on the candy was a bit of a mystery since it was a prototype. Maybe if Spike knew exactly when to induce vomiting, I could hold my breath long enough –
Okay, even I think that’s getting pretty gross. And anyway, it didn’t matter, because it turns out Spike didn’t want to do it.
“I think I’ll pass,” he said, gnawing on his tail as if he was nervous about something.
“Pleeeease?” That usually works on Spike. Honest. Try it sometime.
It didn’t work this time, though. “Sorry, Lyra, but, um,” Spike looked around for Twilight – not a bad option, since she’d definitely put a stop to this if she found out about it – but she was busy up in her room. Like always. “I don’t like taffy!”
I laughed. “Okay, fine. I’ll tell Bon Bon to make it turn me into something else for the next batch.” Spike still looked awfully nervous, so I put the candy back in my bag and hugged him. “Don’t worry, you’re still my favorite dragon.”
“I’m sorry I can’t help you with your, um, your thing,” he said. “But it’s just an ancient hatred. Dragons and taffy. You wouldn’t understand. You can forgive me though, right?”
I gave him a really obviously fake stern look. “Give me another back-rub, and maybe I’ll forgive you.”
===
Of course I’d already forgiven him, and I made sure not mention it at all for the rest of the afternoon, since I didn’t want him to get all flustered and apologetic. It’s cute, in a way, but that way is ‘he’s kind of still a baby’ and that’s a really creepy way to be thinking about him especially given all the rumors I’ve been spreading about us.
I can’t say I wasn’t disappointed without lying, though, and you know how much I hate being a liar. Do you know what it’s like to have a fantasy dangled tantalizingly just beyond your reach, where you can grab hold of it if only you’re willing to jump off a hundred foot cliff and fall to your certain near-fatal wounding? It’s like being a fish, cold and slimy in the depths of a weedy lake, sinking into the mire to avoid the cruel paws of the otters and minks. I’d thought that maybe… maybe with Bonnie’s help, I’d finally found a way where I could give in to my darkest desires without dying, or traumatizing any adolescent dragons, and then I wouldn’t have to feel so slimy about it.
You’d better believe that after Spike turned me down, I was playing minor-keyed dirges and false cadences all the way to Fluttershy’s little cottage on the edge of the Everfree. Aside from Spike, the clawed and fanged creatures that might be convinced to help me were pretty much all under her control. Sure, there were pet cats and dogs, but cats are too aloof and dogs are way, way too slobbery. I was going to ask her to get me in touch with Hairy the Bear, who’s pretty attractive as vicious animals go, and also has a huge sweet tooth.
But as I came close to Fluttershy’s house, a small white rabbit darted out from a bush and tugged urgently on my hoof, so I followed him down a garden path to a hidden lair under a tree, where Fluttershy was hiding out with all her animal friends.
“Lyra? What are you doing here?” she asked. “Didn’t you hear about the dragons?”
“Dragons?” I said, grinning eagerly. “Where?” At the mention of my most favorite of vicious creatures, I forgot all about Hairy, even though he was sitting right there clutching a teacup in his giant paws.
“They could be anywhere!” Fluttershy squeaked. Seriously, it was barely audible. “They – they went to Zecora’s hut, and…”
“What? They ate Zecora?!” I said, my butt flopping to the ground, shocked. As much as I like to flirt with death, I’m not really a big fan of dying, and especially not of other ponies dying. Or even zebras! Plus, Zecora was the one who’d gathered the marshmellow and worrywart for Bonnie, so if she was gone…
“They zebranapped her!” Fluttershy said. “They broke into her hut and broke all her potions and carried her off, and then they came to my house and told me that I had to bring them a dozen rabbits to trade for her, or they’d… or they’d hurt her really really badly!”
“Oh, thank Celestia,” I said. “Do you want me to take the bunnies to them, then? I know you’re really scared of dragons. Ow!” That last was thanks to Angel, who was kicking me in the ankle. All the other animals were staring at me with expressions that I can’t read because I’m not some sort of animal expert, but I could read Fluttershy’s, and her look said that I was a horrible monster. I actually get that one a lot from her. She’s pretty easy to horrify.
