— Carnelia —

If it was all the same, Carnelia kind of wished that Fluttershy had remained a dragon in order to fly her to the hospital. Failing that, she was pretty sure that Rainbow Dash was supposed to be the fast one, and she was almost small enough to be carried, but there was the small issue of her being accidentally fatal in the wrong conditions.

She wasn't in pain, exactly, but the Ring of Ashmund was responding to the dragons in the crowd and it was taking everything she had to keep control of it, and being walked down the street with the two most terrifying beings she'd ever heard of on each side of her was not helping her peace of mind. Oh, sure, technically the princesses were supposed to be even more powerful—the lake to the east that had once been a forest attested to that—but that power wasn't so near to the surface as it was in Rainbow Dash, or as creepy and deeply concerning as Fluttershy.

That said, the demigoddesses' presence did have one silver lining, which was the fact that their reputations preceded them, and the crowds parted around the group. If Carnelia had had to push her way through the crowds on her own, she suspected that at least some of them wouldn't have made it out of the experience unchanged.

Fortunately, it wasn't long before they came upon the Ponyville Hospital, which was a sight to see. Carnelia didn't know what it had originally looked like, but it was clearly in the process of renovation and expansion. She had never been inside of a hospital herself, but she understood the basic idea and supposed it made sense that one would be made a priority.

Fluttershy led the way and spoke with the mare at the front desk, who quickly directed them to a room, much to her blushing chagrin. It turned out that when two goddesses showed up, they got to jump to the front of the line, who knew?

Carnelia's first experience with a hospital was unremarkable. They weighed and measured her... and weighed and measured her... and weighed and measured her some more.

Rainbow Dash was quite sick of it after the first five minutes of this, but insisted on sticking around, just in case.

The problem was, her height and weight didn't seem to want to stay put. The nurse on staff scolded Carnelia, telling her that she needed to stay still so she could nail down her vitals, but no matter how much she tensed and held her breath, the needle on the gauge kept drifting up and down, and Fluttershy had to point out that this sort of thing was why they were there before she would accept it and mark down an average.

That pretty much set the pace for the rest of their visit. The doctors were on a whole flummoxed by Carnelia's condition, and even the old dragoness that they had recently hired wasn't entirely sure if the ring could be cut free without damage. Just about the only thing that they could tell them was that her heart sounded fine, and the ring might be responsible for that by actively taking up the slack.

Eventually, Fluttershy had no choice but to propose her own solution, which the hospital allowed them to commandeer one of their rooms for. Carnelia didn't have the experience to back it up, but she gathered that this was most likely another quite unusual case of pandering to the demigoddesses.

"Um," Fluttershy started off, not sure how to broach the subject. "You've seen the manifestation of my... my demigodesshood," she said, sounding distinctly embarrassed to actually call it that.

"Yes," Carnelia agreed. "As you explained during the search for Ember's sire, you possess the skill to see through the eyes of lesser beasts, and since then I have seen you steer their actions and assume their forms. Your felicitously scheduled presence at the library was also difficult to miss, seeing as it ceased a most unpleasant squabble, something for which you have my most sincere appreciation."

"Yes, well..." Fluttershy shuffled from hoof to hoof. "It isn't just smaller animals that I can assume control of," she admitted. "You might have guessed, since I was able to become one back at the library, but if I push... if I really need to... I can control dragons, too. I've done it once before, though I promised myself I wouldn't do it again—not after last time—and I won't. Not unless you let me."

Carnelia tried not to let the uneasiness get to her, because what was this terrifying pony demigoddess who apparently had something resembling the abilities of both the Ring of Ashmund and the Bloodstone Scepter entirely naturally.

After, perhaps, a little too long, she said, "I see..." and considered what this actually meant for her. "So, since I am powerless to control the ring, you suspect that you may be able to do so in my stead?"

Fluttershy tilted her head to the side in confusion. "Um, no. Actually, I was just thinking that I would..." She held her hoof in front of her, and then it fell off.

That is, her hoof.

Fell off.

Her hoof fell off and turned into a single yellow squirrel on the way down.

The squirrel, not at all miffed at being dropped from a height, stood up on its hind legs and looked at Carnelia.

Carnelia had to sit down.

Fluttershy... Fluttershy actually wasn't entirely much better, as she was staring at her slightly shortened leg with a faraway look.

"Woah!" Rainbow Dash said, taking a flapping hop over to get a closer look at it. "That's wicked!"

