“This is not permitted…” said that brilliant pair of amethysts, gleaming somehow in the darkness.
“Yes, I know,” said I. “And you know that I know, and you knew that I knew that. Why do you bother to tell me what I know that you know that I already know?”
The gems recoiled. “I… What?”
I sighed. “No, no. You were supposed to have said that you ‘do not know’.”
“Gout!” said the voice from those gems, a harsh, indignant whisper. “This is no time for silliness!”
“And whose fault is this?” I said back. “The pair of us could simply enter and exit, thousands of aurims and an army richer, laughing all the way, were it not for this dour little mood of yours.”
“Dour, you say to me!” came her voice, which at any other time I might have called soothing, but could only think of then as irritating. “You defy the will of the gods, and you have involved me in it. In what state would you have my mood be?”
I pondered for a moment, continuing my walk along the cool, rocky floor. “‘Revolutionary’ is not a mood, correct? I suppose I would settle for excitement. Perhaps even some giddiness, if you have any left in stock.”
She made a noise halfway between a huff and a growl.
Restraining my chuckles, I pressed onwards. I could just make out some light, now, seeming to come from around a corner. “Sear, prepare yourself,” I said. “I believe the chamber is just ahead.”
“I have never been blind, Gout. I can see the light, same as you.” I rolled my eyes.
We came around the corner, and my face metaphorically lit up. At least, I think it did—I was not looking at myself to check. How do metaphors work?
In any case, there was an awful lot of gold there.
Hold on, sorry—there were riches unimaginable. There, far more apt. More aurims and argentims, more kinds of ore and gemstones and other crafting materials, more priceless artefacts and examples of master artisanry than any mortal being had ever laid eyes upon. Well, unless they were a mortal being that happened to have laid eyes upon that exact hoard, I suppose.
It was all piled up—and I do mean piled, with no semblance of organization or reverence—in a great stone cube of a room. There was not much more to it than that, really. Just huge, grey, perfectly cut walls, floor, and ceiling, unblemished but for wall sconces and the connected cave through which we had come.
I looked to Sear, at my side. Sires above, she was a sight—white scales a-glistening in the firelight, with pinpricks of gold and silver reflected from the hoard. And always those eyes. I thought something along the lines of, At least I will always have this treasure, and then laughed at how sappy my mind was being that night.
“So,” I said, “ready to steal it?” I tried to flash what looked in my head like one of those charismatic ‘lopsided grins’ at her, though the muscles in my face told me that I probably just looked like a fool. I was fine with that.
Sear frowned at me, though that was hardly much different from the norm. “Gout, why are you not taking this as seriously as you were just yesterday? We are about to rob the royal coffers—do you not think this requires a certain level of decorum?”
“Sear, look.” I motioned a claw to the gleaming masses of raw, wonderful wealth before us. I could barely restrain myself from diving in and bathing in it. “Are dragons so far gone that our blood should no longer boil over in excitement at the mere thought of this? I cannot but ask where your passion is.”
“My passion?” she yell-whispered at me. “What we are doing—what we have already done—is wrong, and I know that you know that I—ugh! Gout, the gods look down upon us in sha—”
“I would ask that you please stop saying that. My gods—our gods—would have me pillage and hoard for all of my days. If I defy anyone here, it is the king.” I tried to ‘spit the last word’, as I had so often heard the phrase go. I sounded angry, at least, salivating or not.
“And that somehow makes this right?” she asked.
“Yes! That is my entire point!” I threw my hands up, exasperated. She was really sucking all of the fun out of the situation. “When we talked about this, you had made it sound as though you were on my side. What has changed?”
She recoiled a bit, looking hurt. “I… I will admit that I do not feel quite so sure of myself as I did. When all of this was just a plan, before we stole into the palace, we had yet to hurt anyone. It does not seem so noble, now…”
I somehow managed to keep myself from snarling. “Nobility!” I practically shouted. “That! That way of thinking is the problem, Sear!”
She was near to tears. I could see it, the water gathering around my amethysts. I gripped her shoulders in a way that I sincerely hoped was comforting.
“Sear,” I continued, willing my voice to be level, “I will say it as many times and as loudly as I need to: this way of life is not our own. Dragonkind needs no king. It needs no kingdom. To pay taxes, to live in a single place, to peaceably socialize—these things make my scales crawl, and I know that I am far from being the only one to feel this way, even if the others do nothing. We are not ponies, no matter what King Wrought fancies himself.”
“But—” she began.
“No buts.” I released my hold. “Everything is already in motion, Sear. It is far too late now for objections.”
My high spirits thoroughly yanked back to the ground, I strolled over to the closest pile. I reached in and retrieved a single aurim, inspecting it carefully and confirming that it looked normal enough. I then forced that familiar rumbling in my stomach, that magical heat, before opening up my mouth and bathing my hand and the coin in light-blue flames. It subsided a second later, and the coin was gone.
A moment passed, silent but for the crackling of the torches.
A minute.
Three.
I turned to Sear, and she looked as nervous as I was beginning to feel. Trying to sound calm, I said, “Do you think it failed to go thr—”
A burst of green fire appeared in mid-air a short distance away, rapidly materializing into a piece of paper as it approached me. Catching it in my claws, I read it aloud to Sear.
Gout,
Apologies for the wait. I had to verify the coin’s authenticity.
By all means, carry on.
— Goldwyn
I reread the note to myself a number of times. “That was far less… buoyant than I had been expecting…”
“See?” said Sear. “Even that feathered oaf knows that this is a time to be serious. Now come on, we do not have all night.”