“So… rescue mission then,” I said, grinning as if the previous comment had been a joke. “We all go out to their cave or whatever, and beat them up so they know not to mess with Ponyville.”
She didn’t say anything out loud, but curling up in a quivering ball with her wings wrapped around her was a fairly strong indicator that she didn’t like that plan either.
“Okay, okay, I’ve got this,” I said. “I’ll sneak over there like a ninja, and spring Zecora before they know I’m there.”
She looked up at me, “Um… but you’re not very sneaky, Lyra.”
She had me there. I’m really not. Even if I manage to pack my lyre away well enough that I don’t unpack it and start playing without thinking, whistling to yourself tends to give you away. “Wait – you’re really good at being quiet, Fluttershy! Why don’t you sneak in and free Zecora?”
“I can’t,” she said, her voice cracking as she covered her face. “If I even see a dragon I just freeze up and I’m useless and Zecora is going to die because I’m scared of dragons!”
“Be really badly hurt,” I said. She looked at me, confused. “You said ‘die’, but the euphemism we’re using in this conversation is ‘be really badly hurt’. Consistency is important, otherwise what’s even the point of using euphamisms in the first place?”
There’s also the fate-weaving enchantment Celestia put over the whole nation of Equestria that keeps ponies from actually dying from anything other than their pre-destined end, but I didn’t want to get into that because it’s not widely known. I only knew about it because of the ridiculous circumstances that kept me from being killed after Cadance tricked me and the other bridesmaids into jumping off a hundred-foot cliff. Besides, being eaten by dragons as a lesson to Fluttershy about being a coward might actually be Zecora’s destiny. It’s a bit callous, but sometimes ponies really do only exist to be an object lesson for others.
Also, I’m not entirely sure the enchantment works inside the Everfree Forest.
“How about this then,” I said, remembering the magic candy. “I have a magic item that’ll keep me from being really badly hurt if the dragons catch me, so I can go and distract them and draw them off, and then after they’re gone, you can sneak in and free Zecora.”
Fluttershy hesitantly agreed to that, and so with her songbirds fanning out to make sure that we didn’t get ambushed before we were ready, we set off into the forest to approach the dragon lair. Apparently, ‘they could be anywhere’ was referring to them wandering around waiting to ambush innocent pegasi, and they’d told her where their lair was, or at least where they wanted her to bring the bunnies.
I was really scared. This was way more heroic than anything I’d ever tried, and it was even set up so that I could get horribly killed and the mission would still succeed – a heroic death like that was just the sort of thing that destiny likes to put at the abrupt end of a young pony’s life. And while dying young is usually good for an artist’s career, I really hadn’t gotten enough of my songs out there to take advantage of it. Plus, Bon Bon would be furious, and I wouldn’t be there to take the brunt of her anger.
I tried to cheer myself up with a song, but I couldn’t think of a single note. The only thing that kept me putting one hoof in front of the other was the sheer awkwardness of talking Fluttershy into this plan, and then chickening out myself. If I got a reputation for being more of a scaredy cat than Fluttershy… wow. That would suck almost as much as being dead. Adding that to the considerable chance that, with Bonnie’s candy, I could actually survive, kept me just this side of calling the whole thing off.
And then we were there. The cave was tiny, because (as Fluttershy explained on the way) the dragons were actually drakes – a little older than Spike, but still the same general bipedal shape. Unlike Spike, these drakes had wings, but the forest canopy would keep that from being much of an advantage in a chase. And ponies are good runners – especially earth ponies. Applejack would be able to lead these dragons on a wild goose chase all day long.