"Um, yes," Fluttershy agreed, flexing her stump and breathing very slowly and deliberately. Shortly, the yellow squirrel dashed up Fluttershy's other front leg, over her withers and down to the missing appendage where it curled up and turned into a hoof once more. "...Sorry," she apologized, setting it back down on the wooden floor with a faint clop. "I haven't really experimented with it much—Twilight would be disappointed in me—but, um, that's it. It should be very simple."

How, exactly, does one acquire a power like that? If it was a manifestation of her demigoddesshood and it was something she just naturally had, then did that mean it was her personality? How exactly does 'shy, retiring wallflower' equal... that?

What Carnelia actually said was, "...What happened to the last dragon you used it on that you swore never to do it again?"

Fluttershy visibly winced, but she did that a lot anyway so Carnelia wasn't sure that it meant anything. "...Oh, well... Yes, I suppose it wouldn't be right not to tell you, it's just... the last dragon I used it on was kind of... dead. Well, he was dying, anyway, and his heart was kind of... really very... incinerated... so I took him over, which healed him... and it worked just fine until I let him go and his heart was still a part of me, and he... and he..."

As she listened to the story, Carnelia's throat grew steadily drier, and she swallowed to wet it. She wasn't sure if it was the heart, but that was definitely the area that dragon fire and therefore dragon magic came from, which had disturbing implications—as if there was anything about this that wasn't disturbing.

"He... rejected it. Um, not like a transplant gets rejected, just, you know, he removed it. Physically. With his claws." With every word Fluttershy said, her quavering voice got quieter and quieter, which really wasn't fair, because it was making Carnelia feel bad about the most viscerally horrifying thing she had ever heard of, from the perspective of the one who had done it.

Suddenly, the walking thunderstorm was sounding like the less frightening of the two. Not the less immediately dangerous, of course—nothing made one step lightly like a lighting bolt in the shape of a pony looking for the first opportunity to break free—but it was now a toss-up as to which one she'd rather have angry at her.

Not that it really mattered, as the two seemed rather close, so what angered one of them would probably anger the other one anyway, in which case she should probably hope that Rainbow Dash got to her first.

Meaning that she had to be very careful with her next statement.

"...Can I get a second opinion?"

— Ember —

Ember roared in frustration, though the sound she actually produced wasn't quite the impressive earth-shaking bellow that she had intended. Slag's room was the last one on her search for several reasons, not the least that her lack of wings would have made it difficult to get to the old library and back, but as she flipped the bed on its side and tore up the mattress, she finally had to admit that, possibly—just maybe—it wasn't there.

It was a very close thing, but eventually, surveying the absolute mess that she had made of things, she decided that she hadn't really done a good enough job, and started throwing things out into the hall, one by one. If it was here, she'd find it.

It had to be here.

— Twilight —

The Ponyville guard station was one of the few buildings in the middle of the city that had been built entirely from scratch. Before Twilight's ascension, Ponyville had barely merited a single squad of guards and a small guard house, mostly for handling the aftermath of civil disturbances—which was a nice way of referring to half the things that had produced friendship letters during the first year of Twilight's stay in Ponyville.

With Twilight an alicorn and Luna moving to the city, though, and the resulting population boom, they had needed an entire contingent to keep peace in the growing near-metropolis and do things like stand guard over a mostly inactive portal to an ex-dragon-lord's lair. They were not technically royal guards, as they were assigned to the city itself rather than the city's pair of currently-homeless alicorn royalty, but they were essentially treated as such, especially with many of them being strangely eager to transfer in from the Canterlot Palace after Celestia-Celestia had vaporized the Everfree forest.

The new guard station, then, was a fairly large, blocky structure made of the same darkly-colored crystal that Luna had originally chosen for the palace, which had been spread to the rest of the town almost like an architectural infection.

"You know," Twilight said as she and Luna came in to land at the guard station after a short flight over their city. "I know there's a whole untouched wilderness in the Crystal Mountains to draw from, but If I'd known that things were going to grow to this scale, I think I'd have said to just use something more mundane for the palace. Or keep the crystal just for the palace. Or just found a new empire in the Crystal Mountains."

Luna raised an eyebrow at that. "I'm not sure it would qualify as an empire, especially if nopony moved there due to the cold."

