The pony stood lightly upon the vast cavern's floor, her wings fluttering so her hooves barely grazed the stone. She also stood there lightly because her white hide and pastel rainbow hair made her an island of brightness in the stony dark.
One tiny part at the back of Porphyry's brain giggled to find both meanings of the word "lightly" working here. But the rest of him was busy cheering with the other dragons at the way Father was roaring and rearing back to his full height, the green ridges along the top of his head gouging into the rocky ceiling of the alcove that served as his throne and scattering sparks in a nimbus around him. "I know who you are, Intemerata!" Father bellowed at the pony, and even off to the side in the hatchlings' balcony, Porphyry had to squeeze his ears shut. "And I've heard nothing but complaints from my subjects about the filthy lies you preach! So back to your own country with you lest my wrath overwhelm me and I overwhelm you!"
The rest of the dragons hissed from their perches among the cavern's crags and outcroppings, and Peribo, clinging to the balcony rail beside Porphyry, gave a nod of her sleek, red head. "My mama says that King Enceladin's gonna eat that pony." She licked her lips. "Then we're all gonna go eat ponies, and it's gonna be great!"
Doubt wavered in the back of Porphyry's brain like the glow from the pony's horn, and that was enough to make the rest of him take a closer look at the scene, at the way Father was standing and the way the pony was standing. "I don't think that's gonna happen," he murmured.
Peribo wrinkled her snout, but when she didn't immediately tell him he was an idiot, Porphyry had to grin. He could almost hear the various parts of her brain arguing among themselves about what he'd said, and it made him tingle all over to know that he was making her think.
"Forgive me, Your Majesty," the pony was saying, her voice not nearly as loud as Father's but somehow carrying even more clearly. "But I'll not leave while we have unfinished business."
"So be it!" Father's roar this time shook the whole cave, and the back part of Porphyry's brain noted the almost musical tinkling from the light rain of gravel that scattered down over the jewels and precious metals stacked in berms all around the assembled dragons. And with his foreclaws spread and his teeth bared, Father leaped toward her.
The bloodthirsty cries of the other dragons exploded from the cavern's every nook and cranny. His heart pounding, Porphyry dug his claws into the stone of the balcony rail to keep from losing his balance, but the pony swooped sideways with a swiftness and ease that no dragon of Father's size would ever be able to match. An ever-larger part of Porphyry's brain couldn't help rooting for the pretty creature to escape and couldn't help gasping at the way Father's talons tore jagged strips from the solid basalt over which the pony had been hovering mere seconds before. Her brightness flashed to Father's left, but when he whirled and swung at her, he ended up slamming his paw into the wall right up to his dark purple knuckles. And the roar he gave out then was filled with pain.
"Please, Your Majesty!" The pony's sweet tones tickled Porphyry's ear. "And all you here gathered! There's a better way! You know that! Consider the words I've spoken, and listen to the part deep inside you that remembers what it means to understand, to listen, and to trust! Let that part imagine the advantages that an agreement between our peoples will bring, and you'll see that we—!"
"Silence!" Father flailed his claws, striking at and just missing her spritely glow again and again and again, and Porphyry's ears pricked to realize that silence was exactly what he was hearing: sudden and deep and filling the entire cavern. Even Peribo beside him had gone still, her eyes wide and unfocused. And everywhere, the air shimmered like it would above a lava flow.
Porphyry caught his breath. They were thinking just as she'd asked, the cavern humming with the noiseless electrical thrum of dragon brains spinning and shifting, the dozens of lobes inside each skull arguing and realigning.
The shimmering was even happening around Father, the fluttering and sparkling reminding Porphyry of the bats he and Father would sometimes dance and play with when no other dragons were in the cave. Instead of going still and silent, though, Father snarled, "No!" He lashed out at the pony harder and quicker, but, well, it looked to Porphyry like he was trying to smack away sunlight. "Your way is weakness, capitulation, and death! I will have no part of it, Intemerata, and I will not allow my people to take part!"
"Think, Your Majesty!" The pony dodged and weaved and flapped. "We don't need to be allies, but we don't need to be enemies, either! We have more than two options, more ways than just yours and mine! Options, Your Majesty! Consider, I ask you, all the many options!"
Options. The word shivered down Porphyry's spine like a cooling breeze on a summer day, and he could see it having an effect on Father. It was a word every dragon loved to hear, a word that quivered the various parts of a dragon's brain and sent connections bristling in all directions.
Father's next blow went wide, the pony drifting out of its path instead of leaping. "Think, Your Majesty," she said again, the honey of her voice now even thicker and more fragrant, "and all of you here gathered! Think of a time before you feared and hated the world! Think of the world you once cherished and loved! For that world still exists, still looks for you, would still welcome you back into its company! A tiny part of you all remembers! I can sense it in you!"
