Fluttershy trudged home in utter horror, her mind a whirl of conflicting terrors. Her life had narrowed to a point of decision, and whatever course she chose, she was doomed.
She wondered briefly how the others felt.
Twilight, she knew, was so consumed by determination to prove herself to her Princess, by the stern code of honor that was the steel hidden beneath the silk of the ladylike Canterlot scholar-mage, that the danger was to her just a mathematical consideration; a set of hazards to be navigated on the path to victory. She had seen Twilight Sparkle like this once before, in the death-zone that was the deep Everfree, standing unafraid before the terrible form of Nightmare Moon. Fluttershy had been out of town the night last week that Twilight had stood up to and defeated an Ursa Minor.
Twilight seemed born for situations like this. Fluttershy knew that she was not.
As for Rainbow Dash, Fluttershy's oldest friend was probably in ecstasy at the thought of getting to fight an actual full-grown Dragon. Pretending to be heroes of the Realm had been fun when they had been young fillies together: Fluttershy knew that it would be far less pleasant in reality. She feared that Rainbow might do something stupid when actually face-to-face with the Dragon.
Face-to-face ... with ... a ... Dragon. She stopped halfway to her house, gasped frantically, deeply, and shivered in her tracks, once again feeling that horrible swirling sensation, the contraction of her vision to a point. She sank onto her belly and whimpered. The change in posture checked her hyperventilation, and in a minute her vision cleared. Strength began to come back into her limbs. Yet she remained prone.
Images flashed through her brain. Huge dragon jaws, clashing shut over her, a moment of incredible pain and bodily violation by immense dagger teeth, before her life fled. Clouds of choking smoke, swathing her, rolling over and over in the furnace-hot breath, her burned and gasping form crushed like jelly under an immense uncaring weight.
Worse -- she cringing safely in a crevice, unnoticed by the great monster as her blue-coated, rainbow-maned protector flashed in to draw off its attention -- only to be met by a vast tail swipe that met that great courage and shining soul and smashed it wantonly against the solid rock of its cave-lair, all that bravery and love snuffed out in a careless instant, a broken and bloodied corpse sliding down the stone wall to the cavern floor, reduced to nothing more than organic deitrus. And she herself -- in this vision Fluttershy survived, to live all her remaining days knowing that somepony far better than herself had thrown away all her great possibilities to preserve Fluttershy's own unworthy hide.
To her even greater shame, Fluttershy could not tell just which nightmare was worse. The death of Rainbow Dash to save herself would scar her soul for the rest of Fluttershy's life, but there would be a "rest of her life." Fluttershy very much wanted to have a "rest of her life." And the fact that she wanted this even if it meant her best friend's death showed that she so very much did not deserve it.
Fluttershy struggled to her feet. Her knees were weak as she walked the rest of the way home.
Rarity ... to her this was probably a question of fashion. What does one wear to face a Dragon? Fluttershy smiled to herself at the thought, then winced at the possibility of lovely, warm-hearted Rarity in a dragon's clutches. Rarity was not as blindly brave as Rainbow Dash, and she was actually better at close combat, so she was more likely to survive. But still ... Fluttershy hoped that Rarity could talk her way out of danger, she was good at that. Rarity's love for Fluttershy was cooler than Rainbow's, it was more purely friendly, but Rarity was someone Fluttershy very much did not want to lose.
Applejack -- she supposed that Applejack was being seen off with kind and loving words, and even more kind and loving packages of food and other supplies, by her family. Her grandmother probably still half saw her as a young filly, but among the Apples the duty to risk one's lives for family and friends went unquestioned -- in their code of honor they were very Pegasus like, by the standards Earth Ponies. Certainly Commander Hurricane, Fluttershy's own ancestor, would have respected and admired Applejack more than he would have his own distant many-times-great-granddaughter, the cowardly Fluttershy.