"Exhibit A: The dragon 'empire,'" Twilight deadpanned. "Exhibit B... The dragon 'empire,'" she reiterated. "Is Ember even staking claim to Torch's old territories? Did Equestria even recognize the dragonlands as a country before she took over? How exactly does all that work when a significant chunk of Equestria may or may not be made entirely of dragons?" She spent a moment thinking about the various questions she'd just proposed, then added, "Also, I see ponies not settling in due to the cold as a feature."

"Now you see why Canterlot is located on the side of a mountain," Luna informed her, possibly seriously. "In fact, it seems like a missed opportunity, since I believe that there are, in fact, a series of crystal caves inside the mountain, yet they have not used it in construction of the city."

"I think it's a generally bad idea to mine the mountain your city is nailed to," Twilight pointed out quite reasonably. "The bigger the city got, the more, you'd be undermining yourself—literally."

Luna nodded quite agreeably. "That is, as you say, a feature."

They entered the guard station via the public entrance and explained that Twilight was there to move the portal from the ex-dragon-lord's lair to a secure location inside the guard station, while Luna needed the freed-up personnel to spread the word to be on the lookout for Ember's stolen book.

Before they split up to perform their individual tasks, Luna had a thought. "If it truly troubles you, would not a portal to the Crystal Mountains accelerate matters?"

Twilight blinked. "Can I do that?" she asked, not having expected to be allowed to actually solve something that was probably a significant aspect to the economics of the constructional boom the city was going through.

Luna hmmed, considering the matter. "I don't see why not," she concluded. "We do not wish to invalidate entire markets, but it is not necessary for you to completely recuse yourself from having any effect at all, especially in this case as the railways are maintained by Equestria and new routes are constructed as they are needed. When we build a new railway tunnel that saves time over the previous roundabout alternative, that is a good thing, even if it ultimately reduces the number of laborers required to run the trains."

"Huh," Twilight said, processing that. "I hadn't considered it like that, but that makes sense. I guess I'll do that, then." She glanced at the guard lieutenant that was waiting to lead her to where she needed to go. "At some point, I mean. When we're not doing national security things."

— Twilight —

The guard lieutenant turned out to be a pegasus mare named Lightning Dust, who, in the process of going to the back of the building and down one flight of stairs, managed to narrate her entire life to Twilight, informing her that she had been intending to attend the Wonderbolts Academy this season, but things had been thrown off because of some freak storm.

"Oh, sure," Lightning Dust was saying as they walked into the first basement floor where the light-security holding cells were located. "They said it was wild weather, but who's going to believe that since the Everfree Forest got between Princess Celestia and a dragon the size of Canterlot mountain? There's nowhere left that makes wild weather between here and the badlands anymore. I bet it was someone getting an order wrong at the weather factory again—happens all the time."

Twilight was fairly sure that it didn't happen all the time, on account of the lack of regular colossal hurricanes in the area, but she kept her peace, especially since she didn't really want to give anyone the idea that the storm in question was the result of one of her demigoddesses lashing out after having her dreams crushed.

"So," Lightning Dust continued, "I thought, 'what could a wicked-cool pony like me do in the meantime that would make me look good to the Wonderbolts next season?'—and then it hit me! There's all these dragons making trouble just by existing now, and the Ponyville guard is hiring, so why not? I get to fly, get some guard experience, maybe wrestle a few dragons on the job—and I look good in black! Come next season, the Wonderbolts will be begging to let me join!"

"Mmhm," Twilight acknowledged, nodding along with the story fairly naturally after so much experience with Rainbow Dash... and Rarity, and Pinkie Pie... and even Applejack once in a while. Oh, and Spike, of course. "And how's that going for you?"

"Oh, it's been great!" Lightning Dust said, absolutely beaming as they went down another flight of stairs. Waving her hoof around, she said, "See for yourself!"

Unlike the first floor, the holding cells on the second basement floor had an exceptionally spacious aisle down the center and were made of some sort of clear crystal which was presumably enchanted to withstand the teeth and dragons, of which there were a number contained in the cells nearest the staircase.

"...Huh," Twilight remarked. "You know, I'm not surprised you've had to detain some dragons, but somehow I hadn't actually considered it when I decided to put a portal to the ex-dragon-lord's lair down here."

"Oh, huh, yeah," Lightning Dust agreed. "It'd be an escape and buffet all in one, right in the cell next door, wouldn't it? Is that it, then? We going back up?"

