Reforming Spell

I guess you could say that it all started with Spike, like a lot of these stories do. This shouldn’t be that surprising, since he’s one of the most important dragons in my life. We spend so much time together, talking about magic or making out. I really love his backrubs, and his scales, and he loves it when I go off on a tangent about some improbable corollary to a lesser-known magical law.

I’m pretty sure he also likes it when I kiss him. He always acts like he’s embarrassed, but he’s never told me to stop.

He doesn’t like it when I ask him to eat me, but when I’m lying there on the couch, my tongue sliding against his sharp dragon fangs, while his claws scrape across my skin, under the thin hair on my belly, I just can’t help thinking about it. And sometimes, I can’t help thinking about it some more as I skip through the streets towards the house where Bon Bon and I live, still tingling from his touch, and I can’t help fantasizing about it as I remember just how much being stabbed and gutted and eaten by spiders hurt during my very short time in Luna’s Night Guard.

And this time, I decided that I’d put on the magic armor Luna let me take home with me, which usually just gathers dust in the closet, and tap the dragon-eye gem that activates its magic, and wiggle around on the floor as the not-quite-pain of transformation squirms through my body like a million little worms, and then screech hypersonically as I got myself off right there, in the middle of the living room floor.

As I was coming back to my senses, I remembered that I had to die in order to change back into a unicorn, and that Luna didn’t like for us to spend a lot of time out in public as a bat pony, and that since it was Sunday, Bon Bon was out at the marketplace selling her candy, and had a date with Rose afterwards, and probably wouldn’t be home until morning.

The sensible thing to do – and I was back to my senses, remember? – would have been to lurk about the house, all on my own, with nothing to amuse myself with except for my lyre and all my worldly possessions and a few library books on musical theory and acoustics and Bon Bon’s weird collection of creepy ceramic masks. She’d promised to kill me if I ever touched them, so it would have been the perfect solution.

But the less sensible part of me had a different plan.

===

The glass shattered as I burst in through the library’s skylight, the light glinting off the razor-sharp shards until they evaporated halfway to the floor. Twilight knows Rainbow Dash, and stopped using actual glass in her windows ages ago. The breakaway quasi-matter windows still made a satisfying ‘crash!’ as you burst through them – Rainbow begged her for weeks to put that feature in.

It was probably a good thing it wasn’t real glass, since I’d left the armor at home as part of my ruse, and would have gotten some pretty bad cuts breaking through a real window. I’m going to say that I planned it that way, over and over again until that’s how I remember it.

Anyway, after my dramatic entrance, I circled around in midair above the library shelves, hissing.

Spike looked up from the book he was reading. “Oh, hi Lyra.”

“Who is this ‘Lyra’? I am a ninja assassin, here to murder your master!”

“Uh huh,” Spike said. “And why would you tell me about your evil plan?”

“Because you will assist me, or you will die!” I said, landing on top of a bookshelf, then waggling my wings to keep my balance as it wobbled a few times before settling back into place. “Where is she? So that I might MURDER her!”

“Lyra, stop it,” Spike said.

“No! You cannot stop me!” I screeched. “I do not fear your vicious claws, or your razor sharp teeth, and I know that you do not dare use your fire here in your own inner sanctum!”

Spike pursed his lips, and breathed a narrow line of fire right at me. I squeaked and jumped back into the air, only to see it end about a foot from the shelf.

“Well, I do not fear it either, even so! Prepare to defend yourself, or I will use my evil ninja magic on your shattered corpse, and wrest the location of Twilight Sparkle from your mind!”

“Did somepony call my name?” Twilight asked, walking into the main room from her little reading nook. “Oh, hi Lyra. What’s with the bat costume?”

“I’m not Lyra! Why do you think I’m Lyra?”

“Because we can see your cutie mark?” Spike said.

“Oh.” I paused for a few seconds to gather my thoughts. “Well, a lyre is a common cutie mark for assassins – the strings are perfect for strangling ponies and dragons with.”

“That’s a myth,” Twilight said. “Pony neck muscles are far too strong for the classic garrote as seen in the movies to do much more than leave a nasty welt. Not to mention that if the wire doesn’t have handles on it, you’re going to do more damage to your pastern than to your target.”

“Poison!” I said, triumphantly. “You poison the wire.”

