“I don’t get it.”

On the stairs in front of Spike, Ember grunted and shook her head. “I already told you, like, five times.”

“Hey, you’re the one who summoned me.” Spike shrugged his heavy shoulders and ‘pretended’ not to check out her gorgeous ass under those stunning wings. “You wanted the assistant of the Princess of Magic.”

Ember kept walking. Spike’s eyes kept drifting to her oh-so-blue hips and the clinking of all the little bits of golden chainmail. Her tail twitched with irritation.

His tail twitched for a completely different reason.

“We can’t have ponies in the Dark Halls!” Ember spat as she lifted the torch higher. All it showed was more staircase and more darkness. “Even the Dragon Lord can’t bend those rules. But this is some really advanced magic… and not just advanced dragon magic. Something else.”

“Yeah, that’s the part I’m unclear on.” Spike adjusted his dark brown traveling pants a little. He was about eighty-percent sure Ember had worn that skimpy little thing on purpose. Seriously, what was the point of armor that showed that much scale? “You keep dodging my questions about it.”

Ember growled and whirled. Her slitted orange eyes narrowed and she blew a strand of blue hair out of her face. Her curved white horns glistened in the firelight as her face twisted into a snarl. She reached forward, grabbed him by the collar and yanked him forward until they were muzzle to muzzle.

Even if he was a foot taller than the dragoness, she could still dragonhandle him pretty easily. He didn’t mind.

“Maybe that’s because I don’t know,” Ember hissed. “Do I look like a unicorn to you?”

“Not really,” Spike said with a smirk, one he knew that would tick her off. “You’re a whole different kind of horny.”

“Seriously?” Ember cocked an eyebrow. “That’s the best you could do?”

Spike shrugged.

“You’re lucky I happen to actually like you, Spike,” Ember snapped.

She hesitated for a moment. It wasn’t surprising. After all, most of their time together started out like this. He could smell her desire. What’s more, she knew it.

With another growl, she pulled him into a hard kiss. Spike didn’t resist, but instead enjoyed twirling his long tongue around hers. He could feel her large tits thrusting into his chest, the nipples hard enough to be felt through the chainmail. She even bucked her hips against him a few times before she shoved him away.

Spike stumbled back a couple steps and grinned. “What?”

“You’d better stop that,” Ember warned. “Or you’ll get more than you bargained for.”

“Like the last three nights?”

Ember spun around and stomped down the stairs again, but not before Spike caught the blush on her cheeks. “Shut up.”

Spike chuckled and followed, satisfied with yet another bit of foreplay. Still, she had asked him to come all the way down here. If she felt frisky, she didn’t need to go through all of this. Which mean she probably did want help.

“Well, tell me how you know it’s not dragon magic.” Spike followed Ember as they spiraled down into the depths beneath Dragon’s Reach. “You have to at least know that.”

“It’s related to dragon magic,” Ember said. “But it’s ancient. Like, a few thousand years ancient. And it’s… darker. But… more…”

“More what?” Spike adjusted his button down shirt. It was getting warmer than usual down here and it wasn’t just the company.

“Sensual,” Ember whispered.

“Say what now?”

Ember didn’t say another word. Spike tried to get something more out of the Dragon Lord, but she just clammed up faster than Twilight whenever he mentioned Rarity.

Well, that was a little different. It wasn’t like he didn’t know the two were having a fling. The castle wasn’t soundproof, after all. Not that he minded. She just didn’t want to admit it to him.

Or maybe she didn’t want to share. He wasn’t entirely sure.

Finally, the reached the lowest level. Spike gaped as the lava flows lit the place in an eerie hellish light. Massive chambers and galleries sprawled for what seemed like miles in every direction. Ancient runes and carvings were etched over every archway. The place looked like it had come out of a Daring Do novel.

Even here, he could feel ancient magic, but it still felt familiar. It felt right for this place, beneath the enormous citadels of Dragon’s Reach, his ancestral home. Twilight had been thorough in his education—in more ways than one. While he couldn’t wield magic in a traditional pony sense, he still had his own innate magic. Most ponies just knew he could send magical letters. Most ponies didn’t have a clue.

Aside from his own unique gifts, one thing that had come in handy was his ability to feel other kinds of magic. After so much time under Twilight—literally and figuratively—he knew magic as well as he knew himself.

“I don’t sense anything strange…” Spike whispered.

“Not here,” Ember said with a shake of her head. “Deeper in. You can only get a hint of it here.”

“Okay.” Spike shrugged and closed his eyes.

“What are you doing?”

“Trying to catch that hint.”

“We could just move on.”

Spike cracked an eyebrow to see Ember glaring at him, a delicate claw on her outthrust hip.

“I’d like to get a feel for this before I walk right up to the source.”

“Ugh, fine.” Ember waved a claw at him and turned away.