Twilight pursed her lips, considering the problem. "Not necessarily," she said. "Let me think about it for a minute."

"Sure, sure," Lightning Dust said with the carefree attitude of somepony who is happy to stand around getting paid to wait on a princess.

"I could probably secure it well enough myself," Twilight mused. "But if I throw too much magic at it, it could interfere with the nearest of the cell enchantments."

"That's a thing that can happen?" Lightning Dust asked, surprised and suddenly alert. "Do we need to worry about bringing unicorns down here now?"

Twilight shook her head, waving off the issue. "Not normally," she said, then clarified, "Not with regular unicorns and regular spells. I just have a... brute force way of doing things."

"Hah!" Lightning Dust laughed. "They say the same thing about me."

Twilight blinked, filing that information away in her mind for later because that was kind of concerning coming from a guard.

"Riiiiiight," Twilight said, drawing out the word, then setting her mind back to the matter at hoof. "So, Lieutenant Lightning Dust. Is there a floor below this?"

Lightning Dust cocked her head to the side. "No, this is it—they're only holding cells, after all. The reason there's so many of them is because the walls can be removed to hold the larger dragons, but there's no need for that anymore, so now it's probably more than we'll ever need. Dragons or not, this is still Equestria. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it, though, right?"

Twilight nodded along with the explanation. "Yes, that was my thought exactly, and I'm glad you agree. In fact, I'll quote you on that when they ask why I added a third basement."

Lightning Dust balked at what sounded like responsibility rearing its ugly head. "Uh—ma'am—I mean, your majesty—I'm just a lieutenant. That is way above my pay-grade. Maybe I should go get the captain?"

Twilight dismissed the lieutenant's objections with a wave. "Don't worry about it. I wasn't asking permission."

Lightning Dust started to panic, looking back and forth between Twilight and the stairs, as if she was asking herself whether she should risk leaving a princess who was in the mood to do architecture unsupervised while she went and got her superior.

"Sorry, that came out wrong," Twilight apologized. "You can relax. What I meant was just to clarify that it's something you don't actually need, which simplifies things on my end immensely."

— Twilight —

"So, how did it go?" Luna asked Twilight as the two of them met out in front of the guard station.

"I thought it went well," Twilight informed her.

"Oh?" Luna asked, plainly curious. "Then, that rumbling that the guard captain and I felt while we were organizing the shifts wasn't you?"

"I said it went well," Twilight defended herself in mock offense. "Not that it went perfectly."

— Carnelia —

It was refreshing to get out of the hospital and back out into the fresh air. It wasn't that the hospital had been particularly claustrophobic or oppressive—there hadn't even been the smell of antiseptics and medicines that she might have expected—it was just that there was no replacement for being able to see the open sky.

Odd for a race that tended to live in caves, that, but they did have wings.

Well, they had wings under normal circumstances, anyway. Carnelia was a bit lacking in that respect at the moment, which did spread something of a pall over her sense of relief.

Oh, and nothing had actually gotten done about the Ring of Ashmund which was still wedged tightly between the spikes and scales of her monstrous claws because she was skittish as a stray about letting the yellow terror into her body and mind.

"Soooo..." Rainbow Dash said, breaking the silence. "What now? I guess Twi might have some ideas."

Carnelia's arm throbbed at the thought of what the even more powerful pony princess might offer. She hadn't previously been overly concerned with the potency of the magics the ponies possessed, but the suggestion that was still hanging around in the back of her mind was a different sort of thing than the physical strength of the older dragons she was used to being outclassed by.

"If it is all the same," Carnelia spoke, quite unenthusiastic, "a place to rest and loosen the harness that this ring has placed upon me would perhaps be best. It seems to respond most strongly to my passions and sentiments, so I may be able to secure some sway over my metamorphosis, or suppress it absolutely."

"Oh! Yeah, sure," Rainbow Dash said, then did the exact opposite of what Carnelia wanted and swooped down to pick her up. "Hold on, I know just the place!"

In the next instant, Carnelia learned what it was like to be a cow in a hurricane.

On one claw, simply being touched by a demigoddess that could kill her instantly almost certainly doubled her heartbeat between one moment and the next and she had to clamp down hard on letting the ring react to the sudden jolt of stress.

But on the other, the whole thing was over in the same instant that it started and they had left behind the much more frightening of the two goddesses, which she could only approve of, even if she couldn't quite appreciate any theoretical relief it might bring until her heart calmed down.