Porphyry could almost see it happening, could almost see the tiny, quiet parts at the back of each dragon's brain stirring. Those parts were growing, too, were shining like the pony's light through the layers of despair and disgust and anger and greed and resentment that Porphyry had started recently sensing in his own thoughts as sour and unpleasant as tarnish on silver. And the breeze in the cavern seemed to pick up.
"Think, Your Majesty," the pony said a third time, hovering like the sun in front of Father's scowling face. "Our two peoples' real quarrels are few and easily solved if we can work together from a place of mutual trust if not actual understanding. Please, Your Majesty. We can—"
"You think me a fool," Father muttered, but Porphyry could see the invisible light of change shining inside him as well.
"Not at all, Your Majesty." The pony settled to the stone at the foot of Father's alcove. "When I look at you and all those here gathered, I see only worlds and worlds of possibilities opening up before us: neighbors, partners, friends, companions." A smile curled across her muzzle. "If your people and mine can come to an agreement, I mean."
Peribo's sides moved, the first full breath his friend had taken, Porphyry thought, in minutes. "Well," she said with a sigh. "I guess we could give it a try."
And if a dragon as grouchy as Peribo was ready to consider it— "Yes!" Porphyry leaped over the balcony rail, scrambled down the wall, and sprinted across the stone to where the pony was turning to blink at him. "Say we will, Father! Please say we will!" He skidded to a stop beside the pony and gazed up at her. "And please tell me how you do that with your mane!"
***
The pony stood lightly upon the vast cavern's floor, her body poised on the very tips of her gold-shod hooves. She kept her wings clenched to her sides, her eyes closed and her head downcast, only her mane and tail moving.
Which suited every part of Porphyry's brain just fine. "Traitor!" he roared at her from the throne alcove, and if she had made any sort of response, had so much as twitched an eyelid, nothing in the wide, wide world of Equestria would've stopped him from smashing her with his clenched paws, each nearly the size of her whole barrel. "Our peoples had agreements! Agreements you made with my father in this very cave!"
A slight shifting of her lips: "Agreements Peribo broke by her actions."
"No!" He spun and pounded a fist into the wall, pebbles clattering down. "You don't talk about her, Intemerata!" When he'd been a hatchling in this cave, Enceladin had often shouted that name at the pony princess during the more heated of their after-dinner discussions. Porphyry had never known before why Father thought the Draconic word for "spotless" was an insult, but the tiny part at the back of his brain understood it now. "After what you've done, you will never speak her name again!"
"I'm sorry, Porphyry." She didn't shake the dust and stone shards from her back. "But Peribo—"
"No!" He slammed his other fist into the wall. "She was my mate, my love, my queen, and my life! And you killed her! Drilled your magic through her skull and boiled all the various parts of her brain away! How can you—?"
"She killed ponies!" All at once, Celestia burst upwards, light flaring from her wings as bright as any dragon's breath. "Not even the worst of the depraved acts that drove me to first introduce myself to Enceladin a thousand years ago was as monstrous as what she did! She had to be stopped before she—!"
"Don't you think I know that?" Wheeling around, he punched again and again and again, striking the rock as hard as he could even though the tiny part in the back of his brain kept reminding him that the royal cave here was an historical site. "She kept ranting about what a mistake Father had made when he first signed the agreements with you, how you couldn't be trusted and were holding us back from our natural place as rulers of all creation! And when I told her she could follow the grievance procedures laid out in the agreements if she had any specific complaints against you or any other pony, she—"
He tried to stop the memories, but they flashed through every part of his brain, folded his knees, and dropped him in a heap to the floor of the cold and lifeless cavern.
"Porphyry!" Celestia had sung him lullabies centuries ago, but fear clenched her voice so tightly now, he barely recognized it. He definitely recognized the stroke of her feathers against his face, though, and he rolled his head so he could meet the rose quartz of her wide eyes.
"Our eggs." The tiny part at the back of his brain formed the words since the rest of him couldn't manage it. "When we fought, she was faster than lightning, and she— While she was smashing them, she said that she wouldn't allow the royal line to continue in a world as unnatural as the one you've made." With quivering claws, he started pawing at the pile of amethysts he'd fallen in front of. "I should've stopped her years or decades ago, should've found better options to present to her, should've taken the time to listen to her thoughts before she—"
Everything he hadn't let himself think came bubbling up from the back of his brain. "She wasn't alone in her opinions was the problem, nowhere near alone. In fact, I'd wager that at least one part in the sundry and parallel brains of every dragon throughout our territory thought Peribo had a valid point when she declared that we were becoming nothing but large and scaly ponies. Most parts of our brains, though, didn't like her methods, called her too loud, too direct, too obvious. So she decided to act on her own in the hope that she would trigger some sort of larger reaction, some sort of cascade that would line us all up in agreement with her."