Pinkie Pie -- Fluttershy had no idea how that strange pink pony perceived the whole situation. She was fairly certain that Pinkie didn't realize her own mortal danger, as she was an insane optimist -- who most of the time seemed to be functioning on the level of a hyperactive filly who had just received her Cutie Mark. Still, she had those strange flashes of intelligence, and even stranger flashes of ... utter strangeness, as if something vast and cool and not entirely Pony was looking out from behind those innocent-seeming blue eyes.
Fluttershy liked Pinkie. It was impossible not to like Pinkie. Certainly, she could at times be very annoying, and Fluttershy wasn't entirely comfortable with the way that she increasingly seemed to be monopolizing Rainbow Dash's attention. Nor was Fluttershy entirely comfortable with her own jealousy in that regard -- she didn't like to think of herself as a Pony who was so petty regarding the attention of her best friend. And if Rainbow Dash was more than just her best friend -- that way lay emotional implications with which Fluttershy was far from comfortable.
Pinkie Pie danced past dangers in blissful ignorance, like the painting of the Fool on a tarot card, and yet somehow she survived. Fluttershy wasn't sure how or why, she had simply noticed it to be true. This was a bright thought in the depths of Fluttershy's depression: for all her recent resentment of her, Fluttershy would not want to see a world bereft of Pinkie Pie.
She was at the door to her cottage now. She had an urge to bolt the door and hide behind it, or flee into the fringes of the Everfree, where at least she knew the dangers did not include a Dragon. If she refused to go now, better if she hid, would Twilight Sparkle pursue her? Would Rainbow Dash?
Perhaps, but she did not think so. They had a mission, given to them by none other than Princess Celestia. And that mission was more important than ensuring the obedience of one Pegasus deserter. She was sure that they could defeat the Dragon without her. Twilight Sparkle was awesome. She could defeat anything, and she would have Applejack, Rainbow Dash, Rarity and Pinkie Pie at her side.
Fluttershy opened the door, stepped inside. Her animals flocked around her, then retreated before the frightened solemnity of her visage. Even the normally-demanding Angel Bunny stepped back. Fluttershy took her sidebags, began piling in canteens, boxes of crackers, loaves of bread, all the supplies one might desire for a trip across rugged and unpopulated countryside.
And if I desert? She supposed that this would be technically a military crime, as she and Rainbow Dash were both in the militia reserve, and a letter from Celestia commanding Twilight to take her friends to face the dragon could be construed as an official call to arms, albeit on a small scale. She didn't think that the Realm would actually pursue it as a criminal matter.
But that's not the point, is it, she admitted to herself.
For one of two things would happen. Either Twilight and her friends would come back from this quest, or they wouldn't.
If they came back, how could they ever forgive her for leaving them in their hour of need? Oh, they might mouth the words, but Fluttershy could see in her mind's eye the looks of disapproval -- of disappointment -- of scorn in their faces.
The hurt in a lovely pair of cerise eyes, as they looked at her and the mind behind them thought "coward." Traitor. How could Loyalty have any love for one who let her down so badly? Rainbow Dash might pretend to forgive her, but Fluttershy would be able to sense the emotions behind her words, would be painfully and horribly aware of the absence of that love which had once burned so brightly.
Rarity -- Rarity might forgive her for real. Rarity understood Fluttershy's weakness, always gave her the benefit of the doubt. But Rarity would not respect her for this. She was not as sternly honorable as was Rainbow, or Applejack, or Twilight herself, but Rarity had a high and indomitable courage of her own, a faith in her fabulosity. She, too, might have made a proper Pegasus. She would still be kind to Fluttershy, but she would from that point on regard her as a thing forever broken.
They would all see her as broken. Which she was. She had been broken years ago, time and time again, until there was nothing of herself but a facade. No heroine, just a cowardly and soft creature, an unfit heir to the legacy of her ancestors, not even a proper Pony at all. Just some weak pathetic thing who everypony foolish enough to befriend had to protect, a burden.
Surely they'd be better without her on this expedition. Wouldn't they?
