Dr. Strangehorn; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Elements
“On the left! They’re pushing high!”
A squad of pegasi shot up, chasing the breakaway dragon formation. The lead dragon glanced back, a fifty-foot behemoth of orange and blue momentarily distracted by the pegasi. He dived to meet them, opening his maw to flame at the easy marks — when a hail of light lanced through the air and into his side. The dragon reeled and hung for a moment, but with one wing in tatters and the other skinned to the bone, he soon fell like a rock, trailing smoke, ichor, and impotent roars.
“Great!” shouted Twilight. “Peel off the others before they get too high!”
The lead pegasus dipped his head in a quick acknowledgement before speeding his wing off to bait the other dragons, trying to get them out of formation so the unicorns on the ground could get a clean shot.
The same scene played out all along the battle line, tens of thousands of ponies baiting, distracting, and holding their own against dragons. Most of the time they managed to down the great beasts, hammering through dragonscale and shredding their wings. Even so, the sky was filled with gouts of flame. Not all the fireblasts hit home, but it only took one; a dragon could shrug off even a few well-aimed lances, but hit a pony with dragonfire and it would be lucky to survive, much less carry on the fight.
There might be many dragons, but they were outnumbered ten, twenty, fifty to one. Equestria hadn’t deployed this many pegasi in a hundred years, and for each pegasus there were a dozen unicorns and Earth ponies on the ground, mounting everything from standard unicorn beams to hundred-fifty-mil party howitzers. From here, it almost looked like they were winning.
Twilight knew better.
Ponies fought hard, but at the end of the day there was only so much they could do. The only thing more dangerous than a dragon was an angry dragon; even if they downed every single one, the beasts would rampage on. Once grounded, the dragons could raze the Everfree Forest in a matter of days, burn it until nothing but ash and memory remained.
She had done the math. She always did the math. If the dragons remained airborne, Equestria’s life expectancy was a matter of days. If they were on foot and claw, that figure jumped to two weeks, three at most. Not enough time to regroup and fight back — not by a long shot — but enough to evacuate most of the major population centers and go to ground, for what that was worth. Their supply stockpiles would last through the autumn, but beyond that there were only single digit survival rates —
A deep shout from the war bridge of a nearby airship broke her reverie.
“Twily! If you’re going to do it, do it now!”
Evacuation was Plan B.
“Right!” she shouted back to Shining Armor and the five familiar ponies at his side on the airship. Farther back, a pair of horns broke into a high-pitched alarm, joined by the faint echo of dozens more as the call was picked up by other airships up and down the line, the signal ringing out for miles in each direction.
Almost as one, the entire Equestrian military pulled back. On the ground, unicorns and ponies dove back to the Mareginot line of fortified bunkers; in the air, pegasi broke off their attack runs, heading to the safety of the shielded airships. The moment the ponies disengaged the dragons backed off to their own lines; even in the heat of battle they could sense something afoot.
For a moment, Twilight was struck dumb. She knew there were a lot of dragons. She had seen them, negotiated with them, lived with them, fought them, calculated their growth curves, even seen a few traditional dragon migrations back when things were different.
But she had never seen ten thousand dragons hovering wingtip to wingtip… waiting.
The bigger dragons were in the middle, where they could char their way to a greater slice of glory, with smaller ones filling in wherever they could. Rudimentary organization or not, it was terrifyingly effective: near the center of the formation was a set of truly massive drakes, easily a hundred feet each of scale, muscle, and pain.
The thousands of dragonwings in front of her rippled, parting for what was quite possibly the largest single creature she had ever seen. Two hundred feet and every inch a dragon, his crimson and gold scales strained to hold in the muscles underneath. More to the point, his jaws were open in a snarling grin as the creature shot forward, the glow of dragonfire building at the back of his throat.
Sss-Thss, Hierarch of the Dragons, had come to personally immolate her.
Twilight cleared her throat and found her voice. “Everypony ready?”
“Ready!” came the familiar chorus as the five Bearers ignited their Elements and floated up to her side.
Twilight flung her wings up, gathering the power of the Elements behind her. Molding the light into a shield for herself and the others was the work of a moment; extending the barrier for a few miles in each direction took only a few seconds more. She vaguely felt the flickering of fireblasts against the radiant energy, but it held.
Of course it held. These were the Elements, holding raw power almost without measure. Power or not, it still took some time to gather their energy and fold it into the proper shape with which to restore harmony, no matter the cost.
The seconds ticked by as Twilight took more and more strength into herself. Her eyes were closed but it didn’t matter; she could feel the shield just fine, along with everything beyond it. The dragons, marginally aware that something bad was about to happen, were doing their best to break down the barrier, but they might as well have been trying to boil the ocean.
The shield wasn’t going anywhere. Neither was Twilight — and nor were any of her ponies. This was their land, and they would defend it, restoring harmony by whatever means necessary.
Raw power coursed through her veins as Twilight built up her power, holding the massive force at bay for just a few seconds more. That portion of her consciousness still connected to the air high above Equestria realized that things were changing, but more slowly than they should be. She eased off the magic a bit, but the Elements kept going, charging her far beyond her own tolerances; she could feel the charge slipping away, slipping beyond—
Twilight blinked.
It was quiet here. That was the first thing she noticed. All of the dragons were right there in front of her, the ponies behind, and the ground far below, but still somehow it was utterly silent.
Ah. None of them were moving. That explained it.
