The Dissonant Infection

Elsewhere, deep beneath the barren, arid desert of the Badlands, somewhere within a labyrinthine maze of twisting tunnels, a dragon slept.

Well, that isn't quite right, the dragon would've thought had he the mental faculties to do so. Floating placidly within the warm and viscous embrace of his own personal pod, the violet drakeling—a creature well into and almost past his young adulthood by pony standards—was very much awake, but not quite aware. A haze had fallen over his mind, thick and heavy and impenetrable.

There were no thoughts to be had in his head, and there hadn't been in quite some time. There was the occasional blink of the eyes here or a twitch of the claw there, but those were involuntary, instinctual movements. Nothing in his cloudy gaze hinted at there having ever been even a spark of life. He simply floated, aimless and empty, in his own private sea of greens and yellows.

For sixteen years, that had been Spike's life. His whole existence. Forgotten by time. Forgotten by the rest of the world. Maybe even forgotten by the one he once called a sister. It would have been a heartbreaking notion if the dragon had the wherewithal to comprehend his circumstances. As it stood, however, Spike was perfectly content to simply be. Here, in his prison of ooze, he wanted for nothing. Nutrients, waste disposal, security—all was taken care of.

No need to think. No need to grieve. No need to remember.

Remember?

Remember... what?

Spike blinked.

And then the world snapped into sharp focus as his comfortable prison was suddenly and violently ripped wide open. Awareness struck the dragon like vicious lightning from the heavens. It dispersed the haze that had permeated his mind, leaving pain and confusion behind as his long-dormant senses were forcefully awakened once more. He barely noticed gravity dragging him down to the cold, uneven ground amidst a small wave of vile yellow-green slime, so preoccupied was he with his reactivating body.

Draconic eyes squeezed shut and retching putrid ooze, Spike tried to stand from where he lay on the wet and slimy stone. He only got as far as his claws and knees before his shaking limbs gave out and sent him spilling back onto the ground. On top of the pain and disorientation, Spike simply wasn't used to his body. Far from the small and pudgy baby dragon he used to be, Spike was taller now. He hadn't quite gained the rippling biceps typical of other dragons his age, but there was power in his lithe purple frame regardless.

His currently spasming muscles were lean and flexible, his claws and fangs sharp and deadly. Still, despite the strength his kind was well known for, Spike's body refused to listen to his commands. All he could do was expel the last of the wretched slime from his lungs, even as that same slime worked to purge the atrophy from his limbs. Spike wasn't sure how long he lay there, twitching and coughing on the ground, but eventually, his involuntary spasms settled into slight shivers.

Then, finally, the shaking stopped altogether. At the same time, the pain and confusion in his mind began to ebb, and rational thought began to return, albeit slowly. With a shuddering breath, the slime-drenched dragon carefully pushed himself up from the ground, getting his arms and legs under him before gradually rising to his feet with a soft groan. Finally, he blinked his emerald eyes open and took a tentative look around.

Darkness, unrelenting and all-encompassing.

No, that wasn't quite right.

Spike blinked again and squinted as his eyes slowly started to adjust to his surroundings. It was certainly dark, but he could make out a sickly green glow that illuminated the rocky walls, ceiling, and floor of a small cave. Spike frowned and swept his eyes over the cave he stood in, looking for the source of light, but found nothing other than the puddle of faintly luminescent yellow-green slime that had spilled from the large egg-like pod behind him.

What... is that?

The pod in question was a pale green and semi-translucent bubble rooted to the ground by a black, chitinous material that wrapped about the surface like thin veins. Spike took note of the large tear in the pod's fleshy, partly opaque surface. It looked like something had ripped its way out from the inside, leaving the gelantinous ooze trapped within to spill out onto the floor.

And that something... was me?

All signs pointed to that being the case, but try as he might to understand what was going on, Spike's memory was still fuzzy and indistinct. He didn't know how he'd gotten here to wherever this was or why he'd been in such a disgusting contraption, but looking at the pod seemed to fill the bewildered drake with a mix of revulsion and a strange sense of loss and longing. The competing sensations made him shuffle his wings in discomfort.

Wait... wings?!