Unicorns, though, not so much. Especially unicorns who spend most of their time sitting in the marketplace working out songs in their head. There was basically no chance I was going to be able to outrun them. But that was okay, because I had the candy. I lit my horn and levitated it out of my saddlebag, slowly twisting it in my magic to unwrap it. It was swirled taffy, a creamy orange color and a pale mint a lot like my fur, twisted around into a spiral shape.
“Ready?” I said softly.
Fluttershy nodded.
“Be quick. I don’t know how long I can keep them distracted,” I said. Then I popped the candy into my mouth, and let it rest on my tongue. It tasted sweet, but not sweet like sugar – it was rotated 90 degrees in an impossible direction, which meant that it tasted sweet like the innocent unconditional love that a child has for her mother, swirled with the slightly sour bitterness of forgiveness for an unforgivable act.
I bit down on it and chewed. With each bite, the physical force from my teeth pressing into the gooey structure of the candy was twisted off-axis and fed back to me, and I felt my whole body slip sideways, without moving. It was dizzying, so I closed my eyes and focused on eating. But the taffy wasn’t dissolving, it felt like it was getting bigger and bigger inside my mouth, and a weird fuzzy feeling spread down my muzzle, over my face, down my neck – you get the picture. When it reached the tips of my hooves – and I felt it reach the tip of my tail, which was not something I could usually feel at all – I suddenly noticed that my mouth was empty.
Also, I was made out of taffy, and the leaves and sticks I was standing on were sinking into my hooves. I lifted one of them experimentally, and my leg reacted like I’d expect, but there was none of the usual feeling of jointed bones sliding smoothly, or muscles pulling against them. It was more like bending a pipe cleaner. My tail was worse – it was sort of frozen in place, stiff, and I could barely wiggle it at all. “Huh.”
Fluttershy was staring at me, shocked, so I held a hoof out to her. “Bite me.” She blinked, and didn’t bite, so I explained. “I want to know how much it hurts, or else I’ll build it up in my mind when the dragons are chasing me and I’ll totally panic and ruin everything, so please just bite me now so that I can get it over with, okay?”
She leaned forwards and set her teeth against my skin, which felt pretty much like anypony setting their teeth against my skin. I smiled and nodded, and she bit down. I gasped – it did hurt, curse it all. She picked up on that and let go right away, and I smoothed out the bite marks until it looked more or less like an unbitten hoof. I took notice of the depth of the bite marks, however. She’d bitten down pretty hard, and well… it hadn’t hurt as much as it would have, if it’d been a real hoof. Or even a real fleshy part of the body that somepony could actually sink their teeth into.
“You turned yourself into candy?” Fluttershy said, impossibly softly – softly enough that my quiet voice sounded like Princess Luna. “Won’t that just make them want to eat you more, if they catch you?” She licked the taste off her lips.
“Nah,” I said, ruffling her mane. “I have it on good authority that dragons hate taffy.”
Then we spent the next couple minutes getting her mane unstuck from my taffy hoof, but it was the giggly kind of awkward, even if we didn’t dare actually giggle. There were smiles involved! It was a good note to go out on.
Set out on, I mean. A good note to set out on a dangerous but definitely not suicidal task.
===
I couldn’t help trying to be quiet as I snuck into the dragon’s cave. See, on the way from the bushes where Fluttershy was hiding, to the cave entrance thirty feet away, I’d come up with an alternate plan. The dragons would be asleep, because that’s what dragons do, and I’d just sneak past them and free Zecora myself.
That notion lasted for about five seconds, then my eyes adjusted to the dimness and I saw that all three of the drakes were awake and watching me. The Con Mane soundtrack that I’d been whistling trailed off as I froze, staring back at them.
One of them was bright red with a yellow frill, and looked a lot like a lankier spike with a huge, fangy overbite. Another was purple with what almost looked like a blonde pony mane cut with bangs hanging over his face. The third was fat and brown, with a lumpy club-thing on the end of his tail instead of the normal spade. All three of them were lounging around a small pile of gold and gems – their hoard, I guess. As I stood there staring, the fat one reached back and scratched his giant butt with his claws.
