Everypony knew about the Hearth's Warming Eve celebration, which was also known as Celestia's Show or the Light Pageant. Being the biggest and the best, it was inevitably the one that ended up monopolizing the definite article "the", preferably with a capital "T" on its head. As a result, ponies really thought that this was The Only Pageant ever done.
They never knew about the others; even the actors were sworn never to talk about these performances among themselves. These were the ones called the Dark Pageants.
In the lonely hall of the Canterlot palace, when the moon shone through the stained glass windows and shadows concealed the stage, the two figures descended. Their round was over, and another tale waited to be told. Backstage, the two pegasi took two helmets from the chest. They placed them with ceremony over their manes, each tucking in as much of her mane as she could and letting flow any locks too long to be tucked out of sight. One pony shivered and her companion patted her on the wither.
Neither of them spoke as they climbed onto the stage. There were no props and no music accompanied them. No narrator announced their presence. The only one qualified for that job was too busy sleeping in his basket several miles away.
Actors of one round of this pageant never watched those of another round. Only one pony sat before them, her legs folded in the traditional Canterlot fashion. Occasionally, her flowing mane twinkled with stars. She could be called an audience, but she was closer to being a witness.
Under the chill of an Equestrian winter's night, the two pegasi played their Dark Pageant. The moonlight guided their movements. The silent mare guarded the flow of the performance. A magic horn glowed blue.
In the minds of the two ponies, they travelled back to a time before chaos.
In Pteryx, the Earth pony town we captured, I was hated by large numbers of ponies. This is the first time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.
I was merely a captain of the Pegasus Army at the time, and anti-pegasus sentiments were turning sour. None of the Earth ponies had the guts to raise a rebellion, but if a pegasus civilian wandered alone through the markets, they were likely to find shops closing all around them, with the owners peeking through gaps in the shutters and doors until the offending civilian moved on.
As a pegasus and a low-ranking grunt in the army, I was a favourite target for baiters. When I was galloping in pursuit of an apple thief, most of the crowd around me closed ranks and some of the sprightlier youths tripped me up. Twice, I was snared in the line of duty by a banner; both times, they were deliberately lowered when I attempted a fly-by. Another favourite tactic of theirs was to stop me and ask for directions, whereupon a nearby troublemaker would push a stacked tower of barrels or boxes. Then, they'd watch me squirm under the wreckage. I was disabled for two weeks after one such incident, when a falling crate smashed my wing in the wrong place and left its bony support crippled.
By my third month on the streets, the constant snickering snipes and pestering pranks were getting badly on my nerves. The pudding merchants were the worst of all. They seemed to have no better purpose in life than to make sure I didn't pass a day without cold ice cream dribbling all over my face. This sounds funny, but try getting it in your eyes. The cold alone stings so badly that you shut your lids tightly to avoid it. Unfortunately, this just melts the cream and makes it harder to shift. It runs into every gap it can find, and all the while it's still freezing. I got scoops of them thrown at me every day. Sometimes, there were ice chunks inside them, hidden away like lumps of metal.
At the time, I had been serving alongside Sergeant Pansy. She persuaded me that the insults were not meant personally, that all of this was just anger at the actions of our higher-ups back in Pegasopolis, and that we were all really ponies in sisterhood. I had already made up my mind that the expansion of the Pegasus Empire was a mistake. The sooner we withdrew and gave the Earth ponies whatever was their due, the better.
If I had been a civilian and not a captain, I probably would have sent a messenger to the Commander of the Empire. I'd have urged him to learn from the unrest, and to hightail it out of there while we still had some credibility. There were already rumours going around about the Commander's sanity, none of them flattering. In fact, many of them were so spot on that it was hard not to think of them as evidence of a spy network among our ranks.
But the pegasus creed is never to talk back to a superior officer. A captain, no matter how ripe for promotion her commanding officer thinks she is, would never do anyone any favours by protesting. A captain who tried would just get banished and replaced by someone less imaginative.
During my early days on the streets, I saw quite plainly what holding down the Earth ponies and monopolizing their food meant. Many homes were boarded up, their occupants having long since been cast out onto the streets to beg. You saw more pegasus guards around these days, trying to stamp harder on any protests bubbling beneath the surface. Stalls began to dry up, and markets swarmed with ragged faces trying to haggle desperately for whatever crumbs had been allotted to them.