As far as he could tell, his entire brain had shut down except for that one tiny part at the back, and it just kept on talking. "I know exactly what I should've done. But, well, it turns out that I'm not you, Celestia, not pony enough to do what you had to do to your sister Luna. I couldn't. So I didn't do anything, and now it's all..." He swallowed. "It's all gone. The agreements you made with Father, I'm declaring them abrogated in all but their most basic terms."
In the following silence, he couldn't stand to see the shock and hurt in her gaze, so he concentrated his attention on clearing away the amethysts. He'd almost moved them all when she said, "Please, Porphyry. We can help. Let us—"
"We aren't ready, Intemerata." He pushed himself up onto all fours. "You touched us all that first day, connected with the parts of our brains that were closest to your pony brain, and we did some real good in the world for a number of centuries. But—" Stepping into the space where the amethysts had lain, he grabbed the basket he'd buried there in the frenzied horror of the night last week when most of his life had ended. "But a dragon's brain is as multi-faceted as the finest gemstone, and the part that thinks like a pony is very small. Almost as small as the number of us who can stand to let that part truly be in control."
He turned and set the basket down, his vision going misty at the sight of his and Peribo's last remaining egg, light purple with darker purple sports scattered across its shell. "So from now on and as much as possible, you will ignore us, and we will ignore you. That's all that the largest parts of most dragons' brains have ever wanted, and it's all we really deserve. Just...take this away with you, please, and maybe someday we'll be able to—" His throat closed, and he couldn't go on.
Whether Celestia understood or not, he didn't know. After all, several parts of his own brain didn't understand it, either.
Most of his brain did, though, and he stood in an empty cave surrounded by gems and precious metals while the pony princess wrapped her magic around the egg basket and flew for the entrance.
***
Both the ponies stood lightly upon the vast cavern's floor, their horns glimmering and their wings spread like they expected the stone beneath them to crumble at any moment.
It was a feeling Porphyry could understand, peering at them from behind a pile of rubble. After all, the figure standing head and shoulders above them both and glancing around, his purple and green scales glinting as he stepped out from between them—
Yes, Porphyry understood all about feeling like the floor was about to drop away.
"This?" the young dragon asked, his voice cracking with the last traces of adolescence. "You're sure?"
"I am." The glow of Celestia's horn began to increase.
The other alicorn's did the same, her glow a duskier purple. "Wow," she more whispered than said. "It's like a museum."
The young dragon nodded, and Porphyry smiled to hear the lad's stomach rumble, his gaze moving from one stack of jewels to the next. "But...this is my parents' cave?"
Celestia nodded. "Potentially your cave now, Spike, if my information is correct."
Spike. Porphyry's heart clenched, and he slid around the rubble. "As always, Intemerata, it is." He tried to clear his throat, but the rasp there had largely become a permanent feature over the last few centuries. "My people have decided that I'm no longer fit to be their sovereign, and by all the ancient rites of ascension, my—" he couldn't stop his voice from roughening even further "—my only living child is given the first opportunity to take my place."
Silence blanketed the cavern so thickly, Porphyry thought for a moment that he'd gone deaf on top of everything else. But then Celestia began speaking, her words as clear as ever: "Spike? This is your father Porphyry. Porphyry, this is your son Spike, and this is my friend and colleague Twilight Sparkle, the pony who's had the pleasure and responsibility of raising Spike after hatching his egg some two centuries ago."
A tiny part at the back of Porphyry's brain spared a quick glance at the purple alicorn, her eyes wide and her mouth partway open, but the rest of him was focused entirely on the fine young drake taking a shaky step toward him. Porphyry could almost hear the arguments going on inside Spike's head, so he did his best to put them to rest: he stepped forward and opened his arms.
With a little gasp, Spike leaped across the space between them, and Porphyry had to close his eyes as his son—his son—wrapped him in a tight and thorough hug.
They didn't have time, though, not right now; he patted Spike's back and asked, "How much do you know?"
Stepping back, wiping his eyes, the youngster shrugged. "Hardly anything. I mean, Celestia only told me last week where she'd gotten my egg and that I might be—" His words cut off with a laugh, and he shook his head. "King of the dragons! 'Cause that's crazy! What do I know about being a dragon?"
"More than you think." Porphyry squatted down and rested a paw on top of Spike's head, so much about the lad's speech and movement reminding him of Peribo that Porphyry's heart felt like a shattered stone. "You have many parts in your brain, and at least one of them—no doubt very small and in the back—will have been whispering to you your entire life about what it means to be a dragon."
"You mean—?" Spike blinked several times. "The little voice in my head? The one that told me about the dragon code and keeps talking about migrating and hoarding and protecting and all that? It...it's real?"