Spike awkwardly craned his neck to get a better look at his back and, sure enough, he caught a glimpse of the two large appendages hanging loosely from his back near the shoulder joints. Stunned at the unexpected sight, Spike flexed unfamiliar muscles with instinctual ease and tightened the wings against his back, then slowly stretching them out to get a better view. The fleshy membrane of his wings were as violet as his scales and each was slick with residual slime, the viscous substance dripping from the tips to fall into the rest of the puddle on the ground.

The dragon grimaced in disgust and gave his wings a sharp flap, dislodging large flecks of ooze. The gesture did little to clear his new limbs of the slime, but fascination far outweighed Spike's annoyance. Though his memory was spotty at best, one thing Spike was certain of was that obtaining wings had been a long-time anticipation of his. But with his excitement came the obvious question of how he'd gotten them. Dragons weren't supposed to gain wings until after the molting stage.

Does that mean I molted at some point?

For the first time since he'd "woken up", Spike took a moment to look himself over and was further shocked by what he saw. Beneath the slime, his body was slim by dragon standards, but incredibly lean, with defined muscle clearly visible beneath the almost radiant sheen of his violet scales. More than that, he was tall. Much taller than he'd been before whatever had happened to him—Spike was sure of that, at least. The stunned dragon guessed most adult ponies would only stand about maybe two-thirds his height, at best.

"What in Celestia's—"

Spike winced at the voice that came out of his throat. It was dry and rough from lack of use, but also deep and slightly guttural—not quite like gravel just yet, but close. With that little discovery, there was no way around it. Spike was at a loss, confused and reeling, but he wasn't an idiot. Even addled as he was, he could at the very least put together that time had passed while he was suspended in that pod—a lot of time.

The problem was, Spike didn't know exactly how much time. A dragon's biological clock was a troublesome thing, their longevity making it hard for other races to gauge their ages at a glance. Spike, being a dragon, had something of an innate sense of his own age, even if he'd been out of it all this time. Such a sense was necessary when you had a tendency to sleep for hundreds or possibly thousands of years at a time.

By Spike's estimate, somewhere between fifteen and twenty years had passed since he was put in that pod, but his draconic senses weren't quite keen enough to tell him exactly. Living with ponies all his life had dulled instincts that would've been honed to perfection in the Dragonlands. That made the drake think of home, and a pang of sadness and nostalgia washed over him before being snuffed out by a sharp stab of pain in his mind as he thought about—

"Gngh!"

Spike slapped his claws to his temples and fell to his knees, splashing slime every which way as white-hot agony blurred his vision. Distant voices suddenly echoed in his head—murmurs of confusion and doubt, cries of alarm and outrage, screams of horror and despair, all accompanied by fleeting flashes of vague images Spike had no reference or context for.

Her voice...

He could hear it.

Out of all the indistinct voices in his head, it was hers that came in the clearest. It called out to him—to them—begging for help. Begging to be saved, only for those desperate pleas to turn to heart-wrenching, throat-tearing howls of agony cut short by a horrible squelch, and then... silence. Cruel silence. There were other voices, furious, horrified, terrified, despairing, grieving, but ultimately inconsequential in the face of that awful silence.

And then Spike was dragged away from it all. Dragged away from the voices, from the silence, from his thoughts, his mind trying and ultimately failing to comprehend what he'd heard. What he'd seen. Whatever else happened to him after that didn't matter. A colorless, foggy montage of events followed, but Spike couldn't make sense of any of it. He didn't want to. More voices followed, and there was a vague impression of radiant, pale green eyes peering into his own lifeless emerald orbs and a wicked grin full of fangs and ambition.

That, too, was inconsequential.

The last thing Spike felt as his consciousness dulled into hazy, dreamlike nothingness was a sense of relief. A sense of gratitude for the fact that he would no longer have to think, to grieve, to remember. That was how it was supposed to go. He wasn't supposed to remember... but now he did. Like some kind of parasitic tumor, the memory wormed its way into Spike's brain, latching onto his newly awakened consciousness and refusing to let go. The dragon's ragged gasps echoed around the damp cave and bile rose in his throat.

