It's More Difficult Than You'd Think
Unicorns, earth ponies and camels alike gathered in the town square, pegasi watching from above. Clouds of smoke, thick enough to seem almost solid, crept from fissures in the mountain. Bolts of fire jutted out, so huge they looked like they would reach up and destroy the full moon above them. The earth shook as something vast moved upon it.
One traveler, fanny pack bouncing on his rump, dared to ask a question. “What’s going on? Is the volcano going to erupt?”
A lemon-yellow pegasus swooped down from his cloud, wrapping a wing around the pony in a too-friendly hug. “You’re new in town, aren’t you? Never heard of the local dragon?”
The pony quivered. “There’s a… dragon? Dear, you never told me there was a dragon!” He glanced around with nervous eyes, hidden behind his souvenir sunglasses. Somewhere in the crowd, he saw his wife struggling to refold a map.
“Hmm? Oh, sorry, sugar. I must have forgotten to tell you. It’s exciting, though, isn’t it? Seeing a dragon on our trip? Oh, do you have the camera? You’ll have to snap a photo!”
The other tourist’s head nodded up and down. “Yes, dear, a photo… of a fire-breathing dragon? You, Mr. Pegasus, sir, what’s going to happen? Is he going to eat us? Oh, if I had known this was going to happen, I wouldn’t have skipped dessert…”
The pegasus pulled him closer with his wing. “Oh, you know, it’s no big deal. He does this every year, like clockwork.”
“What? You mean to tell me there’s a dragon that’s been living here for years? What’s he doing, getting ready for the annual pony sacrifice?”
“Hey, now, that’s racist. Not all dragons do that. No, the big guy’s probably just whipping up a birthday present for his mom.”
The tourist stood for a moment, stunned, until he felt a strange sensation on his rump.
“Oo! I found the camera, dear! It was in your fanny pack!”
Spike shuffled across his cavern, each footstep an earthquake.
“Let’s see… If I add Anaximander’s Augmenting Array, I think I can do this…” His claws scratched runes into the black stone surface as he consulted his scroll. Carefully, he moved his oversized magnifying glass over it, trying not to set fire to the parchment.
“And of course, that special trick I learned from my… friends.” He drizzled a gooey concoction that smelled vaguely of crushed ants. Getting the recipe was interesting, but he hoped it would be worth it.
A few more runes, a few grooves cut into the rock to channel his dragonfire. It was a complicated procedure, one that involved a bit more geometry than Spike was comfortable with, but it was important. Mess up on the angles, and the magic in his breath would waste itself rather than charge up the glyphs.
Spike couldn’t help but grin. Of course, whenever he grinned, he bared more teeth than a Canterlot dentist would see in her entire life, but he still couldn’t help it.
He’d finally found the perfect gift for Twilight. Not a book—as princess, Twilight already technically owned every book in Equestria, and even then, Spike was banned from all bookshops after the Tinderbox Incident. No, it was something better. Something much more snuggly.
His grin widened. Twilight did have a habit of snuggling books at night, mostly when she couldn’t find Smarty Pants. It was cute at first, but once she started having tea parties with the Encyclopædia Equestriannica, her parents started getting worried.
But this was better. This was much, much better. He checked his runes, rechecked them, and made a few corrections. Spike would be much more confident if Twilight were here to look over his sigils, but, well, that would defeat the purpose of a present, wouldn’t it?
Speaking of Twilight, she should be here any—
“Spike! I came as soon as I could! Your letter didn’t say what you needed, so there are five battalions of Royal Guard ready to mobilize and I brought this newfangled creation the industrialists are calling a ‘battle tank’ and I have books on every draconic illness in case you’re ill and I…”
The alicorn paused for breath, her teleport spell leaving a smoking crater on the ground. Around her, grimoires and lexicons popped into existence and tumbled to the floor.
“What’s wrong, Spike? Are you sick? Is there a villainous army afoot? Is there…?”
Spike looked up from his engraving. Finally finished, and just in time. “Relax, Twilight…”
“Will we need more troops? The Crystal Empire is a long ways away, but if we bounce the teleport signal off of a mirror system in Canterlot, we can get Cadance’s legions here by…”
“Twilight, it’s fine!”
She panted from the effort of conjuring potion supplies. “What? I got a letter that said ‘Come at once!’ That’s it! It was smeared with dragon blood! I thought you’d been attacked!”
Spike twiddled his claws. “Um, yeah, I kinda pricked my finger on a big diamond. Turns out they’re hard enough to pierce my scales.”
Twilight noticed a squadron of armored infantry marching up behind her and shooed them away. “And the letter?”
“Writing’s really hard with claws this size. I get cramps, so I like to keep it short and sweet.”
Spike heard a tank backing up out of the cavern.
