"So, you can just... make them, any time you want?" Spike asked.
"Any time I want," Cadance confirmed. Magic burst from her horn and coalesced into a prismatic swirl of jagged crystals.
"No kidding..." Spike breathed. His stomach rumbled. "Can I...?" he asked, taking a hesitant step towards the gems that had been brought forth from the air.
Cadance smiled at him, her amethyst eyes kind and inviting. "Of course," she said.
Spike licked his lips. The crystals still crackled with magic, illuminated from within.
"Eat all you want," she encouraged.
Spike took a tentative bite from the crystal pile. He could taste spicy rubies and tart emeralds and hints of smoky quartz, and beneath it all the magical aftertaste that pulsed like a heartbeat across his tongue.
"That's good," Cadance whispered to him, still smiling her knowing smile. She blinked, slowly, her eyelashes enmeshing and spreading apart.
He took another bite, and another, and another. The gems ground between his teeth. Each mouthful was incredible, the best thing he had ever tasted, yet he didn't think he would ever be satiated. He could keep on eating forever.
"Keep eating, Spike..."
Cadance's breath tickled his ear. He couldn't see her beyond the towering mountains of fresh gems, but he could feel her presence urging him on. Pushing him forward.
"That's good, Spike..."
Everything he saw became crystals. Everything he felt became that warm blissful smile.
-/-
"You've been a simply marvelous helper, Spikey-Wikey," Rarity said as she trotted through her workroom.
"I have, haven't I?" Spike followed after her, dresses and rolls of fabric and featureless models passing him by. He felt like he was floating.
"And I wanted to get you something, as my way of saying thank you. A present, of sorts."
"What sort of a present?" He looked around, but there was nothing that looked like a present. There was nothing that really looked like anything; there was just him and Rarity in the room.
"Why, a gem, of course! I know how much you love gems." She wore Cadance's smile.
"But I don't see any gems..."
"Silly," Rarity teased, "you're just not looking hard enough."
She turned, presenting her flank to him. Rarity ran a hoof across her cutie mark. The sapphires there emitted their own internal light.
"There are gems right here," Rarity murmured.
Spike leaned close to Rarity's cutie mark, almost close enough to bump it with his nose. The sapphires were the deep blue of stormy skies, of the dark ocean. He also saw the way her pristine white coat shined, for it was made of an intricate weave of tiny diamonds.
All of Rarity was made of gems.
Without knowing he was going to do it, Spike bit in to one of the sapphires of her cutie mark. It tasted fresh and cool, like the breeze on the hottest days of summer.
Rarity winced and sucked a breath through her teeth, but when Spike looked at her, her smile was still fixed.
"Did I hurt you?" he asked, crumbs of midnight blue sapphire falling from his mouth.
"No," she assured him, "I'm alright. Keep eating, Spike."
He took another bite, the ice and vanilla of the diamonds mixing with the roiling thunderheads of the sapphires. Rarity gasped. Spike turned his head to look at her, but she pushed him back towards her cutie mark with a firm hoof.
"Keep going," she commanded him. "Don't stop."
Another bite. Another. Another, another, another, all with Rarity's hoof resting on the back of his head.
"Don't stop..." she kept telling him.
He didn't. He ate and ate until all that was left was her perfect unflinching smile.
-/-
In the third dream in as many nights, Spike was himself, but he was also Princess Cadance. He could turn whatever he wanted into sparkling crystals with the horn that jutted out of his forehead. It throbbed with magical potential.
He ate the bed he slept in and the walls that surrounded it, transformed into an array of gems with a blast from his mighty horn. He ate the whole castle, but it was stale and hollow. He grew large enough to pluck the moon and the sun from the sky and devour them with a single bite, but still he hungered.
"Spike?" he heard a voice say.
He looked down to see Twilight. She stood in his massive shadow and trembled, and when she spoke her voice was uneven and uncertain.
"What are you doing?" she asked him.
I didn't mean to! he wanted to say, but no sound came out. One of his colossal arms lumbered down to snatch at Twilight.
She darted back, withdrawing. "Spike, no," she pleaded, "stop."
I'm not doing this! he shouted with his mind, but with his mouth he roared like an incoherent beast, and again he lunged, seizing Twilight in his great scaly fist.
"Help!" she shouted as she struggled in his grip. "Spike, please! Don't do this!"
I--
Whatever denial he tried to make was cut short by his horn erupting and bathing Twilight in a fierce corona of light. She shrieked and Spike felt her body harden in his grasp, turned to sweet and wonderful gems. Within Twilight was opal, peridot, lapis lazuli, tourmaline. He bit into her and the flavors hit his mouth like an explosion, wracking his entire body.
The world went black. All light drained to a single point, a speck in the infinite distance, then winked out. Was it because of Twilight's passing, that one little death?
For a moment Spike feared there might be nothing left in the universe but him, that he would have all eternity to feel the terrible smile etched on his face.
Stars swirled and danced in the darkness, forming themselves into Princess Luna's luminescent mane. Spike turned away from her in shame. He would have preferred waking up in another cold sweat to Luna having seen what he had been dreaming.
"Spike," Luna asked, "are you alright?"
"I'm a monster," he mumbled into the starry dreamscape.
Luna carefully placed a reassuring hoof on his shoulder. "You are sensitive and thoughtful," she told him, "and that does not make you a monster."
"And what about having dreams where I hurt my friends, huh?"
"You said it yourself." Luna's eyes had glints of light in them like the stars in her mane. "They are dreams, not reality."
"But don't all dreams mean something?" Spike picked a twinkling star in the distance and focused on it. He didn't want to think about what these dreams meant.
"Rarely is a dream so literal. They are symbols, guideposts: not directions nor commands."
Spike sat down in the inky blackness. Luna knelt on all fours beside him.
"So..." Spike ventured, "what were my dreams a symbol of?"
"It will come to you in time," Luna said. "Just be assured that your thoughts are yours alone, and that they are only thoughts. Do not let the subject of your private thoughts be the measure by which you judge yourself. It is your actions in the waking world that count, and I have known them to be nothing but noble and honest."
Spike could think of a few things he'd done that weren't completely noble and honest, but he didn't want to push the issue with the princess. "Does everyone have thoughts like these?" he asked instead.
"Of course. It is very normal. Healthy, even, provided you let them run their course and do not allow them to overwhelm you."
Spike looked up at Luna. "Even you?"
She was unfazed by his question. "I have lived for thousands of years, Spike the dragon. Yes, even I."
He rested his chin on his claws, unformed thoughts flitting in and out of his mind like the blinking stars.
"Did that help, Spike?" Luna asked him.
"You know," he said, "I think it did. ...Can I wake up now?"
"Of course you can," Luna said with a smile.
She disappeared in a flash of blinding white light, and Spike opened his eyes to greet the morning.
Author's Note
"Glass Onion" by The Beatles is either intricate and cryptic symbolism or just John having a bit of fun.
