“Twilight?”

She glanced backed, wings folded tight to her sides in an effort to keep the winds from blowing them both off the mountain, and the thickest cloth she could find wrapped tight about everything but her goggle-covered eyes. Spike’s lips, quivering and blue, were pulled tight as he wrapped himself in another blanket from her saddlebags and continued trudging beside her. He’d never needed as much warmth as her, but this storm was pushing even his limits.

“What is it, Spike?” she asked.

“Are you sure you want to do this?”

“If the legends are true, this dragon was amongst the first to ever exist. It’s said to have been old before the Three Kingdoms even existed. Can you even imagine what it could tell us about?”

Spike shivered. “Yeah. Sure.”

Twilight stopped then, leaning against the mountain as the cold winds gusted about them, driving the snow and ice deep into their very bones. Spike wouldn’t meet her eyes, staring off someplace far away beyond her sight. His lips had drawn even thinner, pulled so tight as to almost disappear from his face entirely.

“Spike?” she asked.

“Yeah?”

“What are you thinking about?”

He sighed. “Nothing.”

“C’mon, Spike, don’t you blow that hot air at me. I know what you look like when you’re thinking about nothing. This isn’t nothing. Now, what are you thinking about?”

“It’s just… I don’t know how to feel about this.”

“How about excited?” Twilight asked with a smile, undaunted by the next blast of icy wind as she continued trudging her way up the mountain. “Who knows, he might be a great ancestor of yours.”

“That isn’t it.”

Twilight would have raised an eyebrow, but another gust forced her eyes shut, squeezing hard against the slivers of ice threatening to drive themselves out the back of her head until she finally pulled her goggles back down. She really should have stayed at camp until this had blown over. However, the guides had been very clear: once the snow came, there would be nothing short of an earth-shattering amount of magic that would clear it for almost an entire year. And she didn’t have that sort of time. So she trudged on, pressing against the wind like a brick wall as Spike drew the blankets even tighter.

“Dragons don’t do a lot of magic, Twilight,” he said. “We’re generally terrible at it. Pony magic takes too much time, too much effort, so those dragons who do know pony magic don’t share that secret lightly. Or cheaply.” He shifted a bit, and when she looked back, he was staring straight at her. And she saw the haunting alienness in them, glimmering in the deepest part of those green eyes. Parts she’d never know the truth of as long as she lived. “And this is a first dragon, Twilight. They’re the myths that myths talk about and you’re planning on just walking up to one?”

Twilight felt a shiver run up her spine, even though she was broiling under all the jackets and scarves she’d wrapped herself in. She turned back to the path. One hoof in front of the other. Left, right, left, right, left, right.

“If I had any other choice, I wouldn’t have come,” she said.

Spike chuckled. “Now who’s blowing hot air?” Twilight grinned again.

After about a hundred more feet, she made her first mistake. One hoof landed on a loosely packed section of snow, placed a hair too close to the ledge, and she felt herself tumbling over. She screamed, scrabbling backwards, but her thickly padded legs might as well have been submerged in soggy concrete.

Then she felt a sharp yank on her tail, and she was slammed back into the mountainside. When her eyes had refocused, she saw Spike, clinging tight to the wall like some strange gecko, his claws having torn through the rock like old tree bark, one hand still tightly entwined in her tail.

“Are you okay, Twilight?” he asked. His chest was heaving, his limbs quaking, but his eyes hadn’t changed. They were still alien, still hauntingly deep and unfathomable.

Still draconic.

Twilight suddenly felt every scrape, every bruise, and the thought of another step sent her stomach in backflips. Her body screamed for her to stop, to just lie down and wait until spring. To wait until it was warm again, so she could walk back down the mountain. Back to her friends and family and everyone else who were likely worried sick as to where she’d gone.

