"Tartarus damn it..." Shifting didn't make him any more comfortable, but then Sludge hadn't really expected it to. A mattress and blankets made of rocks did not promote easy sleeping, especially after the nights he'd spent in that pony castle.
The thought made him mutter, "Tartarus damn it..." again. If only he hadn't picked a fight with those fledgling whelps and gotten his tail handed to him, he wouldn't've crashed into that damn pony town, met that damn purple squirt, and known what a damn mattress and blanket were supposed to feel like.
But no! Here he was, huddled in some damn muddy cave, snow falling outside, the Dragonlands half a world away, and no one to care if he froze or didn't! It was all totally—
"Sludge?" a voice with a weird accent asked behind him. "Land sakes! That finally you?"
"Huh?" Sludge rolled over to face the cave mouth, several parts of his bed coming loose and tumbling down the slope in that direction. But the green glowing pony standing there didn't even flinch as the rocks rolled right through what should've been the meat and bone of her legs and outside into the snow.
"Hoo-wee!" the pony said, stomping a front hoof soundlessly on the floor of the cave. "You're one hard fella to find!"
Sludge blinked at the pony and realized that he was seeing the wall and the cave opening through her, too. Trying to pick from the four or five questions popping into his head, he went with "What?"
The pony pushed her hat back. "I'm the Spirit of Hearth's Warming Past!" she announced. "And I'm the first of the folks who's gonna show you how wrong you are, rejecting the meaning of Hearth's Warming Eve!"
All Sludge could do for a heartbeat or two was more blinking. Then— "What?" he decided to ask again.
"No time!" the spirit said, a rope appearing in the green glow beside her. "Took me so long tracking you down, we've gotta get moving! So hang onto your britches!" The rope flashed out, grabbed him around the middle, and before Sludge could take another breath, she was hauling him off into the night.
The whole world jangled and jumbled for the next bunch of heartbeats, Sludge shouting, "Whoa, whoa, whoa!" and nothing anywhere doing any whoaing. Finally, though, everything did whoa, and Sludge crashed face-first into it.
"Sorry 'bout that," the pony said somewhere off to his left, but Sludge had said 'sorry' that exact same way enough times to know the pony didn't mean it. "But we're here! I...I reckon..."
Peeling himself from the ground, Sludge stood and blinked, the air suddenly warm and dry around him. "Hey..." He pointed to the cave in the rocky cliff face ahead, heat and light pouring out of it and telling him that the mountain they were standing halfway up the side of was a not-quite-inactive volcano. "That smells like old Fatty in there."
"Mercy!" the pony said, and Sludge glanced over to see that she had her transparent hat off and was pressing it over her transparent nose. "That's one powerful aroma! Like the butter's gone bad, but you're using it to fry up your cabbage anyway even though the cabbage got overboiled four weeks ago."
Sludge had to grin. "That's Fatty." But then he had to let his grin droop. "Except Fatty's been dead for a hundred years." He turned his drooping grin into a scowl and aimed it at the pony. "What's up here?"
"The past." The pony gestured to the cave mouth, but that made her drop the hat, her whole face scrunching up when she took a breath. "I'm gonna show you how special Hearth's Warming used to be back when you was just a little sprat."
"Hearth's what-ing?" Sludge asked, but then a roar of laughter shook the stone around them.
"C'mon!" Tugging the rope, the pony leaped for the cave mouth and dragged Sludge inside after her.
"And then?" Fatty was saying—and it was definitely him, too; Sludge had forgotten what a lot of ground the old dragon had covered, flopped down in front of the lava stream that ran through the cave. The cave itself was big enough for a couple dozen dragons of every size, shape, and color to fit in, all of them watching Fatty intently with their teeth showing. "She wrapped one set of claws around his head, the other set around his wrist, and she tore his arm right outta the socket! Damnedest thing I ever seen!"
"Wow," breathed one of the little whelps right up front, and Sludge saw that it was his very own self when he was maybe a decade old.
It was just like the glowing pony had said: they were in the past...
Fatty waved his pudgy arms, flapping around near the top of his formless bulk. "The blood spurted everywhere, and when Glazier shifted her grip to squeeze his torso, that spurt became a regular pyroclastic flow!" He leaned forward, and Sludge remembered this exact moment happening, watched from the mouth of the cave as Fatty's gaze met his own, his squirt of a self staring wide eyed up at the big old dragon. "And you know how good blood smells like when it hits hot rock, right?"
Little Sludge's head nodded like it was getting ready to pop off, too.
"Well, sir?" Fatty rocked back to look around at his audience. "This smelled even better. 'Cause it was the blood of her enemy frying on that rock. And there's nothing anywhere that smells better'n that."