Military cadets were quickly snapped up as local police officers. This had the advantage of giving the army something to do, and it also kept the iron hoof pounding down the recent outbreak of riots. Nothing major. Just a few spats here and there. I was one of the ones they called in when the authorities began getting desperate.
We pegasi were pretty well fed and plump by comparison. When I'd last seen him, the Commander had been so obese it was a physiological insult. He had walked through the main street towards the palace, between rows of pegasus officers. I was among the front flank. He was surrounded by a private squad of elite Pegaserkers, officers so crazy that merely looking at them is a test of nerve. If a stranger had come up to me at that moment and (in a whisper, if she valued her life) asked which one was the Commander, she would be quite justified in wondering why the fat one was considered better officer material than the dozens of fitter, leaner, meaner-looking monsters marching either side of him.
I was young and naïve. Pansy still kept her naïve views long after I'd outgrown them. This was probably why she was demoted to private long after all this had passed. Neither of us, strictly speaking, should have been allowed to communicate about political matters within Pteryx's walls, but we were holed up together for a long time, our patrols always coincided, and I was dying for someone to voice my frustrations to. Politics wasn't a pegasus concern until you were high enough in rank to see a line between you and the Commander's temple.
Our Pegasus Empire was dying, but from where I was standing it looked like it was the one doing the killing, like a manticore in its prime. My role in its later attempt at re-expansion, especially during the windigo incident, had yet to pass. I was such a sad sack at the time that any gambler wanting to wager on the next decade's Commander would quite rightly have stuck me at the bottom of the table, (if they remembered to put me on at all).
All I knew at the time was this: on the one hoof, I would quite like to have kicked the incumbent Commander hard in the jaw for what he was doing. Yet, on the other hoof, if I'd led the charge against the pie-throwing Earth ponies of the street, I would have done so with nothing short of schadenfreude.
Possibly the only reason I had such a simple view of things was that I had only Pansy to discuss them with. She was the only pony who would have been deliberately ignored by the gamblers on the aforementioned next-Commander bet. But an incident on one otherwise uneventful day, a month after the Commander's visit to the palace, turned up and gave me a strong wake up call.
Early one morning, Corporal Cirrus came directly to my bunker and said that a dragon was ravaging the marketplace, and would I please come and do something about it. Then he went and hid beneath the bunk bed, which was a mite unfortunate as that was where Pansy was sleeping.
Presuming he was just playing a prank on me, I decided to see what all the fuss was about, and went out as if on a routine patrol. Monstrous creatures were all the rage these days, and there was nothing unusual about one rampaging through the town – in the last week alone, I'd had to deal with a Gorgon's Horse, a Ponytaur, and a plague of birds with steel feathers and bronze claws (the names of which escape me). A dragon was a new one, though. They generally saw nothing worth stealing from us, and most of them were hidden in the mountains, hibernating through the blizzards that were creeping up on them from faraway lands. Besides, Cirrus wasn't above crying wolf for a prank. I nearly had him court-martialled once for frightening Sergeant Pansy over a cockatrice that turned out to be a badly painted peacock.
I took my armour. It wasn't much protection against a dragon, it being used mostly to stop the enemy pegasus from bucking my kidneys out through my skull, but it was standard issue and you're only thought of as an idiot by the spectators if you take on a monster without some kind of protection on you.
Quite a few Earth ponies stopped me through the streets, telling me all about it in that accusatory tone that makes the question "what are you going to do about it" so darn annoying. It quickly transpired that it was not a mature dragon, as I had thought, but it was a young one – one of those unicorn pets that they used as yardsticks for social status. Clearly, the unicorn ambassadors had come to the town palace, to negotiate something or other. The negotiations could last for weeks, like a well-spun court case, and one of the unicorns had felt quite at ease letting his pet off the leash for a few days while he worked.
It was a classic example of unicorn stupidity. Until I fully came to appreciate Princess Platinum's grace and Clover the Clever's wisdom, my only experience with unicorns had been on the battlefield. They were notorious among our ranks for their ridiculous tactics, preferring to rush in with horns ablaze rather than stop to think out a strategy. Their officers were even worse, their promotions being based largely on how good they looked in uniform. To cap it all, we hated them for their excessive love of jewelry and their ability to bribe their way out of almost any scrape. Even during this time of peace, the unicorns got away with all sorts of privileges and scandals simply because they believed they could do what they liked with the world, and sadly they seemed to have the money to prove it.