"It is." A twinge pulled at Porphyry's jaw: a true father would have had this talk with his child a century ago.... "It is, in fact, the greatest strength we dragons possess and our single defining characteristic." He ruffled Spike's head ridges, so much like Enceladin's. "Still, my son, you've nothing to worry about when it comes to being king of the dragons. The others would never accept you as their sovereign."
"What?" The younger alicorn—Twilight Sparkle, Celestia had called her—gave a shout that echoed around the cave. "I mean, forgive me, Your Lordship, but I thought you dragons would offer Spike the crown or whatever, he'd turn it down with a gracious and tearful speech, and we could head back to Equestria and get on with our regular lives! Instead, we came all this way for...for what?"
Silence settled over them, and Porphyry let his gaze move from Twilight Sparkle to Spike and then at last let it settle on Celestia. And while he hadn't seen her in perhaps a thousand years, he knew her well enough to see how jittery the flow of her mane had become. "Will you tell them, Intemerata?" he asked, pushing down the several parts of his brain that wanted to feel pleasure at her nervousness. "Or shall I?"
Celestia bowed her head and took a step forward. "I'll start." And when she looked back up, her eyes were shimmering. "But I'll start at the ending with your mother's death, Spike, in the hope that Porphyry will be willing to jump in and tell you about Peribo's life."
The battle that burst through Porphyry's insides, then, was like none he'd ever known before. Parts of him shrieked to strike Celestia down for daring to speak Peribo's name while the parts that clung to the good memories of his queen surged forward, yearning to share; multiple parts tried forcing tears to his eyes while an equal number silently replayed the events of that last horrible night, the fighting and the fire and the smashing of egg shells; and through it all, the tiny part at the back of his brain, the part that he'd chosen to listen to all those years ago when he'd first laid eyes on Celestia, the part that had guided him his entire life, had helped him bounced back from every subsequent defeat, and had let him persevere in the teeth of every calamity, that part was whispering, "This is your son and theirs, born a dragon but raised by ponies. He deserves to know the entire truth."
Another part of his brain noted that Celestia had begun detailing Peribo's attack on Canterlot and her own lethal response. Porphyry shook himself, found his voice, and raised it when Celestia's began breaking at the end of her story. "Your mother, Spike," he said, "was passionate in all she did, right or wrong."
The next half hour went by with Spike and Twilight Sparkle huddled together on the cavern floor, their faces damp, while Porphyry told them everything: the first flush of success after Enceladin and Celestia had reached their agreement; the back-sliding and mind-changing that had begun not long after Porphyry had assumed the throne; the discontent and resentment that Peribo had tried to inflame; the separation of the two species afterwards and ever since. He ended with: "The dragons will be assembling here shortly to decide on my successor. That successor will not be you, Spike, but I'd ask the three of you to remain nonetheless. There's much good, I think, that we can do here at this time of change."
"Of course!" Spike leaped to his feet, his voice still a little sniffly.
Twilight leaped to her hoofs beside him. "Anything we can do to help, sir, just let us know!"
Porphyry nodded, needing a moment to swallow the lump in his throat. "Since we're not afraid of the more ponyish parts of our brains, we can see a future where ponies and dragons can at least trust that we aren't out to destroy each other in any way." He set his claws lightly on Spike's shoulder. "We can be ambassadors, can start showing dragons how to move the back parts of their brains to the front, and maybe—" His gaze shifted to Celestia, smiling like a summer dawn. "Maybe we'll actually manage it this time, eh, Intemerata?"
"That word." Twilight's brow was wrinkling. "That's Draconic for 'spotless,' isn't it?" She turned a grin toward Celestia. "You should add that to your list of titles!"
The back part of Porphyry's brain coughed and choked, but it was Spike who spoke up: "Ummm, actually, Twilight, part of me's saying that that isn't exactly a compliment."
"Huh?" The younger alicorn turned back to him, her brow wrinkling again.
With a low chuckle, Porphyry tapped his own forehead. "You ponies are all spotless, all solid and stolid and filled with meat from ear to ear, while we dragons have more spots than we know what to do with, lobe upon lobe upon lobe, a complex architecture like nothing you can even imagine." Shrugging, he moved his claw to tap Spike's forehead. "Our job will be to go about the countryside, talk to dragons, and see if we can't rearrange the structure a bit. This time, though, we'll be working from the bottom up instead of from the top down." He had to shrug. "We'll give it a thousand years, and see how it looks then."
"Yeah." Spike took a breath and nudged Twilight Sparkle with an elbow. "So whaddaya say, Twilight? Ready for a good, old-fashioned friendship problem?"
"You know it, Spike!" She threw a hug around his neck.
A shifting of light and shadow drew half of Porphyry's attention to Celestia, stepping up to sit beside him. "Thank you," she said quietly. "Your father would be proud."
The rest of his attention still fixed on Spike and Twilight hugging, Porphyry touched a claw to Celestia's side. "Thank you," he said just as quietly. "For everything."