“Lyra,” Twilight said, letting her wings droop a bit, and her gaze fall to the side. “Come with me up to my room. We need to talk.”

“But I wanted to fight your dragon,” I whined.

Twilight responded by encasing me in her magical field and holding me frozen in place while she dragged me into her bedroom. I had the feeling this was not going to be nearly as much fun as I’d always imagined.

===

“You have to stop bothering Spike,” Twilight said, after dumping me onto my back in the middle of her rather impressive bed. It had to have been created by the magic of harmony that created the entire castle, because I couldn’t imagine Princess Twilight Sparkle dropping by the furniture store and asking for a custom made king-sized six-poster bed in the shape of her cutie mark. Then again, the mattress didn’t feel even the slightest bit like it was made out of crystals. I bounced up and down on it a couple times, testing the springs. Maybe it was quasi-matter?

“I’m serious, Lyra,” Twilight said. “You have to stop harassing him.”

“Wait, what?” I said, replaying what she’d just said. A chill ran down my body. “You don’t want me to see Spike anymore?”

“Lyra –“

“You can’t do this, Twilight!” I said, tears forming in my eyes. “He’s one of my best friends! And he loves spending time with me? How could you possibly – mmmph.“ The rest of my plea was cut off as my mouth zipped itself shut.

“That’s not what I mean!” Twilight said. “Look, if Spike wants to spend his time dallying with you, then I’m not going to tell him that you’re… well… you. I’m pretty sure he knows you as well as I do.”

I snickered, through the zipper.

“Better than I do,” Twilight admitted, blushing. “But you have to stop asking him to eat you. I mean, unless you mean it figuratively – I have nothing against cunnilinguis, and with that ridiculous tongue of his it seems like he’d be really good at that sort of thing.”

The zipper vanished. “You mean you haven’t tried it out? After all these years?”

Twilight sighed. “I’m trying to be serious, here. If you and Spike are going to be an item, then that’s fine. But I can’t have you pestering him to eat you. I care about him, and I don’t want to see him hurt.”

“I haven’t been!” I said, flipping onto my hooves. “I haven’t asked him to eat me even once! I mean, in the last few weeks.”

“Until now,” she said.

“Well, he was supposed to think I was some random assassin,” I said, cringing a bit. “I guess I could have put a bit more effort into my disguise.”

“Lyra,” Twilight said. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed this – and I mean that literally, not sarcastically, because while you’ve shown no sign of noticing anything, I’ve underestimated your perceptiveness too many times to ignore the possibility that you might not be as clueless as you seem…” She trailed off, then picked her train of thought back up off the ground. “Have you noticed that Spike is falling in love with you?”

“That’s silly,” I said. “I mean, I know we fool around all the time, but that’s because he’s an adolescent colt and I’m a mare who’s willing to give him the time of day. He doesn’t act all crazy about me like he always did with Rarity.” I waved my hooves around in crazy motions, balancing with a few flaps of my wings, then set them back down on the bed, which bobbed up and down for a while until the springs settled. “Besides, I’m not available for a relationship. Bon Bon and I are just roommates.”

Twilight looked like she might have broken something inside her head trying to parse that last bit.

“And what if he is?” I asked. “I’m pretty sure that would make him less likely to eat me.”

Twilight leaned forwards. “Lyra, Spike defines himself by his helpfulness and loyalty. There is nothing he wouldn’t do for the mare he loves. Nothing.”

“Oh,” I said. “And that’s… bad?” I tilted my head.

“No matter how much it would hurt him,” she added.

“But he’s a dragon!” I said. “He’s allowed to eat ponies. That’s what dragons do!”

“Not Spike,” Twilight said, firmly. “Lyra, the last thing we need is for Spike to be pushed closer to his dragon heritage. Dragons who act like dragons can’t live with ponies, and he made his choice long before the two of you started hanging out together. If you love him at all, you’ll stop pushing him into doing something that would only make him hate himself.”

My ears flattened, and my wings folded against my sides. I dropped to the bedspread, and sighed. “I believe that your logical syllogism is false, Twilight. I know that he shouldn’t give in, although I think you’re wildly exaggerating the danger of that, but it’s something that I want so much. It’s hard not to ask for my heart’s desire, when it’s sitting there, pressed up against me, his fangs at my throat…” I shivered a bit, my wings fluttering out of sync.