But she couldn’t go back. Not like this. So, with a shuddering breath, she pushed down the aches, and stood on shaking legs. She swallowed once, then twice, to calm them. When she’d finally found that little nub of strength inside her, nestled in a warm spot right between her lungs, she looked back at Spike, still huddled tight to the mountain wall and clutching her tail tightly.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Thanks, Spike.”

Then the mountain shuddered. And then it roared.

“Avalanche!” Twilight screamed.

Spike yanked her again, but this time, instead of just slamming her into the wall, he pinned her to it, bracing his feet and pushing with all his strength as though he meant to shove her clear to the other side of the mountain. The wall of snow was fast approaching them. She could see its vanguard of cold, eternal sleep approaching, and felt strangely calm in that moment.
Spike would never hold. It was five tons of snow against a ten pound ball of scales and muscle. Even the most rudimentary math said he couldn’t keep them there against that much weight.

“Cover your eyes, Twilight,” Spike growled.

“Spike… ”

“Now!”

But the avalanche was already on top of them. An ocean’s worth of ice and snow, crashing down and barely a hair’s breadth from her face.

Spike roared. Loud and shrill, he roared like he never had before, flames pouring from his jaws in an emerald river that blasted into the fury of nature and matched it. Everything before his breath vaporized instantly, steam and boiling water crashing into them hard like a sauna in a hose. If it hadn’t been for her layers of coats, Twilight might have been cooked alive, instead she struggled to breath as wetted cloth clung to her in increasingly uncomfortable warm suffocation. Her goggles fogged, only to be blasted off her nose a minute later by a torrent of water, forcing her to bury her face in Spike’s scales, unless she wanted to find her face scalded clean off her skull.

The seconds crawled by. She could hear Spike’s heart straining, fluttering as his lungs popped and crackled with lost breath. If he stopped now though, they’d just have delayed the inevitable. A minute passed and he was still going. His legs were shaking, but he kept her pressed against the wall, locking his knees as she heard something in his chest tear. Tears streamed down her face, lost amidst the raging flood about them.

And, as soon as it had come, the snow was gone. The wind again smashed against them both, and Spike fell with a sad little thud, gasping and heaving and retching as he tried to force air back into his lungs.

Twilight fell beside him, grabbing him in her forelegs and holding him close as he continued to gag and dry-heave, eyes distant and unfocused. Now the tears froze on her cheeks, but she didn’t care. She simply let them slide and build in frozen icicles along her lashes as she held him in stiffening limbs, soggy clothes slowly solidifying into one whole mass of ice and cotton. The cold that had been nibbling at her before now had her tight in its jaws, sinking fangs into her every inch and slowly but surely sucking the life from her as one might drain a sponge.

The avalanche hadn’t crushed them. But that didn’t mean it was going to let them escape either. 

“Twilight… ” Spike gasped.

“I’m here, Spike,” she whispered.

“I’m sorry, Twilight. I… I tried… ”

“You tried, Spike.” Twilight squeezed him. Gently. “Thank you. You tried so hard.”

The darkness crept upon them. Night was falling. Soon, the temperatures would too.

“I love you, Spike,” she said as the sun finally sank below the invisible horizon.

Spike coughed. Something warm splattered against her chest. She didn’t dare look to find out what it was.

“I love you too, Twilight,” he croaked.
 

 
She felt warm and dry and content.

She also felt naked.

Twilight awoke with a start, and found herself sitting on what must have been the most beautiful bed ever made in a shockingly well-lit cave. Rich blue and green satins draped about her in a sheer canopy like waterfalls, which she pushed aside as she struggled out of the layer upon layer of thin purple sheets she’d been laid under. As she stood, she saw her clothes lying to one side of the massive stone, folded neatly and perfectly dry. On the other side of the room was Spike, in a bed not dissimilar from hers, snoring soundly.

