The pony stood lightly upon the cavern floor, her wings fluttering so her hooves barely grazed the stone. She also stood there lightly because the glow of her horn was reflecting from her white hide and pastel rainbow hair to scatter every bit of darkness that tried to get close to her.

One tiny part at the back of Enceladin's brain giggled to find both meanings of the word being employed simultaneously, but the rest of him was busy roaring at the intruder and rearing back to his full height. The green ridges along the top of his head gouged into the rocky ceiling, sparks scattering in a nimbus around him, and he bellowed at the pony, "I know you, Intemerata, and I've heard nothing but complaints from my subjects about the filthy lies you preach! So back to your own country with you lest my wrath overwhelm me and I overwhelm you!"

"Forgive me, Grandfather." Whether the pony's voice trembled or not, the tiny part at the back of Enceladin's brain couldn't honestly say. The rest of him, though, was more than happy to think that he was hearing a little fear wobbling around behind her words. "But I won't leave while we have unfinished business," she said.

His roar this time shook the whole cave, the back part of his brain noting the almost musical tinkling from the light rain of gravel that scattered down over the jewels and precious metals stacked in berms all around them. "So be it!" Foreclaws spread and teeth bared, Enceladin leaped toward her.

She swooped sideways with a swiftness and ease that no dragon of Enceladin's size would ever be able to match. The tiny part at the back of his brain couldn't help cheering the pretty creature's escape and couldn't help gasping at the way his own talons tore jagged strips from the solid basalt over which she'd been hovering mere seconds before. Brightness flashed to his left; he whirled, swung at her, slammed his paw into the wall right up to his dark purple knuckles, and had to roar with pain this time.

"Please, Grandfather." Her sweet tones tickled his ear. "There's a better way. You know that."

"Silence!" Flailing, striking at her cheery glow again and again and again, he just missed her each time: like trying to capture sunlight, the tiny part at the back of his brain thought. "Your way is weakness, capitulation and death!" the rest of him snarled. "I will have no part of it, and I will not allow my people to take part, either!"

"Think, Grandfather!" She flapped around him like the bats that the back part of his brain had always enjoyed playing with, but the rest of him lashed out at her all the harder, all the quicker. "Think of the advantages an agreement between our peoples will bring! Think of—!"

Whatever her next words might've been, they cut off with a gasp as the heel of Enceladin's paw grazed her just hard enough to spin her sideways into the wall. The solid, meaty smack of her impact made him cry out, most of him in triumph, the tiny part in dismay; he wheeled on her, struck with his other paw, cracked the stone all around her with the force of the impact, and grinned at her body sliding bonelessly down to the rubies piled there.

"Now, Intemerata," he said, leaning forward to wrap both his front paws around her gleaming body, "we shall end this."

"No!" Her eyes snapped open, and her gaze crashed through him more forcefully than a flash flood. "Think, Grandfather!" The honey of her voice had thickened with pain. "Think of a time before you feared and hated the world! Think of the world you once cherished and loved! For that world still exists, still looks for you, would still welcome you back into its company! A tiny part of you remembers, Grandfather! I can sense it in you!"

Enceladin's whole brain froze, the tiny part at the back staring at the pony through the layers of despair and disgust and anger and resentment that had agglomerated around him, that he'd allowed to wall him in, to protect him, and to imprison him.

"Think, Grandfather," she said again, the wavering light of her horn seeming to carry her words directly to the dragon he'd once been, the dragon he so seldom let himself be anymore. "Our two peoples' real quarrels are few and easily solved if we can work together from a place of mutual trust if not actual understanding. Please, Grandfather. We can—"

"You think me a fool," the larger part of him muttered, but the tiny part was stirring, growing, displacing the other parts, wanting for the first time in centuries to come out, to touch, to play, to believe.

"Not a fool, Grandfather." She breathed within his grasp, everything about her soft and warm and inviting. "When I look at you, I see an ally, a partner, and a friend." A smile curled across her muzzle. "If you'll have me, I mean."

The cries of No! She's not one of us! She can't be trusted! were now coming from a small and easily ignored part at the back of Enceladin's brain. Letting a smile pull at his own snout, he released the pony and sat back on his haunches. "How do you do that with your mane?" he asked.

---

The pony stood lightly upon the cavern floor, her body poised on the very tips of her gold-shod hooves. She kept her wings clenched to her sides, her eyes closed and her head downcast, only her mane and tail moving.

Which suited every part of Porphyry's brain just fine. "Violator!" he roared at her, and if she had made any sort of response, had so much as twitched an eyelid at him, nothing in the wide, wide world of Equestria would've stopped him from smashing her with his clenched paws, each nearly the size of her whole barrel. "Our peoples had agreements! Agreements you made with my father in this very cave!"

A slight shifting of her lips: "Agreements Peribo broke by her actions."

