Turns out the School of Friendship has a swim team leader board. Turns out Smolder is a pretty good swimmer. She wants to be the best though, for a reason more complicated than simple pride.

Now with a Youtube reading!

This fic is the product of another one of Nitro Indigo's text prompts. This one: Portray a pony with Naked Foal Syndrome. It ended up morphing into brief character study on Smolder, but that’s not a bad thing for a fic to be.

Twilight discovers that, even with the collective research, intellect and intuition of the entire Equestrian archaeological community at her back, nothing beats the source material when it comes to archaeology.

Smoulder is more than happy to oblige.

Smolder has a nightmare.

What confuses her is that it's of something she didn't think she was actually afraid of.

Featured 3/8/2019

Ever since Smolder revealed her affinity for the fashionable and cute to Ocellus, they've had secret tea parties where Smolder gets to indulge her interests and Ocellus gets to feel trusted. Symbiosis in action!

At their special Hearth's Warming secret tea, Ocellus notices that Smolder is acting strangely. She has no idea how deep the problem goes.

Written for Level Dasher for Jinglemas 2021

Silverstream’s breath kinda smells like fish right now and that’s the only flaw I can pin on her. Her beak and claws are polished. Her mane has that wild...windswept...thing going on.

“What’s up?” she asks.

“You’re literally perfect,” I tell her. I put a little growl into my voice to make it clear that I’m seething in rage.

What do dragons think of hot peppers? Gallus wants to know.

By the end of the day, he'll wish he hadn't.

Silverstream learns an interesting fact about Smoulder's name. Naturally, she has to share!

Smoulder isn't too thrilled.

Preread by ChudoJogurt!

As featured by Equestria Daily! And again on Student Six Day!

As someone who has spent much of his time around authority figures, Spike knows well how difficult it can be for them to just relax. And this is something Smolder learns too, when the two of them receive Dragon Lord Ember for an afternoon.

Dragons are a lot of things. Strong. Brave. Confident.

Smolder has all of these qualities in spades. For example, she needed strength, bravery, and confidence to ask the object of her crush to visit her in the Dragon Lands.

She just didn't expect Ocellus to be such a good dragon too, or why that would be such a problem.

Edited by my dear friends FamousLastWords, Not Enough Coffee, Ice Star, Semillon, Muggonny, and MissytheAngle

Cover art by Raikohillust!

This story is a sequel to Leading Causes

Twilight Sparkle has more than a little anxiety about Spike's upbringing. In the wake of the Molt and the Sludge fiasco, those anxieties are clearer and stronger than ever. Like any good caretaker, she took advantage of an opportunity to learn more about dragons, including their needs and, most importantly, their vulnerabilities.

What started as a casual conversation about death for Smolder spiraled out of control into a full-fledged princess freakout, one that she is in the middle of. When it becomes clear that her teachers are completely hopeless when it comes to dragons, it's up to her to take Spike under her wing and teach him what they can't, one lesson at a time.

After a surprising number of requests for a sequel to "Leading Causes", I finally came up with something of a quasi-anthology of Smolder's lessons to Spike. While I do have a fair number of ideas, expect sizable gaps between updates.

Rated for academic descriptions (but no depictions) of death, and possible future scenes of hunting and fishing at a level slightly too mature for an E rating. Warning tags may be added later if I, or any commenters, feel they're needed.