Spike smiled and closed his eyes again. Ember didn’t really mind. She never did. Even though she’d never admit it, she’d always been fascinated by his upbringing. Raised originally by Celestia herself, until he reached fourteen. Only then had his dragon magic come in, wild and fierce and beyond his ability to control.

There were still a few rooms in the castle that smelled faintly of smoke from where Celestia had tried to contain the feral natural magic within him. Even she had struggled to contain him, until the third day when Celestia’s newest student—one Twilight Sparkle—had come looking for her mentor.

Spike smiled when he remembered the look of outrage on Twilight’s face when she saw what she thought was the princess defending herself against a savage dragon. No older than Spike, she’d thrown herself into the middle of it all.

And to Celestia’s shock and Spike’s surprise, Twilight had been the one to stabilize him.

“You done yet?”

Spike rolled his eyes, but didn’t open them. “Would you give me a minute? This actually takes some minor meditation. I can’t just turn it on at the flip of a switch. Not like you.”

“You cocky little…” Ember muttered a few more things and went quiet.

He chuckled. And to think, ten years ago last week, he’d help her take the dragon throne. He had always secretly suspected one of the reasons she tended to want him so bad was because he’d been the one to take the Scepter first. After all, she’d seemed a little strange that night when she’d ‘thanked’ him for his help for the first time.

Spike shook his head. He was meditating on the wrong thing. If he continued to mediate on that, it would end up pounding Ember for the third time today. The dragoness deserved a little time to recover.

He returned to his thought about Twilight and her miracle of magic. Though he had learned a lot more about magic since she’d contained him, anytime he needed to unlock his own magic beyond a few basic spells, he had to relive these memories. He had to remember the point of binding. Only then could he unbind it.

And that’s when he felt it. Like thin line of red paint in a perfectly white room. He could almost see the power. It was… strange. And extremely inviting. He shivered despite himself. Just looking at the magic filled him with strange thoughts… and a not-so-strange warmth.

Spike opened his eyes and gasped in a gulp of air.

“Well?” Ember demanded. She even looked a little concerned. “What did you—”

“Oh, I felt it,” Spike said, his voice huskier than normal. “Wow. That’s some… intoxicating stuff. I can see why you’re curious.”

“What do you think it is?”

Spike had a few guesses—most of them silly—but he didn’t want to give that away just yet.

“I need a closer look to be sure.”

Ember eyed him, then shrugged. “Whatever. Let’s go then.”

Spike nodded.

Ember took a deep breath, seemed to get her bearings and struck out in a seemingly-random direction. Spike knew it was anything but random. He knew the magic would be pulling at Ember just as much as it pulled on him. Probably more, considering how she kept putting an extra sway into those hips of hers.

As they walked deeper into the darkness, massive stone doors with intricate sigils loomed up on either sides of them, flanking the enormous corridor. One of the Ancient Lords could fit through here, back when dragons strode on four legs and grew to the size of buildings.

“What is all of this?” Spike asked in a hushed tone.

“The Dark Halls,” Ember whispered, holding her torch high. Light sparkled off of her golden chainmail. “These are the hoards of the Dragon Goddesses.”

“Wait… Dragon Goddesses?” That hadn’t been in any of Twi’s history books.

“It’s just a name,” Ember said. “But they’re… like mythology now. Ancient matriarchs who could wield full magic. If you came around to the Dragon Lands to actually learn, you’d know that.”

“I learn plenty every time I come here,” Spike said, his voice smug. “For example, I learned if I finger you in that one spot, you’ll suck my—”

Ember shot him a glare deadly enough to freeze a cockatrice. Spike decided to actual be a gentledragon for once—sorta—and shut up.

“Anyway.” Ember continued. Her leathery blue wings were twitching in time with her tail now. And those weren’t twitches of annoyance anymore—at least, not entirely. “Every ten years, it’s traditional for the Dragon Lord to show a piece of a Goddesses’s ancient horde. I wanted something special, so I went to the first Dragon Goddess. No one had been down here for at least a thousand years. Elder Femax said the place was cursed, but I thought that was crazy.”

“Is it?” Spike asked. The magic didn’t feel malevolent, though it didn’t feel completely benign either.

“I don’t think so,” Ember said—yet she didn’t sound sure. “I just think it’s some sort of magical artifact that got loose after the last big quake. But the door has weird wards I don’t know.”

“Twilight would really be better at this,” Spike pointed out as they turned a corner. This section of tunnel looked even older. The lava vents on either side of the passage had cooled, leaving Ember’s torch to light the way again.

“And the Elders would turn me into a broodmare if I brought a pony around here!” Ember snapped. “So, you’re the next best thing.”

The corridor suddenly stopped at a massive black door, easily five times Spike’s height. Ember paused to light a couple of braziers and slid the torch into a bracket on the wall.

“This is it.”

“What was her name?” Spike asked, trying to take it all in.

“Remothi, Queen of the Heats,” Ember said in a reverent voice. “The mother of dragons.”