I found out later that dragon youths normally take centuries to mature, but they can reach full size overnight if they get a chance to try out their hoarding instincts early. After that, they literally went from cute babies to teenage monsters, and it's no wonder that the mothers abandon the eggs first chance they get. Goodness knows what the ambassador would do when he found out that his pet had gotten acquisitive overnight, but – I thought, with my blood boiling – they probably wouldn't care beyond the short-term inconvenience it cost them with the pegasus officers. After all, we had to clean up the mess.
I soon found a promising trail and my first smashed stall in months. Despite their reputations, the previous monsters had done surprisingly little property damage during their attacks. A stall owner was trying to buck a pile of shattered planks back into shape. Whatever he'd been selling, the dragon had cleared his stock out. He must have had something good on him. He shouted several threats, some directed at the dragon, and kicked a standing wooden block across the street to make his point.
Earth ponies have some virtues. It's one of the most popular urban myths told about them by pegasi, largely because it subverted our expectations. But even the strongest of them was defenceless against a fully grown dragon, and in the meantime even the pegasus riot police were having trouble just keeping up with it. I followed the trail of smashed stalls, gouged buildings, and burning wooden frames, galloping along the ground to conserve wing power for later.
It was hard to see what I could do against it, but I'd been told to deal with disturbances, and at this rate the whole town was going to be seriously disturbed. Footprints large enough for a pony to curl up in guided me from street to street, and sometimes a coin or a gem showed how it had gathered some booty along the way.
Eventually, I caught up with the riot police, who had stopped and were debating with themselves whether to fly overhead or search on the ground. Improbably, the trail of footprints had vanished, and we were stuck between two high walls and a double row of abandoned stalls. There was too long a gap between the prints and the end of the road, and no sign of renewed footprints which would have betrayed a leap. A flying dragon, just what we didn't need.
Pegasus riot police are not built for speed, and the chase had left them plum tuckered, a phrase I'd borrowed from some stall owners who were marginally less rude to me than the others whenever I asked for some armour polish. Pansy had caught up with us, torn between her devotion to duty and her desire not to get cremated prematurely, so we agreed to do a fly-by and let the police catch up with us later.
I remember how cloud-saturated the sky was that day, as though the weather teams up high were preparing to make this ordeal more atmospheric than it really should have been. We began with a simple ascent to try and get a full view of the town, but flying straight upwards is not as pleasant a business as we sometimes make it out to be. Go too high too fast, and your ears pop something dreadful. There's also that horrible sensation that's like your head's getting pinched. It was with relief that we both came down low and began scanning district after district – the dragon had, at some point, landed and hidden itself among the labyrinthine streets crossing and crisscrossing each other.
Crowds were still in abundance. Ponies looked up and openly mocked us, or at least that's how it sounded from up high. I'd learned how to block out such sounds by now, but Pansy still hadn't gotten used to it. As far as pegasus upbringing went, she'd had it soft. I'd learned a few weeks into the job (we rarely talked about our personal lives) that she hadn't been submitted to the hilltop test like the rest of us had been. Her parents had belonged to some weird sub-community that favoured nurture over torture, a pretty alien concept to most pegasus parents at the time. Being left on a hillside overnight to see how a foal coped was pretty tame stuff compared to the drills and disciplines that soon followed, and somehow Pansy had been lucky enough – unlucky enough, I would have said back then – to have avoided all that. It was still a mystery to me how she'd ended up in the army.
Since it was already raining, and the insults were only getting worse, I decided not to let her add to the precipitation, so I told her we'd land. We settled for a place a couple of blocks from where we'd taken off, as the crowds were in full flow there and one of the ponies must have seen it rise up. But conditions were little better down here, because now the crowd of Earth ponies engaged in a different kind of mockery.
Each time we asked a bystander to help us locate the dragon, we never got a consistent answer. Some said it had alighted on the corner, while some said it had landed not too far from here. Others swore blind that they'd seen it head over to the other side of town. North, and east, and south, and west – all were given as answers to the question "which way". Even the ones who gave consistent directions had a tendency to point in any direction save the one they'd just described. A minority denied that there was even a dragon at all, insisting that I was merely getting worked up over a gold-obsessed giant chicken, or that it was actually nothing at all, and just my imagination, a glimpse into another world, or that I'd eaten some really bad hay the night before.