On closer inspection, nothing was moving. Except for her, and even then she didn’t feel quite… normal. Of course. The excess energy would have bled off into time itself, stopping it. Or hyperaccelerating her? Two sides of the same coin… though she should really do more research into the matter. She made a mental note to look into that later, when she could curl up in the restricted section of the library without having to worry about the fate of Equestria for once.
Twilight could still feel the awesome power of the Elements, but it was muted somewhat, held back. She felt not unlike the filly who plugged a hole in a dam with her hoof; if she stayed exactly where she was, everything would be fine, but the moment she moved….
Except this wasn’t a lakefull of potential energy. These were the Elements of Harmony, powerful enough to reshape worlds. Orders of magnitude stronger, but also warmer, friendlier. She had gotten to know them — insofar as it was possible to know a set of gemstones or the awesome powers beyond — over the past forty years, and they were old friends to her now. Some days, she imagined that the Elements were combining again, returning to their state of nature. They had spent a thousand years vested in the Princess, splitting only for a young filly who almost didn’t know better. And now they were coming back together, coming back… to her.
But calling the Elements old friends was giving short shrift to the Bearers behind her, the other five ponies who had been with her from the start, in one way or another. Once, a long time ago, she had tried to use a substitute Bearer, deputizing Spike while Rainbow was gone. It failed, miserably, but she always suspected it wasn’t because there was something special about the particular pony. The Elements worked on will; they didn’t care whose will it was. There was no way the Elements could be bound to their original Bearers: ponies died, and the Elements didn’t. Besides, after Rainbow’s accident, Scootaloo had stepped up just fine.
After that, the substitutions didn’t take long to come. Rarity had too much to do in Canterlot, and Sweetie Belle was a blood relation. Applejack didn’t get much time away from the farm after Agnes passed, and Apple Bloom’s zap apple cutie mark did look an awful lot like a burst of magic.
Fluttershy was still there, at least in body if nothing else; take her out of battle and she was a husk. She still cared enough to power the Elements, though. She cared too much, and that had been her downfall: over her lifetime she had seen hundreds, thousands of animals die in every way imaginable — and she took every one like the loss of a foal. Hers was a big heart, but she couldn’t save them all. Her remaining kindness was enough for the Elements, and that was all that mattered.
Rounding out the quintet was of course Pinkie, sixty years old and bubbly as ever.
Twilight herself, on the other hoof… well, technically she was also sixty-something. Didn’t feel a day over twenty-five, though, and certainly didn’t look it. It was becoming increasingly clear that Twilight would outlive the rest of the original Bearers. And when that happened, she would simply reabsorb the Elements. They had taught Twilight the lessons she needed, fulfilled their purpose, and would simply move back to their unitary state.
It was the way of things: the Elements sought unity, just like dragons sought war and death.
Off in the distance, behind the wall of draconic rage, she could see the crater of Appleloosa, curls of smoke frozen like blood through ice. How many times had the city been razed? How much of the countryside’s fertility was not due to fantastic soil or a temperate climate but to the blood and ashes of the previous generation?
The dragons were a threat; they always had been and always would be. She hadn’t believed Celestia at the beginning, but years of research and statistical modeling only confirmed the Princess’ conclusion. Twilight had dug through every library in the land and flown halfway around the globe, interviewing Everfree veterans from as far away as Stalliongrad. And every one of them said the same thing: as long as there were dragons, there would be danger.
The Skirmishes were one thing, but now they had gone too far. The drakes had finally gotten together and tried to break Equestria, burn it off the map. They weren’t so much going to unbalance harmony as rip it to shreds — but what could she expect from a society of predators? For all their talk and posturing they were killing machines, nothing more.
And now it was us or them, just as Celestia had warned. Ponies might be spread all over Equestria, but the dragons had gathered all of their strength into a single invasion force. Every dragon who could fly, walk, or crawl was here, either fighting in the air or mopping up on the ground.
Every fighting dragon, all right here. They had the raw strength to conquer half the world if they were minded to it, and the Hierarch’s word was law. No individual, no group, no nation could stand up to them. Nopony — but not nothing.
Twilight let a feeling of serenity wash over her. The Princess had been right, as she always was. The dragons were here. They meant to kill them all. And now it was time for her to end them.
She released Time, and with an electrical snap the world spun into life —
Twilight pumped her wings once, twice, three times and held them high, spilling light onto the battlefield. She froze the Hierarch with a glance, threw him back with a flick. The dragons around him reacted, too slowly.
She grinned. A dragon, ten dragons, a hundred of them posed no more a threat than an uppity mouse. Behind her she felt the heat of a thousand suns, the hopes and dreams of a million ponies who just wanted to live, felt the Elements, pressing ever closer —
Twilight felt the release build and surge, the Elements of Harmony pouring through every fiber of her being, and for a moment there was no magic, no pony, just a single unity of power, washing outwards to wipe the world clean, to balance existence itself, no matter the cost.
After a long moment, she opened her eyes again. She was floating, held in place by the lightest touch of magic. Her wings flapped twice to break the hold, and for a moment she hung in midair, admiring the scene in front of her: nothing but a warm summer day and clear skies as far as the eye could see.
From the airship behind her, she could hear a dozen cheering ponies; from the battle lines on either side of her, she could hear ten thousand more. She couldn’t help but join in; harmony had been restored.
The dragons were gone, now and for always.