"No!" He pounded a fist into the wall behind her, pebbles clattering down. "You don't talk about her, Intemerata!" The tiny part in the back of his brain remembered being a hatchling in this cave and hearing Enceladin shout that name at the pony princess during the more heated of their after-dinner discussions. He'd never known why Father thought the Draconic word for "spotless" was an insult, but he was more than happy to deploy it here and now. "After what you've done, you will never speak of her again! Is that understood?"

"I'm sorry, Porphyry." She didn't even shake the dust and stone shards from her back. "But Peribo—"

"No!" He slammed his other fist into the wall. "She was my mate, my love, my queen, and my life! And you killed her! Drilled your magic through her skull and boiled all the various parts of her brain away! How can you—?"

"She killed ponies!" All at once, Celestia burst upwards, light flaring from her wings as bright as the sun standing at midday. "Not even the worst of the depraved acts that drove me to first introduce myself to Enceladin a thousand years ago was as monstrous as what she did! She had to be stopped before she—!"

"Don't you think I know that?" Wheeling around, he punched again and again and again, striking the rock as hard as he could even though the tiny part in the back of his brain kept reminding him that the royal cave here was an historical site. "She kept ranting about what a mistake Father had made when he first signed the agreements with you, how you couldn't be trusted and were holding us back from our natural place as rulers of all creation! And when I told her she could follow the grievance procedures laid out in the agreements if she had any specific complaints against you or any other pony, she—"

He tried to stop the memories, but they flashed through every part of his brain, made his knees fold, and dropped him in a heap to the cave floor.

"Porphyry!" Celestia had sung him lullabies centuries ago, but fear clenched her voice so tightly now, he barely recognized it. He recognized the stroke of her feathers against his face, though, and he rolled his head so he could meet the rose quartz of her wide eyes.

"Our eggs." The tiny part at the back of his brain formed the words since the rest of him couldn't manage it. "She smashed them, Celestia, one by one, and said she...she wouldn't allow the royal line to continue in a world as unnatural as the one you've made." With flailing claws, he started pawing at the pile of amethysts he'd fallen in front of. "I should've stopped her, should've done something years or decades ago, but she—"

All the thoughts he hadn't let himself think came bubbling up from the back of his brain. "She wasn't alone in her opinions, nowhere near alone. In fact, I'd wager that at least one part in the sundry and parallel brains of every dragon throughout our territory thought Peribo had a valid point when she declared that we were becoming nothing but large and scaly ponies. Most parts of our brains, though, didn't like her methods, called her too loud, too direct, too obvious. So she decided to act on her own in the hope that she would trigger some sort of larger reaction, some sort of brain cascade that would line us all up with her."

As far as he could tell, his entire brain had shut down except for that one tiny part at the back, and it just kept on talking. "I could've stopped her. I should've. But, well, it turns out that I'm not you, Celestia, not pony enough to do what you had to do to your sister Luna. I couldn't. So I didn't do anything, and now it's all..." He swallowed. "It's all gone. The agreements you made with Father, I'm declaring them abrogated in all but their most basic terms."

In the sudden silence, he couldn't stand to see the shock and hurt in her gaze, so he concentrated his attention on clearing away the amethysts; he'd almost moved them all when she said, "Please, Porphyry. We can help. Let us—"

"We aren't ready, Intemerata." He pushed himself up onto all fours. "You connected with Father, touched the part of his brain that was closest to your pony brain, and together, you and he did some real good in the world. But—" Stepping into the space where the amethysts had lain, he grabbed the basket he'd buried there in the frenzied horror of the night last week when his life had ended. "But a dragon's brain is as multi-faceted as the most finely-cut gemstone, and the part that thinks like a pony is very small. Almost as small as the number of us who can stand to let that part ever be in control."

He turned and set the basket down, his vision going misty at the sight of his and Peribo's last remaining egg, light purple with darker purple sports scattered across its shell. "So from now on and as much as possible, you will ignore us, and we will ignore you. That's all that the largest parts of most dragons' brains have ever wanted, and it's all we really deserve. Just...take this away with you, please, and maybe someday—" His throat closed, and he couldn't go on.

Whether Celestia understood or not, he didn't know. After all, several parts of his own brain didn't understand it, either.

Most of his brain did, though, and he stood in an empty cave full of gems and precious metals while the pony princess wrapped her magic around the egg basket and flew for the entrance.

---

Both the ponies stood lightly upon the cavern floor, their wings spread like they expected the stone beneath them to crack open at any moment.

It was a feeling Spike could understand. Rising head and shoulders above Twilight and Celestia, he stepped out from between them, peered into the darkness, and felt like he was about to crack open himself. "This?" he asked. At least his voice had finally stopped cracking: taking four decades to pass through adolescence was just plain overkill. "You're sure?"

"I am." The glow of Celestia's horn began to increase.

Twilight's did the same, light flowing out from the two of them to fill the entire cave. "Wow," Twilight more whispered than said. "It's like a museum."