After a few minutes of this, I was quite content to simply fly back to the bunker and let the citizenry deal with the dragon. I would have done, too, if Pansy hadn't spoken up. She heard some calling, she said, from the next street along, and as one we hurried over, flying over the crowd when it became too obstructive. We came out onto a street that was clear, except for three ponies huddled around something in the middle of the road. Further along, I saw the glimmer of a fallen sapphire in the dirt, and as we glided closer we could see, like an illusion revealing itself, the impression of dragon claws deep in the mud. They started near the three ponies, and I suspected for a moment that the bystanders were stealing loot. I crashed into them, knocking two aside, and stood up straight to deliver a lecture before I heard the shriek of pain.
I looked down, and saw a broken leg lying before my hooves. It was attached to an Earth pony, though only just. Pansy nearly vomited at the sight. In fact, I'm sure she did vomit, thought I can't recall perfectly. Somepony had definitely vomited, though. The naked horse was half buried in the mud and appeared either unwilling or unable to move. I admit I had, until then, never seen an Earth pony without clothes on – usually, the citizens wore rags and cloths to cover up their bony bodies – and it made this one look far older and smaller than he really was. The dragon's foot had probably stuck to any cloth he'd worn and had torn it off when the foot was lifted.
The three bystanders were family – his offspring, I soon found out. They'd fled at the sight of the dragon, but the father – the one who was currently trapped in a footprint bigger than his own body – had not seen it in time. The dragon had landed on all fours, which was a small mercy as that distributed the weight, but all the same you didn't get out of that situation without something to remember it by. The pony was lucky it had only been his leg.
As soon as I heard this account, which took a while to decipher through the hysterics, I sent Pansy to a nearby doctor's house to send a team down for this pony. I wanted to go after the dragon, but the bystanders were on the verge of pulling their fallen loved one from the footprint, and I hastily stepped in. They were more likely to harm him than help him, and I told them so outright. At least he was still breathing and conscious. To this day, I sense that the only reason they desisted was that I was a pegasus and, to them, one of the military overlords. Had I been an Earth pony, their expressions wouldn't have been the end of their hostility towards me.
Pansy came back pretty quickly. They were a pegasus establishment, it transpired, and unwilling to come out for an Earth pony. I sent her back, with an addendum. On any other matter, this animosity might have been just another burden to stomach, but when you're looking at the pony who's lying in the mud screaming over what's left of his leg, you don't put up with any horse offal from anypony too readily.
The next time she came back, they came with her. With the casualty covered, I went ahead, Pansy hurrying after me. We were on wings now – speed was essential to cover lost ground, and in any case I was working myself up for the big moment coming up. As we went along, a group of civilian pegasi caught up with us and told us that the dragon had made a beeline for the palace. They weren't the only ponies following us. Word had gotten around, doubtless since we stopped to ask for directions, and the whole marketplace got up and moved like a caravan behind us, muttering among themselves. Some were shouting excitedly that we were going to fight the dragon. I cursed them under my breath. Most of them, as far as I could tell from the snatches I heard, were looking forward to seeing a pegasus getting char-grilled.
Pansy was still showing her inexperience. The idea of a dragon wanting her burnt to a cinder was enough to make her turn white, but by the time we reached the palace gates, listening to the cheers of the crowd behind us – who definitely wanted to see us burned to a cinder – she was shaking so badly even her armour was having the colour shaken off it.
The sight of her losing her nerve made me feel uneasy. I had no intention of letting her get close to the dragon – she was only tagging along because I felt better for having a witness who wouldn't groan in disappointment if I survived – and I was just hoping she'd have enough sense to leave it to the riot police if I failed. Pansy had a weakness of trying to save fallen comrades in battle, which was weird to the high command, whose view was that being recognised for falling in battle was nothing less than a posthumous badge of honour.
I soared over the gates, feeling like a complete fool, and told Pansy to hang back at the watchtower. It was deserted, which was probably just as well as only pegasus washouts were assigned guard duty on the tower, and they'd be next to useless in a brawl. Beneath me were the slopes of a grassy hill, and looming before me was the palace, a granite-block collection of towers that had the words "impenetrable fortress" written all over it.