“When I heard about Luna’s Night Guard, I thought it might be good for you,” Twilight said. “I thought it might help you get this out of your system.”

I took a deep breath. “It helps, but… it’s just a taste. The armor is a huge temptation, and on balance I don’t think it’s making me less interested in this sort of thing at all.” I sighed. “But I was miserable, trying to be her guard full time. It was just so exhausting! So much fighting, so much training… so much Diamond Tiara. Ugh.”

Twilight giggled, then put a hoof to her mouth to stifle it. “I’ve been thinking about this,” she said, once she’d gone back to her serious face. “And I have an alternative.”

“I’m listening,” I said.

“A magical solution to your problem,” she continued.

“I’m listening with considerably more trepidation than before, given your track record on solving things with magic,” I said. Then, because I was curious, “What did you have in mind?”

“A Reforming Spell,” Twilight said.

I froze.

“Discord somehow managed to eat every copy in Equestria, but I managed to reconstruct one of them from Ego Whip’s original notes. I haven’t tested it --”

“Well, thank Celestia for that,” I said, shocked. “Twilight, those spells were forbidden for a reason!”

“They’re not forbidden!” Twilight said. “They’re restricted, and as a Princess of Equestria I can give myself permission to cast restricted spells.”

“So because I sometimes tease Spike about doing something that he doesn’t want to do, and doesn’t do, and is never going to do, you’re going to turn me into a zombie?!” My wings were spread aggressively, and I was weighing the chances of escape if I just made a run for it compared to trying to stun Twilight with a hoof to the horn or something before making a run for it.

Twilight held up a hoof towards me. "You'll still have free will! You'll be able to do whatever you want! Even better, the parameters of what you'll want to do are guaranteed to be within the acceptable social mores of Equestrian society!"

“I’ll be gone, and a completely different pony will be living in my body!”

“That’s not true at all!” Twilight said. “You’ll be that completely different pony. That normal, well-adjusted, friendly, happy pony.”

“Twilight, you can’t –“ I said, but she’d already explained that she could. “You wouldn’t!” I stopped, breathing heavily, and calmed down a little as I realized that that was true. “You wouldn’t.”

“Well, of course not,” she said, smiling. “Not without your permission. You don’t have to give me an answer right now –“

“No,” I said.

“You can sleep on it, and think about the alternatives –“

“No,” I said again. “No, Twilight, I’m not going to give you permission to cast a Reforming Spell on me. If there’s one good thing that came out of my time in the Night Guard, it’s that I’m confident that, even if I have strange fantasies sometimes, I’m not a danger to myself or others. Now kill me.”

Twilight blinked.

“You’re not going to let Spike do it, and Luna doesn’t like me walking around in this body any longer than necessary. That means it’s up to you.” I rolled my eyes. “I’m sure you can make it quick and painless and completely boring.”

“Wait,” Twilight said. “So you just want to end the spell that summoned that body from the Shadow Realm? I think I have a spell for that.” She walked over to one of the shelves in her bedroom. “I keep a few books here that have sentimental value, even if they don’t belong in circulation,” she explained, as she scanned a hoof down the row. “Aha, here it is.”

I hopped off the bed – it took two hops – and walked over to see what book she’d found. “Legend of the Mirror Pool?” It didn’t mean anything to me at the time – I grew up in Canterlot, and hadn’t heard many of the local Ponyville legends. If I had, I would have run away and let Bon Bon kill me in the morning.

Twilight flipped to the back of the book, where a small spell was described. I tried to read it over her shoulder, but she was a much faster reader than I was, and I hadn’t gotten far before she finished and put the book back on the shelf. “Are you ready?” she asked.

“Will it hurt?”

“There might be some slight discomfort, but no, it shouldn’t hurt,” Twilight replied.

I pouted.

“Sorry, but I don’t want to encourage you to make a habit of this,” Twilight said, before pointing her horn at me and firing off the spell, quicker than I expected.

I felt my body go numb, and float up off the floor… and my legs and wings wouldn’t move, and my mouth wouldn’t even open. It was like I was being filled full of air, overinflated like a rubber balloon.

Then I popped, and everything was dark.

And cold.

And wet.

This was not my living room.