I raised a brow. “Eager, all of a sudden? Have I finally gotten through to you?”
From the corner of my eye, I saw her face shift to one of guilt, and no small amount of sadness. It worried me that this all was having such a negative impact on her. “I just want this to be over and done with quickly,” she said. I thought it best to oblige.
Gathering up more of that magical heat in the pit of my stomach, I vomited out as much fire as I could manage in one go, and it swallowed up a chunk of the myriad precious objects before me. I could hear Sear doing the same, her own emerald flames whisking everything safely off to Goldwyn back at the griffon encampment.
This went on for a few minutes, gout after gout—ha!—of magic flames pouring from me without rest, yet I had not made anything resembling a dent in the riches of the room.
Just as I began to wonder whether I should be disappointed or very pleased with that fact, I heard an odd ‘pop’ from behind me. It had sounded as though it had come from Sear’s portion of the room, so I started to turn instinctively, even as my mouth still spewed flames.
My eyes met with something very troubling in the pile before me, just before my flames did.
A tiny little crimson gem, unassuming but for the even tinier runes etched all along its surface.
My mind saw fit to work out what that probably meant just as my flames consumed it.
There was another ‘pop’, this one seeming to come from all around me.
And then there was a blood-red inferno.
I did not feel a thing, surrounded by dragonfire. And I mean that in the most extreme way possible—not only could my body not feel the heat of the fire that I perceived, but my mind could not… feel my body.
So this is what it is like to be transported, I thought.
And I had plenty of time to think. In a sense. Well, it felt as though an awful lot of time was passing, but it also felt as though I was experiencing mere seconds.
At any rate, I thought to myself for a while. A mental while. And a sizable portion of that thinking was devoted to my mistake.
In hindsight, it seemed obvious that King Wrought would mix some tele-stones in with all of that tasty, distracting treasure, nevermind that the things were thought not to actually exist.
My entire basis for thinking that the treasure itself would be trap-free had been flawed. I assumed Wrought would have failed to come up with a way to somehow deal with an interloper that had the cunning to successfully sneak into the castle and the ability to knock unconscious the cave entrance’s guards and even had the guts to try any of it in the first place. But I neglected to consider the "fabled" traps that were—supposedly not—out there, which was downright idiotic on my part, as the royal horde itself was fabled.
And tele-stones were the obvious choice of fabled trap. Thief dragonfire-ing your treasure? Why, here is this little item that will send them straight into your obsidian dungeon. Or, if you happen to be a particularly vengeful little whelp of a king, why not have it send them…
“Good evening… ‘Gout’, was it?” he snarled at me menacingly and stereotypically. But just in my head. In reality, King Wrought actually sounded surprisingly levelheaded, though his voice did boom intimidatingly.
“That is correct, Your Majesty,” I said, actually spitting this time. Not the words, really spitting. At his big, ugly, black-scaled feet.
We were at what had been the griffon encampment. Nearby, I spotted Goldwyn—the griffon mercenary that I had intended to buy into my service alongside his little army—bound and gagged. Sear was there as well, off to the side and looking very… regretful, but somehow not the appropriate kind of regretful, I thought.
Wrought towered above me to my front, his elder body far more impressive than my flimsy adolescent one. His crimson eyes stared down dispassionately at his now slightly sullied foot. “That was uncalled for, miss.”
I might have tried to run up and punch or claw or something at him, had being this close to the king not included a complementary pair of royal guards to hold my arms for me. I had to settle for snarling incoherently.
“Settle down, if you would,” Wrought all but droned. “Gout, I have been made aware that you think yourself some ‘heroine’ after a fashion, and that I am an ‘evil king’ to be overthrown. While I would implore you to adopt a more rational mode of thinking, I must also, in the name of the law, make an example of you.”
Ooh, I wanted to bite him so much.
“Now, my daughter”—he motioned a great claw towards Sear, and my jaw metaphorically-but-not-actually dropped—“seems to have taken a shine to you, Gout, so—”
“You are one of the king’s daughters!?” I shouted to Sear. She nodded, barely able to look in my direction. “But… But that is so utterly predictable! I thought that reality was not supposed to work this way!”
Sear’s face suddenly became a mask of rage, and it was all too easy to hear her oft-told advice to ‘take things more seriously’ in my mind.
“Miss Gout, please,” continued Wrought. “As I was saying, my daughter has her eye on you, and while I cannot in good conscience bring you harm in any case, that would surely serve to stay my hand. In light of this, and in the knowledge that some form of justice must be given, a few years in the dungeon should suffice, I would think.”
He turned as though to leave, but I could not help myself from blurting, “‘Good conscience’? Coward.”
He turned back, but said nothing, staring listlessly at me instead.
I fought against my throat, threatening to close. “This is not Equestria—you are far from being some sort of princess!” I shouted up at him. “Where has your pride gone? Your honor? Anger, greed, mistrust—anything that would make you what you were meant to be? I am a thief that has just tried to take what is yours, and you do not even seem to care!”
A moment passed, then Wrought sighed heavily, turning once again to begin thundering away. “One day,” he said, loudly enough that his voice would carry back, “you will come to realize that dragonkind need not be any less civil than the ponies, or any other peaceful race of beings. These things you label virtues will suddenly appear as they truly are: flaws. Just give it time. You will come to see as I do.”
More sure of myself than I had ever felt before, I said beneath my breath, “Never.”