The fortress had not been hard to conquer. While the average pegasus may be a gung ho fighter who'd rather kick a pony than stop to have a drink with her, that didn't make us stupid. The Earth ponies had held the fortress, but only so much food and water, and ponies hate being cramped. When those supplies ran out, they surrendered, we kicked their croups into the middle of next week, and everypony invaded the dining hall for a feast afterwards. Attacking a surrendered enemy wasn't endearing, but as we told the unicorns, it's a great way to make sure they didn't un-surrender.
On one of the towers, the dragon had touched down, and it was beginning to tear through the conical roof to get at the chamber inside. Large as it was, it hadn't fully grown yet, though since that still left it with a set of jaws capable of swallowing me whole, I wasn't about to pull a Leeroy Wingkins on it. It had its back to me, but its wings were tucked in and the slates being thrown off either side of it gave me enough clues to deduce what it was doing. I flew in closer, until I was nearly perching on its tail, and at this range I was at least reassured by its absorption in its task. From here, I could see the bulging cheeks and the dribbles of golden chains either side of its mouth. Dragons like this one liked to settle down, preferably somewhere with a good view of the prospective land all around.
I decided not to get any closer until I had a plan worked out. Even with its mouth full and its flame thus averted, the dragon was danger incarnate. As soon as it noticed me this close, it would do anything to get rid of me, and now I hated with double vigour its ability to fly. Had it been a run-of-the-mill ground dragon, I could have defeated it simply by making it lose its balance and fall off. But I still had the image of the crushed pony in my head and Pansy's terrified face in my memory, and if I had to clip this dragon's wings to see it grounded, so I would.
This was the problem, though. I hung back, wondering how best to go about the job. The dragon was now unloading its collected gold into the hole it had made, and once done it would probably be content to sit tight and bother nobody else. While it was on the tower, there would be no real danger unless it made the tower collapse, but a tower this sturdy didn't look ready to collapse without at least ten thousand years of erosion beforehand. Moreover, the unicorns were still within the palace grounds and would learn sooner or later about the monster's doings. One of them might be competent enough to get it down and change it back to normal. However I looked at it, my presence there was superfluous.
I looked back at the gates, seeing quite plainly the crowd of spectators growing. I could simply have turned around, folded up my wings, and started the long trek back to the bunker, but the crowd were having none of it. The intensity of their collective will was horrible to behold. I've seen ranks and ranks of enemies swarming from horizon to horizon all around me. I've seen armies as vast as seas roar and close in like tidal waves over the clouds. I've seen skies blackened with the wings of a thousand pegasi. But at least then I've always had my hooves full kicking them down one at a time. If I fell, my comrades would have cheered for me and sung a noble eulogy in my memory.
All I could see was a crowd of sneering civilians watching my every move. They were already falling silent, having made their bets and worked themselves up into believing they were about to see a real treat. They wouldn't have been there at all if I'd been an Earth pony. But a pair of wings and no choice over my parenting, and suddenly I was classic entertainment. They'd be telling this to the children, and it'd be known by everypony I'd ever met before sundown. It was terrible enough thinking what they'd say if I was wounded. It was worse still to wonder what they'd say or think if they saw me reduced to a sad little pile of ashes.
I'd have no control over what they did with my reputation then.
Pansy hovered between me and them, and I wondered how many were actually seeing her. The idea that she'd be alone, despite the crowd, when she saw me go up against the dragon was a shock. It was unthinkable.
No, one way or the other, I was taking it on, and if I was taking it on then I had to win, or at least not lose too badly.
I tightened the muscles in my wings – it was not enough to change my flight trajectory, but enough to prepare for a change – and rose silently behind the dragon. Common sense told me to flee and let the matter sort itself out, but a pegasus never flees, and I was starting to see options coming up. That was probably when it hit me.
Eureka moments are not moments at all and can't be defined by an arbitrary point on your life's timeline, but if I had to date it, I'd say something occurred to me around then. I was military, through and through. I wasn't going to flee, but not because the crowd wanted me to stay, and not because I enjoyed the thought of being a reckless idiot. I wasn't going to flee, because I was a crazy fighting machine, I was born to treat fighting as the highest of the high arts, and if I thought I had a chance of winning, nothing was going to deny me the pleasure of a good fight.