For an instant, the only sound in the cave was the crackle of the lava flowing. Then the whole place broke into stomping, hooting, hollering applause.
All except for the pony beside Sludge. "What the hay!" she shouted, her hooves wide set and her head pulled back. "I mean, what the absolute hay!" She spun away from where Fatty wasn't really taking his bows—he didn't have the waist for that—and wrenched Sludge back out the cave mouth.
Everything pitched and rolled a whole lot more, Sludge flailing his arms and legs this time while he shouted, "Whoa, whoa, whoa!" He smacked the ground face-first again, too, but this time, it was cold, mushy snow instead of good, solid gravel. Sitting up, sputtering, smacking the stuff away from his snout, he shivered, blinked, and found himself looking at a pink pony with flowers or something woven around her ears.
Her mouth was a straight, dark line across her snout. "Saying 'whoa' to a pony?" She shook her head. "Very insensitive." Her squint stretched into a stare, though, as it moved over to focus on the green glowing pony. "But what're you doing here so soon, Pasty? Don't you have to show this guy more of his—?"
"No, siree, Bob!" The see-through pony was shaking her head so fast, the glow made her face blur. "Them dragons was talking about pulling arms out and spraying blood everywhere! I mean, I'm a spirit, not a ghost! I don't got nothing to do with none of that gory stuff!"
"Wow." The flowered pony clapped her front hooves together, the sleeves of her big yellow robe thing flapping in the other pony's glow. "A triple negative!"
But Sludge wasn't interested in knowing what that meant; he was busy thinking back on what he'd just seen. "The Feast of Fire. I'd almost forgotten about that. Sitting there with the other orphan hatchlings every year just drinking those stories up..."
The pink pony sidled up to the glowing pony. "See?" she muttered out of the side of her mouth. "It's working!" She flashed Sludge a quick, toothy grin, then shifted her lips over to talk to the other pony again. "You need to go back and make him realize how much Hearth's Warming meant to him when he was little!"
"Hearth's Warming?" The glowing pony poked a hoof at the pink one. "That weren't Hearth's Warming! That weren't anything but a buncha carnivores and cannibals bragging 'bout all the folks they'd et over the years!"
"What?" Sludge said at the same time as the pink pony, but Sludge went on: "No dragon's eating any other dragon!" He shrugged. "I mean, yeah, maybe a pony gets eaten once in a while, but that's just the natural order of things."
"No, siree, Bob!" With several soundless stomps, the glowing pony nearly flipped her hat off. "Where I come from, nobody gets et during Hearth's Warming, not then, not now, not ever!"
"Hmmm..." The pink pony rubbed her chin. "Maybe that was just how they used to do things." With another toothy grin, she patted the other pony's withers. "No offense, Pasty, but there was a lotta weird stuff that happened back in your domain. I'm sure dragons celebrate Hearth's Warming way differently now!"
Sludge raised a claw and started to ask once more what this hearth thing was they kept talking about. But before he could, the pink pony grabbed the glowing pony's rope and hauled him up and away.
He didn't shout when everything went flippety-flapping this time, but only because his face slammed into warm rock a lot more quickly than before. "Like these dragons here!" he heard the pink pony squeak, and he sat up to see another cave full of dragons sitting around a pool where lava was cascading down from a hole above.
It lit up the whole place, a lovely brimstone smell floating around, and one of the dragons was saying, "—snapped first one leg, then the other, the crack of the bones audible even over the screaming."
"Eep!" came that pony squeak, and Sludge got pulled sideways, skidding over a patch of obsidian that hadn't been there a second before and splashing face-first into a lake of lava.
Like before, though, none of the dragons basking in the lake seemed to notice him. They were all looking at one big copper-colored dragon stretched out along the side of the lake. "They have this stuff called hair." The dragon flicked her foreclaws along her head spines. "And when I roared down on them with fire belching outta my gut, every bit of hair on the whole herd of them went up like so many torches! It gave off the most amazing smoke and smell!"
"Eep!" The pony squeak was even squeakier this time.
"Hey, now!" the slightly deeper tone of the green pony said from somewhere above and behind Sludge. "How 'bout that new Dragon Lord of theirs! She's s'pposed to be all modern and everything, ain't she?"
"Pasty, you're a genius!"
This time, the lasso around Sludge's middle wrenched him backwards so that when he hit the ground—awful and icy and cold again—it was tail-first. Another lava pool sat ahead of him, though, this one surrounded by snow, the air steamy and somehow both hot and cold against his scales. Ten or fifteen dragons sat soaking up to their waists in the lava, but Sludge's attention went immediately to the one who had the Bloodstone Scepter leaning against a pile of rocks on the shore of the pool behind her.