She walked towards his bed, the clop of her hooves echoing about the chamber as she strode across the warm stone floor of the cavern. The closer she drew, the warmer the room. The air grew thick, and she could feel herself growing dizzy. But she pressed on. The glow of the room was stronger on this side, not caused by the numerous balls of light that were draped tastefully upon the walls of their chamber amongst rows upon rows of stalagmites and stalactites, but by the river of molten magma passing not three feet from the foot of Spike’s bed, bubbling and simmering quietly, an occasional waft of fumes coming to strike her in the forehead with the oddest scent of freshly cut grass.

As she drew beside his bedside, the faintest hint of a smile found its way to her lips. He’d curled up and was sucking his thumb. He’d said he’d given that up decades ago, not long after Applebloom had gone off to highschool, but she knew he still indulged in it if he felt he could get away with it. She reached out a hoof to bush against his cheek.

“Leave him be a while longer, child.”

Twilight whirled about. No-one was there. “Who are you?” she asked.

“Oh, I have not had a name for a long time, young child of the stars, though the one that was once mine was indeed quite beautiful. Talked of meadows, I believe, with a thin stream beneath the boughs of a lovers’ willow. Two souls uniting as one with green tears draping about their faces. Skittering mice and crying eagles, dancing in the everlasting cycle as a snake swims from bank to bank, a river of scales across a river of time. Cries of laughter and unbearable agony. A fallen giant, its shade now given way to cold steel and rocks and fumes. Two broken hearts drifting apart within the toxic haze. Shuffling laborers and shrieking whistles, marching through the endless toil as the vermin crawl across the streets, a harbinger of filth upon a path of decay.

Yes, that was my name. And many were the times it was called out in laughter and in anger. In blessings and in curses. But my name is not why you came. My name will not bring back that which you have lost.”

Twilight frowned, but did not argue the point. The shattered mass jutting from her forehead was proof enough of why she’d come.

“Ferros… ” Twilight whispered. Her host did not reply. “That is one of your names, correct? Ferros of the Iron Mountain.”

“It is not quite as lovely as most of my other names, but yes, I have answered to that on occasion as well, star child.”

“Can you fix it?”

“I think a broken horn is not beyond your kind’s abilities to fix, correct? Many is the horn I’ve seen grown back, if not by the owner then by a friend of the owner.”

Twilight shook her head, tears again forming in the corners of her eyes. “It… it won’t grow back. I’ve tried everything. Medical science, potions and tinctures, incantations and cantrips, everything. Nothing ever stays. They all just fade away or simply fail to work at all or end in disaster.”

“How was it lost?”

“I was fighting someone.”

“One of your own?”

Twilight snorted. “No, some creature from Tartarus, summoned up by whatever newest villain of the week was. I never learned her name, and I never learned its species. Just that I couldn’t put a dent in it. It came, hit me once, and I lost my horn. The girls never even got a shot off. They barely managed to drag me away before Luna and Celestia banished it.”

“And what did this creature do, at the moment of your loss?”

“It… it said something.”

Ferros was silent for a moment. Twilight did not feel the need to interrupt. The silence continued to grow larger and larger, until the whole room was filled with its choking presence. “What was said, child?” he asked.

Twilight didn’t answer.

“What was said?” Ferros asked again.

Twilight still didn’t answer.

Ferros sighed. “Hurts unshared do not lessen the pain, child. They extend it, stretching thin across the years until they either fade away or smother you. Do not hide your wounds. They will only fester and consume you.”

Twilight looked down at her hooves. The first drop landed by her right hoof, followed swiftly by a second, then a third. “Everything,” she sobbed. “Everything it could have said, it did. That I was weak. That I didn’t understand the first thing about magic. And that I didn’t deserve to wield it.” Before she knew it she was screaming. “Why?! We beat it, so why can’t I stop feeling like this?! Why does it still hurt so much?!”

“Because it was right.”

She felt her heart leap into her throat. Her stomach followed swiftly after it. It took her almost a minute to gulp them both back down. She felt like her eyes were on fire, her temples throbbing dully as an ache crept across her chest like a spreading pool of ink across a page. She closed her eyes, biting her lip to keep herself from slumping to the floor and simply passing out.