But there was a worse possibility than her staying behind and them going on the quest and coming back victorious to view her with scorn. At least that way her friends would still be okay, maybe they would even eventually forgive her and come to be her friends again, feed her a little friendship even if Rainbow Dash would probably never gift her with her love again ... she could live on friendship, she could live even with scorn if she knew that her friends were okay.
The worse possibility was that she would stay behind and they would go off and she would never see them again because they wouldn't come back. The Dragon would kill them and afterward maybe Princess Celestia would destroy the Dragon, and there'd be flashes of light on the far horizon and thunder rumbling over the plains and a great mushroom cloud climbing to the stratosphere, and the threat to Equestria would be over and the poets would make new songs about it ... but that wouldn't bring her friends back.
And she'd have to live the rest of her life knowing that perhaps, just perhaps if she'd been there, she might have been able to do something that would have kept them from dying. Knowing that she'd betrayed the only true friends she'd ever had in her life, the only Ponies who had ever really loved her ...
Other than her mother.
She hadn't thought about Sweetwing Wind in a long time. Her mother was five years now in the asylum, five long years of care by strangers -- perhaps not cruel strangers, not even Pegasi were normally cruel, but strangers nonetheless, Ponies who did not really love her.
It had been almost a year since Fluttershy had been to see her mother. She visited her on her mother's birthday, brought her some presents -- not much -- she wasn't allowed much at the asylum. Each time Fluttershy went to visit her, her mother seemed worse, further separated from reality, more paranoid.
Sweetwing would rant -- about her childhood, about the friends of her youth, most of whom had completely deserted her when she went mad. She would rant about things that Fluttershy knew were all too true -- about a certain menhir-crowned hill deep in the Palomino Desert where it faded into the Badlands, a hellish cave-riddled mesa that overlooked it, and the creatures that lived in that mesa, all black-shelled and buzzy and glowing-eyed, things able to assume or drop Pony form in flashes of green fire ...
... creatures who Fluttershy knew with horrid certainty to be real, for she knew that she had herself been sired by one of them. Within Fluttershy, under the facade of yellow fur and pink hair, behind her soft blue eyes, a monster slept. A monster that needed love to live, that could sense that love empathically, could drain it for strength, that could employ that strength to fuel an incredible and frightening power. The Stare, the power to overwhelm another's will. It could do much more, so much more than stun fish and worms. It wanted to do much more, which is why Fluttershy so greatly feared that side of herself.
And she ranted about Dragons.
Fluttershy had never fully understand why -- perhaps it was because of Sweetwing's brother Leed Wing, who had disappeared on a mission to the Northern Isles across the Stormy Sea, presumably slain by Dragons -- but her mother was utterly convinced that Equestria in general and Cloudsdale in particular was destined to suffer an invasion of Dragons, that they would specifically come looking for herself and her daughter, to slaughter them in any number of horrible and explicitly-described fashions.
From her earliest fillyhood memories, Fluttershy remembered her mother going on and on and on about the Dragons. Calling her inside from play, barring the doors, shuttering the windows, crouching fearfully in their cloud house, turning off all the lights, demanding complete silence for fear that they might attract the attention of a patrolling Dragon. It wasn't until she had started school that Fluttershy had realized that the dragons were imaginary, that they lived only in her mother's morbid mind. And it wasn't until Fluttershy had been much older that she understood that they were a defense mechanism, a substitute for something else -- perhaps the hostility of her own family -- that Sweetwing feared too much to openly name.
Dragons were not the only thing that Sweetwing feared, of course There were Buzzies, and Griffons, and Simurghs -- a whole bestiary of improbable aerial attackers, massing in some great alliance specifically to persecute Sweetwing's little branch of the Wind Clan.