Spike could only nod, the stacks and stacks of mouth-watering jewels almost making his stomach rumble. "But...this is my parents' cave?"

Celestia nodded. "Potentially your cave now, Spike, if my information is correct."

"It is as always, Intemerata," came a rasp from one of the rapidly diminishing shadows, and Spike blinked to see a long, thin dragon raising his head from where he'd been curled up in a corner of the cave. "My people have decided that I'm no longer fit to be their sovereign, and by all the ancient rites of ascension, my—" His already rough voice roughened even further. "—my only living child is given the first opportunity to take my place."

Everything inside Spike turned to jelly, and he wasn't sure if he felt hot or cold. "Spike?" Celestia said somewhere behind him. "This is your father Porphyry. Porphyry, this is your son Spike."

Not knowing what to do—did dragons hug?—he found himself taking a step forward. The taller dragon did the same, and that was it: Spike didn't even try to stop, leaping the rest of the way across the cave and wrapping his arms around the other's grayish-green and faded purple body.

He felt claws tap his back, then that rough voice spoke again above him: "How much do you know, my son?"

Stepping back, wiping his eyes, he shrugged. "Hardly anything. I mean, it was just last week that Celestia told me where she'd gotten my egg and that I might be—" He stopped, the words so absurd, he couldn't keep them from coming out with a laugh. "King of the dragons! 'Cause that's crazy! What do I know about being a dragon?"

"More than you think." The older dragon squatted down and rested a big paw on top of Spike's head. "You have many parts in your brain, and at least one of them—no doubt very small and in the back—will have been whispering to you your entire life about what it means to be a dragon."

Spike stared up at him, pieces of his past falling into place like a giant jigsaw puzzle. His urge to migrate; his ideas about 'The Dragon Code'; his desire to hoard, to consume, to overwhelm and protect: it did sometimes feel like he had a voice in his head telling him that stuff.

"Never fear, though." That big paw ruffled his head ridges. "There's no chance the dragons will ever accept you as their sovereign."

"What?" Twilight's voice echoed around the cave. "But, I mean, I thought you'd all offer Spike the crown or whatever, he'd turn it down with a gracious and tearful speech, and we could get back to our regular lives! Instead, we came all this way for...for what?"

Silence settled over them, and when Spike looked up, the older dragon—his father, he told himself, his throat tightening; this was his father—his father was looking with narrowed eyes at Celestia. "Will you tell them, Intemerata? Or shall I?"

Celestia took a step forward, her wings shivering. "I'll start," she said, and when she raised her head, Spike could smell the salty scent of nervousness, something he'd never sensed from her before. "But I'll start at the ending with your mother's death, Spike, in the hope that Porphyry will be willing to jump in and tell you about Peribo's life."

And the story the two of them told sort of backwards and sideways over the next half hour made Spike cry more than once, Twilight huddled against his side, her own face damp with tears. He understood, of course—his mother had gone crazy and started killing ponies; Celestia hadn't had any choice but to do what she'd done—but still, a red-hot nugget of anger wouldn't stop burning in the back of his brain, wouldn't stop muttering about vengeance and justice and the death that this pony princess deserved.

It was just a tiny part of his brain, though, and the way Celestia's voice thickened and broke told him everything he needed to know about her sorrow. He hugged her in the end, hugged his father again, too, and another stretch of silence spread over the cavern.

Till Twilight cleared her throat: "It all happened so long ago, but I...I still wish there was something we could do to help."

"There is," Porphyry said, and Spike looked up to see his father looking down. "Neither you nor I, Spike, are afraid of the more ponyish parts of our brains. We can see a future where ponies and dragons can if not understand each other than can at least trust that we aren't out to destroy each other in any way." He set his claws lightly on Spike's shoulder. "We can be ambassadors, Son, can start showing dragons how to move the back parts of their brains to the front, and maybe—" His gaze shifted, and Spike followed it to a smiling Celestia. "Maybe we'll actually manage it this time, eh, Intemerata?"

Celestia nodded, but Twilight's brow was wrinkling. "That's the Draconic word for 'spotless,' isn't it?" She turned a grin toward Celestia. "You should add that to your list of titles!"

The back part of Spike's brain sort of coughed and choked, and he felt his face heat up. "Ummm, it's not exactly a compliment, Twilight."

"Huh?" She turned back, her brow wrinkling again.

Porphyry gave a low chuckle. "You ponies are all spotless, all solid and stolid and filled with meat from ear to ear." He tapped his own forehead with a claw. "We dragons have more spots than we know what to do with, lobe upon lobe upon lobe, a complex architecture like nothing you can even imagine." Shrugging, he moved his claw to tap Spike's forehead. "Our job will be to rearrange the structure a bit."

"Yeah." Spike took a breath. "So whaddaya say, Twilight? Ready for a good, old-fashioned friendship problem?"

"You know it, Spike." She flapped over and threw a hug around his neck, a hug he was more than happy to return. "You know it!"