It’s so unfair – there I was, staring at three of the sexiest creatures in Equestria, and they were all huge jerks. Why can’t more dragons be like Spike? Or, well, nice like Spike, but not quite as nerdy, although I’d still want them to be smart, and not quite as shy, and most importantly, not carrying a torch for Rarity of all ponies. I mean, if he was in love with Fluttershy I could kind of see it, but Rarity? Really?
“You bring the bunnies?” said the red one. I guess he was the leader.
“Um…” I said, my heart not pounding in my chest because it was shunted off into concept space with the rest of my body. I was still pretty scared, despite the lack of a physical endocrine system. I took a step forwards, and lit up my horn to open my saddlebag as I approached. “Not exactly,” I said. “But I’ve got something better.”
“What’s that?” asked the blonde one, walking towards me casually and craning his neck to try to see into my bag.
“Your hoard!”
I grabbed the biggest gem I could with my magic, and dragged it after me as I turned and ran for the entrance. I got about three steps before I felt a clawed hand close around my tail, but I didn’t stop – and as scared as I was, I barely noticed the sting as my tail stretched out and snapped right off my butt, flinging me towards the entrance like a pellet from a slingshot. I dashed out into the sunlight, stashed the gem in my saddlebag where I was sure the dragons could see, then ran off to the side before they remembered they could breathe fire.
“Get her!” the red one shouted from the cave, and then all three of them were after me.
It wasn’t a very long chase. See, my cunning plan had one fatal flaw – I was made out of taffy. It wasn’t especially noticeable when I was walking at a normal pace, but when I tried to gallop, every time my hoof came down on something it stuck. Before I’d gotten to cover it was like I was running in clown shoes made by some over-eager beaver cobbler, and then I tried to push past some underbrush and got three or four low-hanging branches embedded in my chest and sides for my trouble.
“Gotcha!” said the purple one, and I screamed as his claws dug painfully into my flanks, and threw myself forwards, tearing loose from his grip and the branches, each of them tearing away a piece of me as they were dragged from my sticky substance. The wounds burned as I hobbled deeper into the forest, but all I managed was to get stuck in another bush five feet further along, and this time the dragon tackled me to the ground, straddling me with his warm scaly body and putting a clawed hand to my throat.
The red one walked up and looked down at me, glaring angrily. “Did you really think you’d get away with stealing from a dragon?” he asked. He was still holding my tail.
“Ponies are stupid,” said the fat one. “Can we eat her?”
I thrashed and struggled, but only managed to sort of squish myself out of shape and get even more leaves and dirt stuck to the side that was pressed into the ground.
“Yeah, not even the namby pamby pony princess will care if we take care of a thief,” said the leader. “Take her out.”
The purple one sunk his claws into my neck. I gasped in shock as the needles of pain stabbed through me – during the chase, I hadn’t had time to really pay attention, but held down like this there was nothing to distract me, and this was just too much. When I didn’t stop moving, he dug his claws in deeper all the way to where my esophagus would have been if I was made out of meat, and sort of wiggled them around, shredding everything inside my neck. I squealed, and tried to buck him off, or at least that’s how my body moved. I didn’t really have a lot of control over my actions.
“She’s not dying,” the fat one said.
“There’s no blood or bones or anything,” complained the dragon whose claw was now thoroughly stuck inside me. “It’s just this nasty gooey mess.” He tugged firmly, and out of the corner of my eye I could see the mint green taffy stretching from his fingers to the mess he’d made of my neck. He wiggled them around and it slowly peeled off, drooping along the ground.
It also didn’t hurt anymore – and I noticed that none of the previous wounds hurt anymore either. The gouges the claws and branches had left in my sides and flanks were still there, but it wasn’t really pain, just a sort of stinging sensation that felt kind of like pain but didn’t really hurt. Sort of like if you eat a really hot pepper?
The purple one pinning me down looked up at his friends, and asked, “If we can’t kill her, what are we going to do?”