I'd have a crack at it. I could almost taste the golden medal. If it proved too much, I might consider a "strategic retreat".
I rose higher, readying myself for the dive. I couldn't kick hard enough to hurt at normal speed, but with some momentum built up in my body, I'd give the dragon something to think about.
The crowd were now completely silent, and for a moment I wondered how the dragon could not notice the change in sound when I could hear it so clearly over this distance. The ponies were going to remember without fail whatever happened next. Despite the familiar pains I had to endure throughout my ascent, I was pumping with a wonderful sense of trepidation. I'd show those ponies a thing or two. I had my target identified. The dragon was nicely relaxed now, perfect for me to get a shot off. I built up speed, then did a quick U turn and propelled myself straight towards the ground, breaking through g forces under sheer willpower and a mounting sense of bliss.
I was insulted by the dragon's laziness as it wrapped a tail around the tower. For a beast so intimidating on paper, it was in practice an embarrassment to look at, like a hyperactive foal's doodling brought to life for an experiment. It was just an overgrown lizard. The spines along its neck, the bat-like wings, the horns, and the scales; all this ornamentation looked less like pegasus regalia and reminded me more and more of those ridiculously fancy unicorn outfits. Now I was seeing weak spots all over its body, where previously all I'd seen was untouchable armour.
It took a while for my vision of the dragon to show any sign that I was getting closer – I'd covered a lot of air – but once it started it seemed to jump straight to the other extreme and my vision was full of dragon almost immediately.
Dragon wings rely on innate draconic magic to get around the more burdensome gravitational physics. Otherwise they are, when you get down to it, two big leathery capes.
I tore into the membrane with a satisfying slash and changed direction immediately, heading out over the town's rooftops. The wings were jerked back, ripping the dragon – who was caught by surprise – clean off the tower. It roared in alarm and I was suddenly encumbered by the sheer weight dragging through the air.
It tried to flap – I could feel its pulling through the membrane wrapped around me – and only managed to entangle itself further. I tried pushing the speed a little more. He felt suddenly loose. I changed course again, wrenching both of us directly upwards. At least, I hoped so. The membrane covered my face, and I could only tell where I was going from memory. Having been up already, I never had a pop in my ears to confirm it.
My plan started to fall apart once the dragon regained its senses. Up until then, I'd relied largely on its being too surprised to respond.
With a jerk, its wings whipped off my face and I was thrown tumbling in an eddy of my own creating. For a fleeting moment, I was expecting a brief flash of heat to engulf me. I steadied myself, flipped round, and tried to build up momentum again.
The dragon was an aerodynamic mess. It was trying valiantly to flap, fighting against the tumbling of its own body. Despite the amount of time it had enjoyed getting used to its subadult form, the dragon hadn't practised much on the wing. I tackled it in the chest and pushed down. I couldn't see the ground. The air howled like a choir approaching its climactic finish. At any moment, I was expecting to strike earth and shatter every bone in my skeleton.
To my shame, I turned chicken at that point. Both wings came out and I stopped. The dragon left me hovering in midair. Or maybe I left the dragon shooting downwards under our joint momentum. Either way, it was quite a sight.
The impact knocked down two buildings either side. For a moment it was lost amid a cloud of dust, before the cloud cleared away and I could see its body sprawled across the road. To my horror, it was barely further up the street from the back of the crowd.
After what seemed a long time, the last of the dust settled. The dragon's mouth was wide open, and it was frowning as if in the middle of a protest against its treatment. Every limb was bent wherever there was a joint – at the knee, at the wrist, at the elbow, along its claws – and even the wings looked like they were folding up wherever possible. I landed next to its head. The eyes were closed, though whether with unconsciousness or worse I didn't know at the time. I simply stood next to it, watching in case a muscle twitched.
The crowd was already galloping up the road to take a closer look, and most of my morning was spent simply watching their mob thinking at work. They were breathing very calmly, with steadying breaths, and seemed to lose some control of their quick breaths whenever they glanced in my direction. Many were gaping – it was clear they had never seen a pegasus fighting anything larger than another pony, up close or at a distance. I was commanding respect now.
I waited a long time for them to disperse. They didn't.