Propping himself up on his powerful arms and legs, he retched yet again, unable and unwilling to hold it in. After what felt like hours, his vomiting turned to wet coughs, then a few dry heaves, then rough pants of exhaustion. Eventually, he swallowed and let out a slow, shuddering breath, his eyes glued to the ground but his mind elsewhere. Slowly, Spike shook his head as the memory replayed over and over again in his mind. He raised a fist and—

"No..." he groaned as the fist came down, splashing into the slime and sick around him, "No... No. No. No. No. No!"

With each shaky word, his fist slammed into the ground, harder and harder until the stone cracked, then shattered beneath him. He shot to his feet with a vicious snarl, his horror and despair twisting into something dark and violent. He suddenly felt the overwhelming urge to rend something apart. Someone. To lash out at anything and everything around him. Predatory eyes bulging and gleaming fangs gnashing, Spike swept his wild gaze across the cave but found nothing. No focus for his directionless fury.

It was then that he noticed the singular entrance to the dimly lit cave. An opening just large enough to fit his draconic frame lay just ahead of him. How he hadn't noticed it before was neither here nor there. All that mattered was that he had a way out and a lot of anger and sorrow to vent. The sickly pale green light of the cave seemed to shift to a deep crimson hue as the enraged dragon stormed out of the cave with a guttural growl, leaving behind the cave and the sundered pod that had been both his prison and paradise for over sixteen years.

Yet further within those endlessly twisting tunnels, hidden at the deepest level of the maze-like labyrinth of damp caves and narrow stone pathways, another creature lay dormant, much like Spike. Like Spike, the creature stood suspended in its own pod of semi-transparent pseudo-flesh and vein-like chitin. Unlike Spike's smaller pod, however, the mucilaginous goop inside this much larger pod glowed a bright orange. The thick liquid shifted and bubbled occasionally as the tall equine mass within twitched.

The surrounding cave wasn't much larger than Spike's, similarly housing only the grotesque pod within. But where the entrance to the dragon's cave had allowed him to leave unimpeded, this cave was entirely closed off by a thick door of solid, dark grey stone. A complex series of arcane runes and sigils etched into the door's surface ensured the prisoner remained sealed inside that cave. It was an ancient sort of magic that kept the door shut, lost to all but a rare few.

At the time, the warden felt it only prudent to enact such measures for a prisoner as dangerous as the Princess of the Night. Perhaps she was right, perhaps such measures were entirely too much. Either way, the warden had long since abandoned her post, leaving behind only a single wretched drone to stand vigil over the prison, for that was all the previous warden could spare now. The rest had either died of starvation or had followed the warden when she left.

Now that single jailer was left alone, starving and pitiful, but stubbornly clinging to life. The little drone wandered the tunnels, subsisting on whatever he could find in the empty hive, knowing it wasn't enough but unable to obtain what he truly needed in these abandoned underground passages. Still, he persisted, having recently found a reason to live beyond the deaths of his forlorn kin. As he once more returned to the sealed stone door to fulfill his duty, the pathetic little drone's large opal eyes gleamed with determination.

After all these years, his Queen had finally reached out to him, and contrary to the imperious tone and callous indifference the drone had expected, her words were full of emotion. Sorrow. Regret. Pity. Guilt. A bone-deep weariness. A clear desire for forgiveness. There was anger, yes—rage even—but the drone could tell it wasn't directed at him or any of his brothers and sisters. The drone hadn't ever dared to hope that such a drastic change in his Queen would come to pass—not in his wildest dreams.

Not aloud, anyway.

He hadn't dared to voice his secret wish, lest he be ridiculed by his closest brother and their other siblings, or worse. This little drone was unlike most drones in that he didn't quite share his Queen's desire for power. For conquest. To this drone, a promise of open communication and understanding was far preferable to cruel vindictiveness and a knife in the back. But that was not the way of his kind, he knew... or so he'd thought. But this new development had given him hope for something better.

His Queen, and all her plans, had changed, and they'd changed in such a way that the drone couldn't help but struggle on just a little longer. He wanted the words his Queen had spoken—the new desire she'd passed unto him—to come to fruition. He needed it. Even if he didn't survive to see it, he had to try. It was the one thing left to him and the sickly, starving little drone wouldn't fail. If all went to plan, they would arrive soon and this whole nightmare would end, but if the drone died here, then all would be for naught.

"I won't die," the little drone croaked in a voice so weak it was almost non-existent, "I can't die... not yet."