The place that Rainbow Dash had brought Carnelia to was a small clearing at the base of a waterfall which was strangely overrun with enough apple trees that it had to be intentional. She had thought that farms—or orchards, in this case—were generally planted on flat, earthy plains, but what did she know about farming? The trees were clearly thriving well enough, though Carnelia was lost as to how one would get a cart through to actually harvest them.

For some reason, that tickled an idea in the back of Carnelia's mind, but she couldn't put her claw on what it might be reminding her of.

Nevertheless, as she stepped forward into the small river winding its way away from the pool at the base of the waterfall, she had to admit that it was, in fact, exactly the ideal kind of serene, isolated locale that would allow her to just sit, collect herself and maybe un-collect a certain piece of maliciously uncooperative jewelry—except for one little thing.

"So, how's about it, eh? Eh?" Rainbow Dash said, swooping out in front of Carnelia and holding her forelegs wide, presenting the place like a carnival barker would the latest show. "I found this place when I was feeling down about—well, that doesn't matter—the point is: it's great! You can take a little dip, then sit and relax in the sun eating apples and listening to the water! There's no way anypony—absolutely anypony—will interrupt you! Complete and total solitude!"

Carnelia was going to settle for the most withering glare that she could muster until she realized it looked like Rainbow Dash was taking another breath to continue her sales pitch. That was too much.

Carnelia expressed her desire for some peace and quiet with an apple to the face of the demigoddess.

Ember would have been proud.

— Ember —

If dragons were capable of sweating, Ember would have been rank. As it was, she was collapsed against the wall in her room, panting in exhaustion.

Every item in every room of the manor had been searched—anything smaller than an apple had been thrown out into the halls, and anything larger than an apple had been reduced to the size of one, or smaller than even that.

Quite a lot smaller, in some cases.

Ashes counted as smaller, right?

The book wasn't there. Not unless it had been buried in the walls, and sometimes not even then.

Damn it.

Damn it all.

Where else could it be? Where else could they have hidden it? Kindle had just come to town when Ember had found her, and Drift had said she'd been sleeping in an apple orchard and flying into town, so neither of them had any particular place they might have stashed it. Carnelia and Slag, on the other claw... she didn't know. She hadn't asked as many questions about them because they were proper dragons raised in the dragon lands and the questions she had asked had been about where they'd come from, not what they'd been doing since they'd come to Equestria.

That had been a mistake.

Then, there was Spike. Spike, who had been living in Ponyville for probably years, who knew all sorts of ponies including five demigoddesses and four princesses. Spike, whose signature magical spell since he'd been a hatchling was the ability to send things to ponies by burning them.

It ate her up inside to admit it, even in the silence of her ruined shell of a home but if Spike had stolen the book and hid it somewhere, then she wouldn't find it

If Spike had given it to one of the Princesses, then she'd never be able to take it back.

Not without the Ring of Ashmund, at least.

...But probably not even with it.

...

Suddenly, the idea that she had refused to consider—that it wasn't one of them that had taken the book—seemed a bit more appealing.

— Star Glister —

Star Glister was a bitter, cantankerous stallion, and every time he left his new residence in Ponyville, he grew ever more so from seeing each new building of crystal and how the mere presence of that mare—that filly playing at being a princess—was warping the city just by being present. It did not escape him that his own presence was due to that very same filly, but he was not above a bit of hypocrisy.

Star Glister had never approved of Twilight Sparkle, ever since she'd been a filly in truth standing at Celestia's side. It was not unusual for Princess Celestia to take students. She'd taken many of them over the long millennia that she'd been ruling Equestria. When Twilight had been chosen, however, it had been quite some time since her last one. More than three decades, in fact.

Long enough that the position had been empty since he was a colt.

It had been his oldest dream to be one of those students. He'd worked hard and devoted himself to the idea. Even his choice of career as an astronomer had been in part inspired by the particular longing that Princess Celestia had been seen to have when she stood out on her balcony and looked up at the night sky.

It was all for naught, of course. More so than he'd known at the time, since apparently that longing was for her lost sister, but also down to the fact that her previous student—still a young mare at the time—had died not long before he was five. It had seemed an opportunity at the time and he had always thought that if he worked hard enough, if he was good enough, that she would choose him to be her next.