“So,” she hissed, trembling as she stared down at her hooves. “That’s it, is it? I almost lost Spike today to prove it was all pointless.”

“I never said that.”

“Yes you did!” she shrieked, stomping a hoof. “You just said that!”

“I said it was right. Never that your journey was pointless.”

“It’s the same thing!”

“Really? How so?”

Twilight caught herself speechless yet again, her tongue tripping over itself in an effort to simultaneously scream, throw out insults, and growl in frustration. She settled for settling on her haunches, cradling her aching skull in her forehooves as she settled for breathing deeply. Anything to keep her heart from exploding.

“Fine. I’ll humor you. What do you mean when you say that?”

“Exactly what I said.”

“Is this conversation going anywhere, or are we just running circles now?”

“Will you continue asking questions with obvious answers?”

Twilight allowed the silence to grow again. Of all the thoughts tumbling through her head in a mad dash about her skull, she finally picked one, lingering towards the back of the pack behind all the arguments and accusations vying for her mouth.

“So, if what it said is true,” she whispered. “What’s the point?”

“Yet again, the only answer is the one you’ve already found.”

Twilight glanced up, gazing into the darkened depths of the cavern. “What?”

“Why did you come here, Miss Sparkle? For what reason have you risked life and limb to ask an old dragon their dusty wisdoms?”

Her gaze went back to the floor. “I wanted my horn back.”

“Because?”

“Without it I can’t do magic. I can’t protect anypony like this.” She hunched her shoulders, rubbing one foreleg with another. “I can’t even protect myself.”

“So? Many of your friends are incapable of magic as well. Are they weak?”

“No, but my magic was something that was mine. It made me… special… ”

“Magic is not special.”

“How can you, of anyone, say that magic is not special?”

“The same way that it never made you special, child. Tell me, what is magic?”

“It’s the warmth you feel in a laugh, the joy in a gift given to a stranger, and the wonder of finding trust amongst a sea of deceits. It’s that tingly sensation you get when you stand by those you care for and protect them, even at the cost of your own life, or the honest satisfaction that comes from giving someone else a moment of light in a dark, hurtful world. It’s friendship, and love, and goodness in its entirety. Magic is light.”

“And what of those you fight? Do they not use magic as well?”

Her eyebrow arched. Then her eyes widened. “But… but that can’t be magic.”

“An ideal is not magic, child, just a path. As a river may be turned to the field to grow a crop, or into a village to destroy your enemies, so too is magic capable of both creation and destruction. It cares not for who wields it, or how it is wielded, for it is not a mortal that needs to understand right or wrong. Would you ask the wind its allegiances? The earthquake? What of the sword or spade? Would you ask of them whether they serve for good or evil?

“And, though they serve many, so too do those they serve not deserve them. Has the soldier earned his sword? Or is his sword but his chosen magic? His force, taken by his own sweat and hurts to change that which is about him? Does the mother deserve her child’s smile? Or is it but the child’s magic, a gift to one whose heart grows heavy with hard days and harder nights? Does the ruler deserve their subjects love or hate? Or is it but the subjects’ magic, a method by which those who are ruled dictate their own fate?

“Magic is many things, child. And so too is magic not many things. Magic is not in a horn, or in an object, or in spells and potions. There is no magic in the stillness of an unseen tidal wave. Nor is their magic in the silence of an unknown grave. Magic is not in passion or in faith, until that passion and faith is made into action. In the denial of wrongs and approving of rights. In the defending of beliefs and destruction of your foes.

“Magic is in action. Magic is in life. In action and reaction, in thought and contemplation. And, though magic may come in many forms, they all share the truth that they are not unique, for they are all magic.”