“So everything’s fine?”
“Yep. I just needed to see you.”
“Okay. Okay, then.” Somewhere in the distance, the tank smashed into a stalagmite, and Spike heard a rushed apology from its driver. “Spike, you know I love you, but can you please try not to give me a heart attack like that again?”
Bits of half-molted scale fell to the floor as Spike scratched the back of his neck. “Sorry, Twi, I didn’t mean to…”
She saw his eyes darken and started to rub a hoof over his leg to comfort him. It didn’t work, seeing as her entire body was smaller than his toe. “It’s okay. I know you meant well.”
A fizzling rune caught her eye, and she glanced around the cavern. Now that she wasn’t looking for attackers or interdimensional rifts to the planes of elemental evil, she could take stock of what was around her.
Strange sigils curled across the basalt and rough-hewn gems marked off the corners of pentagrams. It could be part of a spell, but it was certainly dragon magic, mixed with something she’d never seen before.
“Spike, what did you mean?”
He perked up. “Oh, yeah. That. I got you a present. Well, I’m not sure if it counts a present since I can’t exactly gift-wrap it, but I made it for you and I think you’ll really like it.”
“It’s a spell of some sort? Sorry, dragon magic has always been a bit of a mystery to me. What do all these runes do?”
A long shadow fell over the alicorn as Spike bent his neck over her, trying to get his huge head closer. It was difficult, and in his contortions, Spike ended up flipping his head upside down, so his head spines rested on the floor and his eyes were level with Twilight. She couldn’t help but chuckle at his predicament.
“You know how, back in Celestia’s school, you’d get really stressed over tests and things?”
“Whatever do you mean? I was a well-prepared student, and thanks to my fifty-six step method of time management…” She could hear scales creaking and straining as Spike raised his gargantuan eyebrow.
“Okay, so maybe I got a little stressed… a lot stressed… the doctors said I got a stress-induced heart attack… but only once!”
“Yeah. Well, I remembered that whenever you felt overwhelmed, you’d pick me up out of my crib and pull me into one of those trademark Twilight snuggle sessions.”
She broke into a smile. “You were so small back then.” Her forelegs closed around an imaginary baby Spike, before the actual giant-sized Spike brought her back to reality.
“Then in the library, after we defeated whatever horrible monster was threatening the world that week, you’d sometimes reach into my basket and flip me onto your barrel.” He sighed, a long sigh that would qualify as a strong breeze on a pegasus wind chart.
Twilight rested on her haunches and looked up into Spike’s eyes, each one as large as she was. “We’d bundle up beneath the covers and make sure the blanket totally protected us from any baddies. Everyone knows monsters can’t get you if you’re undercover.” Her wings jiggled a bit as she giggled.
Spike continued her memory. “Your horn would light up, and I’d read one of my comics in its glow, or else I’d pretend to listen while you read a dictionary aloud…”
“Hey! I read those for your benefit!”
The dragon’s smile widened. Half the library would fit in that mouth, Twilight noticed.
He kept going. “Then Tirek came, and we moved into separate rooms in the castle, but I knew you’d sometimes get nightmares about all we’d been through, so when I thought you couldn’t sleep, I’d come to your door and tell you I couldn’t sleep, and then…”
“Wait, all those times you asked to sleep on my bed with me, you were trying to help me?”
Spike started to nod, then reconsidered once he realized that would cause minor tremors in a three-mile radius. “Yeah. You’d hug me, and tell me it was all okay, and somehow when you said the words, you’d believe them yourself, and we’d both drift off together. Protecting me made you feel invincible, so I let you protect me.”
A few tears started to wet Twilight’s snout. “You know, if Luna learns about how many of my nightmares you chased off, she might feel a little jealous.”
The cavern boomed with draconic laughter. Outside, the tank crew wondered if a thunderstorm had somehow formed inside the mountain.
Twilight hooked her fetlock over her nose and brushed off the tears. Happy tears. It had been a long time, a very long time since then. He just kept growing…
“Then I had to take my dragon nap, and when I woke up…”
“You were tall as a tower and strong as a thousand Big Macs put together.” Twilight looked up at her dragon. For most of her life now, she’d been looking up to him, but back before he grew, he’d been looking up to her. She used to be his big sister and his mother and his… Twilight never really knew how to qualify their relationship, but she was the big and he was the little. Her cute, adorable, ever-so-huggable little.
“Hey, at least two thousand Big Macs,” Spike grumbled. Twilight laughed when she saw Spike’s face, all screwed up in mock offense.
“One thousand, five hundred. And we’ll throw in three dozen Applejacks.”
Gears turned in Spike’s mind as he calculated how strong that would make him. “Sounds alright.”