“Why don’t you eat me?” I said, and my voice sounded normal despite my throat being shredded, which makes sense since it wasn’t being generated by the normal method of vibrating vocal cords and stuff. It was the concept of communication put directly into action. Sort of how ghosts talk, only without the echoey bit since a taffy pony isn’t supposed to be scary. “Oh that’s right, you only eat rocks. And ponies.” I smirked at them.
“Was that a dare?” said the red one.
I frowned. I didn’t like where this was going.
“I think it was a dare,” he said, lifting my tail to his mouth and taking a big bite.
I flinched as the teeth came down, and squirmed as he chewed – even though it wasn’t attached anymore, I could still feel everything, although since it was a tail, that used to be made out of hair, it didn’t hurt as much as the claws had. It actually felt good. “Ahhh!” I said, thrashing a bit and getting a claw roughly pressing my face down into the dirt for my trouble, as the dragon’s teeth and tongue combed through my tail, starting at the tip and working their way down, right to the base. “Oh, Celestia!” I whimpered, as it finally started to sting then, as he worked over the part of my tail that would have had flesh and bones in it if it hadn’t been taffy – and then the chewing gave way to a wet, slippery massage as the pieces of tail slid down his throat…
And all this sensation stopped just short of my nethers, because my tail had been yanked off, and was like five feet away from the rest of me. It was maddening! I pawed at the ground with a free hoof, and moaned.
“You guys have to try this,” he said. “She’s made out of candy!”
“But… dragons hate taffy,” I said softly. My tail fizzed as it dissolved inside the red drake’s belly, and gradually went numb.
The dragons kind of looked at each other, and then they all laughed. “Who told you that?”
===
So then they basically ate me, although I suppose I can go into a little more detail. I mean, it hurt a lot at the time, but even at the time it was also really arousing, and remembering it, when I know that I’m going to live through it, and don’t have to actually re-feel the pain? Yeah, it’s not exactly a painful memory. So I can tell you about it if you want to know more.
Since the red one had already eaten my tail, he claimed my head, too, and just walked over and dug his claws into either side of my neck, right near my shoulders, and just stretched and pulled, gouging them in deeper and deeper and squishing my face against his smooth scaly chest until it was held on by a few threads, which the purple one cut with his claws. By the time the pain had faded to where it was bearable, he was sitting with his back against a tree, my neck resting in his lap as he held me where I could watch the others dividing up my body.
I wiggled a hoof just to see if I could, and watched it wiggle. It was weird.
“So what are you, some kind of candy golem?” he asked, as his friends grabbed my body by its legs and rolled it over onto its back. It looked like they were going to try to divide it in half by just pulling on either end, but of course it wasn’t the huge thick body that stretched out most – instead they just ended up stretching my legs all out of shape. It didn’t even hurt, really – it hurt like stretching before an exercise, not even like over-stretching and straining your muscles. “Some pony decided to send you in to steal our gems, because she thought we wouldn’t eat you?”
“I’m not talking to you,” I said, as I felt the gooey inside of my neck slowly conforming to the countours of the dragon’s thighs and belly. His hands were set on my cheeks, the claws just barely pricking me. For the moment, nothing really hurt that badly, and I was able to feel all satisfied that at least Fluttershy was going to have plenty of time to rescue Zecora before any of them went back to the cave, because they were obviously planning to eat me out here in the forest, and even if dragons didn’t hate taffy, I was a lot of taffy.
“Who was it? I bet it was that purple one,” he said, lifting one of his claws to cup my ear, and then gouging a huge chunk out of the side of my head. I screamed at the splitting headache, and my stretched noodly legs flailed about on my body. “Mmm,” he said, as he started nibbling on my ear. “I love it when you scream.”
I just sort of sat there in his lap panting, trying to ignore the feeling of the breeze flowing over the inside of my head where my brain was supposed to be, and the exquisite caress of his tongue and his teeth on my ear, and the way that the two at my body had given up on my legs, and the big fat one was just about to sink his claws into my belly. I tried to ignore that last part really hard. I think maybe I was thinking that if I didn’t notice it happening, I wouldn’t feel it.