And then there were other Ponies. There were spies who watched her for signs of weakness (Fluttershy later learned that this may have been half-genuine, as her uncle Windvane at one point had hired detectives to investigate his sister Sweetwing, in hopes of finding her engaged in some sort of illegal or immoral conduct). There were brigands, who lurked right outside and sometimes inside Cloudsdale, waiting to snatch up a little pegasus filly like Fluttershy and rob her or kill her or commit other half-specified atrocities upon her helpless person. And bullies, who would taunt and beat Fluttershy, eventually escalating to maiming and murder. (The bullies were real enough, though not in the numbers or to the degree of viciousness Sweetwing imagined, and around the time they began to afflict her seriously, Fluttershy had found Rainbow Dash to protect her).
By the time that Fluttershy, at fourteen, learned of the one key element of her mother's ravings which had actually been true, she had long since come to realize that Sweetwing was hopelessly mad.
But by then, the damage had been done.
Fluttershy was afraid of Dragons. Not with the ordinary, healthy fear that a Pegasus should have for a flying carnivorous archosaur many times her length and mass, armed with claws and teeth able to tear through stone, a breath weapon able to destroy everything within a wide cone, and scales thick enough to turn most pegasus-portable weapons. No, Fluttershy feared Dragons with a visceral and unreasoning terror that made her heart stop and her wings clench in paralysis at the mere thought of any close meeting with such a creature. And the mere fact that Fluttershy knew her fears were irrational did not mean that she could overcome them. Phobias did not work that way.
It was strange about Spike. She didn't fear the little Dragon, quite to the contrary, she rather liked him. He was friendly and funny and sometimes when she hugged him she could feel the warm slightly-alien affection boiling off his scales. It tasted somehow spicier than normal Pony love. She wondered if she would ever get to see him grow up, and if she would fear him when he got larger. She supposed not -- it was difficult for her to imagine Spike as anything other than a friend.
But Spike was the exception.
This Dragon they would be facing would be no friend -- he might not be an active enemy, he would almost certainly not want to actually start killing Ponies, not because he loved Ponies but because he feared the wrath of Celestia. But he had come here for a reason, and his draconic pride would not let him retreat easily, not from six seemingly-ordinary mares, not even if they bore with them the mandate of Celestia herself. All the old sagas, all the histories, had been very clear on this point.
There would be a confrontation, a confrontation that would pit them against the will and power of a great beast. A great intelligent creature, not amenable to her ability to befriend mere animals. Strongwilled, perhaps immune or at least resistant even to The Stare.
And if they made a mistake, they could very easily wind up dead. All of them.
She didn't want to do this.
But she had to do this. If she didn't at least try, she would never be able to face her friends again. If her friends perished because she was not there, she would not have saved her life at all. She knew what lay down that path.
She opened a locked drawer, withdrew a thin dagger with an antique ivory handle, pulled it from her sheath, examined it briefly. No signs of rust or tarnish -- it had been forged some fifteen hundred years ago from old titanium steel alloy, the wonder-metal of the Golden Age that had ended in the Cataclysm twenty-five hundred years even earlier. Provided that one occasionally honed the blade, it was as sharp and deadly as it had been the day it had left its armory in the lost City of the North-Realm.
It was the ancestral honor-blade of the Wind Clan, an artifact which her uncle Windvane would dearly have loved to possess, and it was not really a weapon in the conventional sense. For it was not meant to harm enemies, but rather to remind her of the course of honor, and -- should she fail to steer that course -- to redeem her honor in the only coin that could purchase something so precious -- her own heart's blood.
Fluttershy gazed at the blade. Light glinted from its lovely little length, a light which reflected in her own blue eyes, and she was resolved.
I'll try. I don't know how far I'll get, I don't know if my courage will fail at some crucial point, but I'll try. I can't desert my friends. I can't let them down without even trying.
She resheathed the blade, put it back in the drawer, closed and locked the compartment. The honor-blade was far too puny, physically, to be of any use in fighting a dragon. But by reminding Fluttershy of who she really was, from what she had come, it had already played its part.
I will face the dragon, she thought, trembling. I hope I can still feel this way when I'm actually on top of that mountain, but I will try to face the dragon.
There was a scent of sulfur in the air, whose origin she knew well. But the darkness within Fluttershy was clearing, at least for now.
She had decided.