Spike stepped forward and studied the door, his purple-scaled claws hovering less than an inch over the glistening obsidian surface. There were sigils here, stretching as far as the eye could see. Every single iota of the door was covered in inscriptions and runes. Some of it was familiar to him… but most of it was gibberish.

“Anything?” Ember asked after a few minutes, folding her arms under her breasts and biting her lip. “Anything at all?”

Spike traced a symbol he recognized as Ancient Draksyiad. “This one seems to be center… I think it’s the sign of the Matriarch Remothi.”

“You think?”

“It’s weird… it’s sorta like an embellished rune for the word ‘female?’ It almost looks as if the ‘shadow’ rune is part of it though. Then there’s a bunch of spells I don’t know. Not to mention the ‘male’ runes all around it, plus smaller and simpler female runes, too.”

“You’ve totally lost me.”

“You’re not the only one who’s lost.” Spike sighed and scratched his head through his hair ridges. “There’s not a single gender symbol is connected to one another without a spell. That’s… weird.”

“Why?” Ember asked, stepping forward to study the symbols.

“Ehhh…” Spike hesitated. “In the few books I’ve seen, it’s just never like that. It sort of reminds me of a fertility rite… but way more complex. Shadows are a key part of it… something about becoming one with the shadow? Maybe it needed to be done in the depths?”

“‘Fertility rite,’” Ember repeated, glaring at him. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Totally serious!” Spike said, pointing at the spells. “Just look here…”

Ember glanced at his claw and then back at him. Her wings were still twitching. That’s when his fascination for the door gave way to a different kind of fascination.

“You’re just trying to get under my tail again.” Ember said with another glare.

Spike grinned easily and shrugged. “Well, you do seem to love lifting it whenever I’m around.”

Her wings twitched again. He’d always loved those wings. Especially how sensitive they were. He didn’t mind if Ember constantly threatened to get revenge on him when he reached thirty next year and his wings came in. In fact, he looked forward to her attempts at vengeance.

“You’re way too cocky, Spike,” Ember said, poking him in the chest and making him step backward toward the door. “Seriously! I’m bringing you down here to a place most dragons only dream of, and all you can think of is getting under my tail!”

“You’re the one who said I was interested, not me,” Spike pointed out, perfectly reasonable, as always.

Ember’s eyes narrowed again. Her breathing quickened. The fires to either side of the door seemed to grow brighter. The sense of magic in the air thickened… or maybe it was just Ember getting hotter.

“You’re not the only dragon I get to enjoy you know…” Ember hissed.

Spike’s grin widened. “Oh, I know all about you and your clawmaiden, Enrixa. Not to mention Naira, Vandir and Shayza.”

Ember’s face went redder with every name. “How can you possibly…”

“Oh come on!” Spike laughed. “It’s not like I can’t smell them every time they’re in the same room as you. They really got it bad for you. Still, we both know there aren’t any good males around for you to play with. Let’s be honest… most potential candidates leave a lot to be desired. Thankfully, you got me.”

“You’re… you’re just trying to rile me up!”

The fire grew a little higher, casting parts of the hallway into deeper shadow. Spike guessed there must be a draft or something.

“Yeah.” Spike smirked. “Is it working?”

Ember trembled for a few long seconds before she finally broke.

With a feral growl, she threw herself at him. Spike thought he was ready, but she still shoved him hard against the cold obsidian of the door. He moaned as a delightful rush ran down his spine and through his tail, then back up and all the way over his scalp.

Only then did he realize he felt the magic in the air. The door was positively brimming with it. It felt old and intensely powerful, like sensing a looming cliff in the fog. Shadows seemed to bubble up around them, darker and somehow thicker than they should be. The light gained a faint purple sheen.

Ember didn’t seem to notice… or care. She was too busy pulling his shirt open to reveal his muscled green-scaled chest. She nipped and nibbled at him in all the right ways. He felt himself grow and thicken for her.

“You’re such… a… such a…” Ember growled as she took a long lick around one of his nipples. “Such a jerk to me… can’t believe a dragon… raised by ponies…”

Ember seemed to lose the ability to speak. Instead, she was already pulling at his belt in something close to a frenzy. In fact, she was acting hungrier than last month—and she’d been in heat then! One hand rubbed his cock while the other kept trying to yank his pants off.

That’s when he noticed Ember’s horns were… glowing slightly. A faint red. That didn’t seem right.

Spike paused for just a moment and managed to scrape up just enough focus to think. It was hard, but after dealing with the panic attacks of one Princess of Magic, he’d learned a few tricks. He managed to tap into his magic and unbind just a little of his power.

Ember finally got sick of waiting and ripped his pants clean off.

The same moment, something slammed into Spike’s magical core. He blinked and the world vanished.

Author's Note

Heee! New story idea I had lotsa fun with! Hope you like it! The really fun stuff comes next chapter! :3

If you find some mistakes, lemme know with a direct message! <3