Maybe it would have worked if I’d managed to actually ignore it, but staring at something and focusing on ignoring it is kind of the opposite of actually ignoring it. So when he sunk his claws in, I screamed. It took the two of them a long time to actually claw my body into two roughly equal pieces, and I did nothing but scream the whole time, because there was nothing in my world but pain, and there was nothing in the spell to stop the pain just because I’d felt so much of it. No endorphins, no nerves to stop sending signals because they’d severed my spine, and I couldn’t even die.
But eventually it ended, and that was the worst of it. After that, the dragons were just biting and chewing, and while it still hurt, it was the sort of muted pain that I’d felt when Fluttershy bit down – it didn’t hurt as much as it should have, especially once I started dissolving against their tongues. After a while, I started to enjoy it. And wow did those dragons eat fast. That was probably part of why it didn’t hurt so much – there was some chewing to get the pieces of my body into a swallowable shape, but after that they sort of fed me down their throats as fast as they could shove more of me into their mouths, their throats squeezing and pulsing around what was almost intact bits of taffy. And once I was in their throat, that part didn’t hurt at all – so there was a piece of me that was being chewed, and so much more of me that was being hugged and caressed by warm, slimy muscles… until it fizzed away to nothing inside of them.
“You’re not screaming,” the red one complained. He wasn’t eating as quickly, but he’d finished off my ear. He lifted my head off his lap and turned it so that I could stare him in the eyes. “You didn’t die, did you?”
“Kiss me,” I said, shivering all down my body, or at least the parts of it that were left. My mouth was hanging open, and my tongue lolling out, and I probably would have been drooling if taffy could drool.
And he did. His scaly lips pressed to mine, and his tongue snaked inside my mouth, curling around and licking at the insides, wrestling with my tongue as I squirmed it back against him, until too much of his saliva coated it and it dissolved. But his tongue was just so long, just like Spike’s – it squirmed into the back of my throat, and wiggled its way into the taffy there, a slick wriggling worm burrowing into me, sliding around inside me, hollowing me out behind my eyes… I moaned, and his claws dug into my neck harder, and then his teeth bit down on my muzzle, and he started chewing, crushing my lips and nose and the silly soft representations of what were supposed to be pony teeth, squishing it all into a slimy, squirmy mass inside his mouth, melting me into a soft, sticky goo… my eyes were closed by the time he ate them.
Eventually it ended. Red had eaten my head and neck, and the other two had finished off my body, and the last bits of me were sitting in three slowly fading lumps inside their bellies. I couldn’t see or hear anymore, and all I could feel was a slow gentle dissolution as I faded away to nothing.
===
Lyra let out a breath, and rested her head on her forelegs, as she stretched out on the couch. “Eventually the spell wore off. I worked it out later, and it was about six hours? The dragons were all asleep, and I just sort of poofed back into existence right between the three of them – right on top of their hoard! Apparently, if you get eaten by three dragons, the spell doesn’t pick a piece of you as the spot for your real body to return to, it just takes the center of mass. Lucky for me!
“And yeah, I just ran for it. Didn’t even think to steal their gems this time, not that I had anywhere to put them. I don’t know what they did to my saddlebags, or my lyre – maybe they ate them. But that’s fine, I can buy new ones. I mean, in theory, once I have some money.”
“And Zecora?” Rose asked. “Did she make it?”
Lyra winced. “Ugh, that was the worst part – it turned out the drakes never actually had her. They trashed her hut, but she got away, then they lied to Fluttershy to try to lure her to their cave where they could catch her. Or maybe they actually wanted the bunnies, I don’t know. But yeah, it was all a complete waste of time.”
Rose pouted. “Well. At least nopony was hurt.”
Lyra stared at her for a few seconds, then laughed. “You’re a riot, Rose!”