Twilight didn’t move. She simply sat where she was, clutching at her foreleg as her thoughts tried to settle themselves. For what must have been an eon, she did not speak. Then, after a time, she looked up and stared once more into the impenetrable darkness outside the warm light above and beside her.

“Thank you for your time,” she said. “And for your help. I will take my leave now.”

“No more questions about whether or not I can fix your horn?”

“No. I figure I know the answer to that already.”

The chuckle echoed all about her. She watched as the beds and lights all faded into oblivion, the magic holding them together unraveling with an almost glacial slowness. Spike, still asleep, floated across the room and set gently, almost tenderly, by Twilight’s hooves.

“Truly it is rare that I meet one such as you, child of the stars, and rarer still that they display your wisdom and humility. We may now discuss payment.”

Twilight tensed. “What do you want from me?”

“Merely another visit, my child. Perhaps a few stories, to while away a few days for an old wyrm that has long since lost the edge to his fangs, and the answer to my own question.”

Again, Twilight arched an eyebrow. “And that is?”

“If you could go back and do it all over again, would you?”

It took Twilight a whole three seconds to decide.

“It’s a deal.”

The whole cave then began to quake, with a sound that was remarkably close to a tremendous purr as the river of molten magma boiled and bubbled viciously. Twilight swiftly leapt atop Spike, shielding him with her body as best she could. Spike awoke with a startled shout, claws digging into Twilight’s sides as he tried to catch his bearings.

It emerged from the river, long and sinuous and writhing like some great serpent. There was a growl and it darted forward, bashing itself against a cave wall. The rock held. It bashed again. Then again. Cracks formed around the crater it was making, and then, with one final tremendous impact, it broke through. Sunlight poured in, followed soon by a wisp of crisp, clean air.

Tentatively, Twilight stood, Spike following suit. They walked over to the whole and glanced out. Below them were the clouds, hiding the base of the mountain for what must have been a hundred, hundred, hundred feet down. If she listened closely, she could hear the faint sounds of the storm. She glanced back at the mighty creature behind her, shaking itself free of its molten coat against a nearby wall, and then turned and bowed low.

“Thank you again, mighty Ferros of the Iron Mountain. I look forward to our next meeting.” She motioned to the pile of clothes and assorted equipment still lying folded neatly in the cave. “You may keep those, as my promise to return.”

“I shall look forward to it, Twilight Sparkle the Star Child.” It chuckled again. “But I think you should know one last thing if indeed we are to meet again.”

Twilight spread her wings, Spike astride her back as she prepared to take off. “And that is?”

“The name you use is wrong.”

She paused. “No, I’m certain I got it right. It might not be your original name, but that’s how it appears in all the books: Ferros of the Iron Mountain.”

“The problem is,” he said, grunting as he finally smashed the last bit of magma from his head. “That was because of one poor fool’s misspelling of the proper title. They added one too many words.

And that’s when she noticed the thing before them wasn’t a dragon. It was as long as a dozen dragons stitched end-on-end, not counting the part still submerged in the magma river, and thicker than a dozen ponies standing abreast, but it was also pink and slimy and covered in millions upon millions of tiny, fleshy bumps. And, as the last bits of molten rock cleared the head, she saw it wasn’t actually a head.

It was the end of a very long, very thick, forked tongue.

“I am Ferros: the Iron Mountain.”

With a gulp, Twilight again bowed low. Spike had gone completely pale, gibbering something she didn’t understand very quietly beneath his breath as he shook upon her back. Then, with as much dignity as she could allow herself, she took to the air and flew out into the open sky.

Spike only managed to start speaking properly again when the top of the mountain was far into the horizon, right around the same time that Twilight could stop shaking. His nonsensical gabbling quieted, and his eyes refocused onto the back of Twilight’s head, slowly drawn to the shattered remnants of her horn.

“He couldn’t help, could he?” Spike sighed. Twilight felt herself smile, even as more tears were whisked off her face into the wind.

“I never said that,” she whispered. “I never said that at all.”