The Dragon Lord herself! Sludge started wondering if there was a way he could sneak over there and grab the Scepter, but that damn rope still felt pretty tight around him.
"Now, me and Thorax," the Dragon Lord was saying, "we already knew that the unreformed changelings had a spy in the hive, and we figured they'd be listening in to any plan we put together. So the plan we made when we met there in the hive was a lot different from the one we put together when we met with Twilight at Canterlot Tower.
"Which meant that when the whole pod of renegades had Thorax surrounded in that box canyon and I swooped overhead yelling, 'Now!', all the changelings turned into lumps of basalt 'cause that's what I'd told Thorax he'd hafta do to survive the attack us dragons were gonna unleash. Instead, though, Thorax just flies straight upward, and my squad kicks out the wall they'd built, flooding the whole canyon with lava!
"The pegasus ponies Twilight sent fly in the next second, pelting the lava with so much cold rain and snow and stuff that the lava freezes up pretty much instantly, sealing those changelings under a ton and a half of sticky, solid rock! And yeah, Thorax was still kinda sad about having to kill the whole bunch of 'em, but hey: they mess with the Dragon Lord's friends, they're gonna get themselves boiled and smashed and frozen, y'know?"
This time, the "What the hay?" and "Eep!" went off at the same time, and the force wrenching Sludge away was so hard and fast, it tore the breath out of his lungs before slamming him once again face-first into a layer of fine grit with something that felt as hard as granite underneath it.
"Sisters!" A different, much louder and more solid pony voice rang through the clattering inside Sludge's skull. "Why do you continue playing about? Should you not have passed the miscreant on to me by now that I may show him his future and deliver the final blow to his recalcitrance?"
The squeakier pony voices rose in a tangle around him at that point, but Sludge wasn't really listening. Pushing himself to his knees, he wheezed in and out for what felt like a couple minutes till he could feel the air finally sticking to the inside of his lungs. At least it was warm here, though...
By then, the pony voices had stopped, and Sludge brushed the gravel from his eyes to see a taller, darker pony wearing a silver-gray robe had joined the other two. All three were glaring at him, though, so he unlimbered a scowl, swallowed the stale, dusty grit in his throat, and asked, "What? You prissy little ponies got a problem or something?"
"We?" the tall pony asked, looking down her long snout at him. "Indeed not. For we celebrate love, laughter, and friendship rather than death, destruction, and mayhem." A confused wrinkle creased her brow. "Have you honestly no idea what Hearth's Warming is?"
Sludge waved his arms. "That's what I been telling you!"
The pink pony's glare had changed, too, her eyes wide now and her head pulled back. "And all you dragons do during winter is sit around telling horrible stories?"
"Well?" Sludge pushed himself to his feet. "It's a horrible season in a horrible world filled with horrible creatures, and most of 'em don't even have the sense to be dragons. What else're we gonna do?"
The tall pony shook her head. "Your current dragon lord doesn't seem to think the world and its creatures are so very horrible."
Sludge shrugged. "She's an idiot. What's that gotta do with me?"
The glowing pony still had her glare firing at him full force. "So you got no problem with your past, present, and future all being one kinda wasteland or another?"
"I'm a dragon." He crooked a thumb at his chest. "If we aren't in a wasteland, we trying to make a wasteland."
The pink pony narrowed her eyes. "Does that include pillows?"
Memories tried to nuzzle soft and gentle against him, but Sludge pushed them away. "That's not who dragons are," he said, the words wanting to stick in his throat.
The tall pony shook her head again and vanished.
The first pony turned away. "Not who you are, y'mean." And she vanished, too.
Swallowing, Sludge looked over to where the pink pony had been standing, but the world spun around him, tumbling him sideways and toppling him forward. Frozen air slapped him, and it was snow that he fell into again.
"Tartarus damn it!" he shouted. Rolling over, he sat up and saw the cave he'd been trying to sleep in when this had all started gaping cold and black at him from the side of the icy hill. But something sat in the mouth of the cave that hadn't been there before: a pillow, blue and white and fluffy with some sort of red curving shape on it.
"Tartarus damn it..." He trudged over and picked it up. What was he supposed to do with—?
A thought came to him, and he raised his snout, sniffed for something he hadn't tried to find recently and would've gone out of his way to avoid if he'd ever come across it: the scent of other dragons.
Yeah, there were maybe a dozen gathered a few miles away. It was apparently the Feast of Fire today, after all.
Stretching his wings, he flapped upward, his mind already spinning up a story he could tell about burning down some ponies' cabin and taking their pillow.
He grinned. He'd need to come up with some good, gory details, but he was sure he could manage it on the way.