Finally, sensing that I wasn't about to be troubled for a while, I sat down and waited for Sergeant Pansy to catch up, which she eventually did. She was as quiet as the rest of them, and to my surprise seemed reluctant to talk whenever I made an observation about the dragon or told her what was going to happen next. She didn't make eye contact. Even she hadn't predicted that I'd win, but I had expected to be seized in a hug so relieved to come out that it was ready for an all-nighter. It took me some time to realise that she was scared of me.
The crowd was trickling away, slowly at first. I noticed that none of them went up the road if it meant passing close to me, and even the ones who went the other way did so with a hypnotic stare back at me, as though terrified I would follow them. This was new – even among pegasi, I had so far shown no skills out of the ordinary. I felt I had to see it out. Faces that would otherwise have mocked or ridiculed me were now pretending very hard that they had never even acknowledged my existence, and indeed were trying so hard that the lack of attention was in itself a kind of acknowledgement.
It seemed curious that this was the reaction I'd get for essentially doing what they'd half-expected me to do – indeed, for doing what was expected of me, as a military pony. I had worked something out around the time the last of them went, and by then I had nothing else to look at except for the dragon, which I now realised was sleeping. Its chest was rising and falling, and once in a while a faint wisp of smoke puffed out of a nostril.
By lunchtime, nopony seemed to be coming, not even the riot police, and I was tired with the delay. I sent Pansy off to bring a squad here to supervise the beast, and then had to repeat the order loudly when she didn't move. It wasn't a long wait after that. Clearly she'd been in a hurry not to disappoint me.
The squad came soaring overhead. One or two of the guards landed next to me and began asking questions, mostly along the lines of "what the hay just happened" and "was Pansy telling the truth". I wasn't in the mood, so I rattled off a few answers and left. I swear that I saw the dragon half-open an eyelid as I went past, as if to check I was really going.
I heard later that the dragon was pretty compliant, and was soon shrunk down and reunited with its owner. The pegasi had difficulty persuading him that I'd done what I'd done. To be honest, they'd have had difficulty persuading me, and I'd been the one who had done it. Earth ponies were mysteriously mute about the whole affair, which puzzled me as Pansy told me the next morning that nearly everypony outside of town for three miles around knew.
It was then I understood why the Commander insisted on the expansion. It wasn't the land he claimed that made it worth it – a quick look at how poorly he managed Pteryx could dispel that notion like lightning – but the conquest itself. There was no pleasure in having conquered. There was little to be gained from going hoof-to-hoof with the powerful unicorns. Yet something had yearned in him to perform greatness, and what better testament than conquest? For a fleeting time in my life, I felt respect for him. Taking on the dragon, I had seen and felt exactly what he must have experienced. It was delicious.
Several days later, of course, the Commander withdrew his troops from the town, and that was the start of the Empire's withdrawal. Despite what I'd lead myself to believe, I felt it as a bitter blow when I learned what was happening. We were supposed to be tougher than that. To Pansy's horror – and my own horror too, in retrospect – I actually pined for the old Commander, the one I'd hated for most of my time on the streets in Pteryx.
Soon afterwards, I was given a recommendation by my commanding officer, and thus would begin my ascent to the Commander's position. I felt strangely calm about my initial promotion. It was as though it was obvious it would happen, even natural. Pansy went in the other direction. This also seemed natural. I started to look down on her; she was not cut out for the demands of a position of authority, for greatness. I kept her close all the same. Despite the dragon incident, we still had several months of plodding through the streets behind us, and a lot more had happened since then that only strengthened it.
Strength became my watchword. I'd shown it, the Commander – before his withdrawal – had shown it, and I suspected, on my better days when I was feeling more kindly disposed, that Pansy had a strength of her own too, though for the life of me I couldn't tell at first what it was. I often went into moods like this. The Earth ponies respected strength, even feared it. Pegasi lived by it. Unicorns, of course, had their own magical power, a strength going by another name. When I went up against the dragon, it was my strength versus his. Plans, schemes, subtleties; none of them compare to the pleasure of raw, unsullied, unrestrained energy being released. That was what the crowd had been watching for, though they had expected it to come from the dragon. I'd delivered more than they'd thought, and had the Commander realised how much respect we pegasi now commanded, our Empire might not yet have collapsed. I was physically giddy with the prospects of power.
Before I close, though, I must make a brief return to my time in Pteryx.