He understood now, of course, as a stallion nearing his fifties, that it had been too soon to expect her to take another student so soon after the tragic loss of the last one, but his childish heart hadn't. Back then, a year had seemed like forever, and surely, surely she would be choosing another one soon.

That didn't happen, and Star Glister had eventually grown up and put his childish notions behind him... is what he'd like to say, but before one can be an adult, one must first become a teenager, and his obsession with Princess Celestia had grown with him, his innocent daydreams of being teacher and student growing into grand fantasies of one day courting her.

That did not happen, of course. It was an even more foolish notion than the last, for while Princess Celestia had had many students over the years, she had never in living history been known to take a lover.

This did the opposite of dissuade him. Being a teenager, with his head full of hormones and not much sense, he had imagined being the one. The singular exception who would claim the lonely immortal, virginal goddess.

With each year that passed, he would come to realize that things were not, perhaps, as easy and simple as they first appeared. In his twenties, he decided that, having lived for two thousand years, no, it was unlikely that she was actually a virginal goddess, and he thought himself incredibly intelligent and mature in deciding that his new notions were much more realistic and sensible, even as he worked twice as hard to raise in the ranks of the Astronomer's Guild, believing that surely, some day he would be important enough to stand out to the mare who had watched generations pass by like clouds in the sky.

Eventually, though, he received a shocking wake-up call in the form of 'his' princess taking on a new student.

Twilight Sparkle.

Oh, how he resented her. She was nothing special—and of course she wasn't. She was a filly; barely even a person at that point, but her very existence stuck in the craw of his fantasies. showing them for the ephemeral illusions they were and bringing back a powerful envy of what could have been.

Star Glister's dreams died a slow death over the next few years and maybe he could have finally put them behind him if the filly's mother hadn't started publishing those books.

The Twilight series, he felt, must have been his punishment from fate for coveting what could never be his. It was a series of stories about a young filly chosen to be Princess Celestia's student, going through all sorts of wondrous and fantastical adventures, fighting changelings, saving the world and routinely clashing with her sometimes-enemy-sometimes-rival, Sunset Shimmer, Princess Celestia's previous student turned villain.

The books were a disgustingly blatant exploitative cash-grab from a mother who had all but lost her daughter to the care of a mother much more deserving of the name, and he hated himself and the world around him a little more for each one that he bought and read.

And then, of course, Nightmare Moon had returned and that abominable filly had become a national hero in truth, not just in the pages of her mother's books.

He'd started drinking, then. Not that he hadn't before, but it became a habit for him to take each new piece of news about the oh-so-wonderful Twilight Sparkle with a shot of his latest fine liquor, paid for by his pointless work as an astronomer, his very cutie mark paying tribute to the wrong princess.

Really, by the time Twilight Sparkle had become an alicorn and taken over the night sky, Star Glister had been absolutely done with caring, and this newest revelation was surely, surely the final insult that would finish the joke that was his life, and for one fleeting moment, it almost seemed to be true.

Princess Celestia, overlooked since the return of her sister and the ascension of her student, had shown herself to be the perfect, superior goddess that she was, fighting off an ancient dragon, taking back the eye of the people and reminding him what he had devoted himself to for all these years.

And that's when whispered rumors of Princess Celestia acting like a lovesick schoolgirl started coming out of Canterlot, shortly after he'd had his star taken from his chest, revealed to be the rotten core from which his magic sprung forth.

At that point, Twilight Sparkle's subsequent tantrum wherein she uplifted all of her friends to divine status and the following false alicorn saga barely even mattered to him beyond it somehow being the catalyst for Celestia to split herself into two half-draconic twins.

On the one hoof, in a way, Princess Celestia—his Princess Celestia—was gone.

On the other hoof, it sounded like the new Princess Celestia Corona and Princess Celestia Candesca were both still her, but with a fresh new look at life.

Also twins.

No, Star Glister did not like Twilight Sparkle, but as he read the story of a certain ambassador of the dragon empires who had lost the favor of one goddess and had it replaced with the fire of a dragon, he thought, for once, that he saw a clear way forward.

Author's Note

Thanks go out to those supporting me on Patreon and ko-fi, pomegranate horsie, Sunny, Zervon Tora, Katharine Berry, LD, Jan Sterba, senaxyva, Ersmiller, Canary In The Coal Mine, J T, Nineite, Andrew Pam, Southpaw, Andrew Denton, Trellmor, Kirishala, djthomp, SirHoli, IamUnknown, fused and CvBrony