He was so powerful now. So massive. Twilight… Of course, she still loved Spike, loved him even more every day, and she wouldn’t wish him an inch smaller. Being huge was his nature. It was Spike’s destiny to be a powerful, earth-shaking, majestic elder dragon. But sometimes, she’d wish for one more hug.
“Thanks for the trip down memory lane, Spike. Those were good times, good times.” She wiped a few more tears away. “You, um, never told me what all these runes are for.”
Spike unbent his neck, thunder cracks resonating through the cave as his joints popped. “I’ll show you.”
His wings flared out and his chest expanded. Air pressure dropped precipitously as he sucked in breath, let it steep for a bit in his inner furnace, then suddenly exhaled a green jet of flame. On instinct, Twilight raised a heat shield with her magic.
Tongues of fire licked at the stone walls, but the channels Spike had carved redirected the energy, curving the conflagration around bends, heating rock into lava that filled up engraved glyphs, charging the dragon runes.
The heat distortion warped Twilight’s vision. It almost looked like… everything was shrinking? That’s odd.
Twilight pondered the effects of thermodynamics on optics as Spike continued to exhale. Perhaps the magic was interacting with the expanding gasses to create a sort of reverse magnifying lense? She would have to research this topic further. It almost looked like she was the same size as Spike now.
Smoke from Spike’s nostrils blocked out the view, and Twilight waved a hoof around to try to clear it up. “Spike, what’s going on? I can’t see anything.”
He grunted as the last of his fire breath escaped his lungs. “Twilight? Are you alright?”
“Yeah, I’m fine, though I feel a bit…” The smoke cleared. It hadn’t been heat distortion at all. Things had changed, but they hadn’t shrunk.
Twilight raised a hoof to her face, then compared it to a nearby rock. No, the rock wasn’t any smaller. She was bigger. A lot bigger.
“Um.” That was all she could say. “Um.” No magic she knew could do something like this. “Um.” She took a half-step back.
Crrnch.
Spike cringed as her massively-expanded rump smashed a priceless gemstone to dust.
“Whoops. Sorry, Spike, I’m not really used to being… what am I?”
“New spell I cooked up. Makes you bigger.”
“Oh, of course.” She tried to take it all in stride. She was dragon-sized now. She was huge. She certainly wouldn’t fit in her old lodgings anymore—maybe the Crystal Empire could help regrow her castle to accommodate her? That would be pricey, but her new size and power meant she could probably save on the defense budget… How was she going to get out of the cavern? She couldn’t slither through holes like Spike could. Could she teleport this much mass? What were the biological implications of—
“Relax, Twilight. It’s not permanent.”
His voice snapped her back to reality. Her new, larger-than-life reality.
“I see.” She also saw the apprehension in his eyes. He was afraid, afraid his present wasn’t good enough. “Is this the gift? It’s a very impressive display of magic, Spike.” Still apprehensive. “Honestly, you’ve made me very proud. I think it’s fantastic that you’ve kept up your studies…”
Spike cut her off. “It’s not the present. It’s just the, um, prerequisite to the present.”
“Hah, see? ‘Prerequisite.’ Looks my dictionary readings did teach you a thing or two.”
The dragon sprouted a shy little smile. “Uh, yeah, Twi. But… You know… Remember…”
“What, Spike? Are you okay?” She rubbed a hoof on his cheek, and for a moment, it felt just like old times. Big sister, little brother…
Oh. That’s what the present is.
She reached out both forelegs, wings unfurled and full of love. Her feathers, her fur, her hooves, that little puff of fluff on her chest… She hugged him with everything she had, and thanks to his spell, she had a lot.
Steam rose as rainstorms of tears hit pools of lava. “I love it, Spike. I love it.”
He hugged back, claws clutching her, somehow feeling soft despite their diamond hardness. Twilight never understood how a sharp, jagged, scaly dragon could hug so well, but she swore that she’d find out. It would take research and frequent practical experience, of course.
“I know it’s not your birthday for another few weeks, but the spell only works under a full moon, so…” He trailed off, words muffled by Twilight’s enormous tufts of fur. She snuggled in closer, resting her head atop his and letting her breath ruffle his spines.
“Spike, this is the best birthday present—” She squeezed him tighter. “—ever! How did you make it?”
“It’s pretty much just a shapeshifting concoction I got from the changelings, powered up with dragonfire…”
Twilight’s eyes popped open.
“Spike, how do you know changeling magic?”
“Well, I was flying in the desert looking for gems, and I met a few changelings, and… one thing led to another, and now I’m their king.”
“What?”
“Or at least prince. I’m not really sure how their marriage laws work.”
Twilight fainted. Stalactites tumbled from the ceiling as the shockwave of her fall ricocheted through the cavern.
Spike leaned over her still-massive form. “So, not the best birthday present ever?”