I remember my last day in that town, when the bad news came through and I sought one last walk through the streets before we were to pull out. Pansy came with me, having recently been demoted to Corporal for trying to comfort a young criminal instead of incarcerating him. I never learned the full details, but I was briefly reminded of my former self all the same. I felt outraged. There were so many petty thieves targeting food stalls these days that soon we'd have to send them to another town's prison.
It was the Commander's fault all over again. The food monopoly hadn't yet been broken. I was seeing evidence of it all over the streets. Earth ponies were thinning. To my surprise, pegasi were feeling the brunt too. Any pony lower than a private was having their food rations cut down "to resupply the troops". It wasn't long after this that the Commander lost all respect among his peers and was ousted.
Pansy and I went along the marketplace, silently living out our last few hours in the town. There wasn't much to see that wasn't already etched deeply into our minds, so we felt more like we were checking off a list than evoking any fine memories. We came upon the food stalls, most of which were nearly empty. Whether this was due to an early rush buying up stocks or due to a lack of stock to begin with, I couldn't say. Either seemed plausible.
A pair of Earth ponies lingered around the apple stall, eyeing up the red swellings. Perhaps they were contemplating theft? Perhaps they were simply trying to slake their hunger by feeding their eyes? Or perhaps the sight of food was too distracting for them to pass it without taking time out to gaze? My old sympathies for the dishevelled ponies of this town came back to me, but more out of habit than out of any hope that I could help. For once, I felt powerless. It was a sharp antidote to how I'd been feeling ever since I'd faced that dragon, and I hated the bitterness.
Pansy then went ahead and did the sort of thing that got her demoted later on. It was also the reason I wanted her close when I became Commander.
Without a word, she walked up to the stall owner and bought two apples. I had expected one for me and one for her, but instead she walked over to the pair and offered her purchase to them. They looked stunned, almost frightened, and I fully expected them to turn tail and bolt. They reached out gingerly. I could see them looking for the hidden irons, waiting for Pansy to clap them over their pasterns and pull them along by the chains.
They held out their hooves until they were nearly touching hers, but dared come no closer. Pansy tipped the apples into their hooves and smiled encouragingly, like a teacher to a pair of students making a breakthrough.
I don't think the pair knew what they were doing throughout the entire ordeal. Receiving an apple each from one of the sworn oppressors just didn't figure into their worldview, and I couldn't blame them for still trying to find the trick. They ate the apples in the end though, greedily, heartily, and noisily. We passed on, catching up on our patrol route. When I looked back, they were staring after us.
I don't remember what Pansy and I talked about after we left the marketplace, though we never mentioned the incident with the apples. Truth be told, I suspected Pansy was slightly embarrassed about it. She tended to blush a lot if I began to frame a question with the word "why". I could certainly see why she'd keep mute when we joined the rest of the pegasi at the bunker for a last lunch. The others would have ripped into her if they'd known she'd wasted money on Earth ponies. They would have called her a soft heart. To her, facing them would have been like facing a dragon.
Perhaps it was a premonition. Certainly, I have had much to think about since the windigo incident. I think, after contemplating this, I'm starting to fully understand what Pansy had that I didn't; some dragon of her own – to put it one way – which she had been facing, some test she had to pass, and some scorn she had to overcome. To beat it required strength of another kind. I'm sure I saw it in the flame of friendship, and I'm sure it's why we had our separate destinies at that crucial time. We both had strengths, but whereas I'd used mine to challenge those who were strong, she'd used hers to help those who were weak.
The Earth ponies respected strength. All pegasi live by it.
It's just a matter of perspective.
The Dark Pageant came to an end, two minds returned to the present, and their bodies collapsed onstage. They were puffing and panting with the effort. A blue horn glowed for a while longer, before the magical light was snuffed out. Outside, the moon had continued onwards, and being overhead, its illumination did not reach through the windows anymore.
The Princess clapped her hooves together and, in the light of her starry mane, the actors could see her smile. The two pegasi bowed together and descended the stage. They returned the costumes back into the chest, released their breaths, and threw back the windows. Through the inky night, the two Elements of Harmony – Loyalty and Kindness – rose and soared away. Soon, they were distant dots above the horizon.
Within the hall, another pair of ponies ascended the stage and turned to face their audience. One of the actors had a pudding on her head.
These pageants of the night were not necessary, but for the Princess they were all she had.