Sweet Leaves

You knew soldiers who participated in the liberation? Or at least saw the aftermath?

Both. I was acquainted with some of the ponies in those units. Again, I didn’t make an effort to make many friends. As for the aftermath? Sure. I saw it. Everybody knew about it. Including the brass, including the Crown. If they made an effort to put any stop to it, it wasn’t very much of an effort. Not that they weren’t pre-occupied with their own business.

When the dragons were driven back, they abandoned a lot of materiel. We were as eager to recover as much of it as possible as we were eager to drive them back. And then we, we meaning the troops on the front, started finding whole towns.

Most towns overrun by the dragons were like my hometown. They were destroyed completely. Others, the ones with strategic value, were spared. They were captured mostly intact, along with the ponies who lived there. According to the story that later emerged, any ponies showing resistance were summarily eaten. Others were just eaten anyway. Some were publicly tortured, just to set an example to those even thinking about resistance. The dragons had use for the ponies. Slave labor, essentially. The ponies kept the supplies moving into the front. Now the thing about killing all the resistance was, those who survived soon forgot about any hope of resistance. They needed the dragons’ favor to survive. Soon they started being friendly with the dragons. It wasn’t slavery anymore. It was cooperation. The ponies in those towns were willfully, gladly aiding the dragon’s war effort. The dragons even set up their own pony breeding operation.

It was just a matter of survival, wasn’t it?

You’d hope so, but no. The ponies actually sympathized with the dragons. When the dragons fled backwards, they abandoned the ponies. And the sympathizer ponies actually put up resistance to our advancing troops. That really only made matters worse.

You have to put yourselves in the shoes of those troops, not that I want to defend their actions. We’d just gone through years of war. Many of us had lost our families. All of us had seen our comrades killed in combat. We had all suffered immensely. Our hearts were filled with revenge.

We, again “we” as in the front line troops, probably would have taken it out on dragon civilians, if there were such a thing. All we had were snake-loving ponies.

What happened then?

What happened? Well, the same thing that happens with any invading army in every war that has ever been. Civilians were brutalized. The stallions were killed, the mares were raped. Anything with any value was looted. The foals? Well, the same general pattern as the adults, I suppose.

Thunder Charge

When and where did it start?

The third day of Maresk. That battle was already won. We started out well behind dragon lines. Little things like lines didn’t matter a thing to us long-distance teleporters, right, Doc? It was former pony territory, around about the neighborhood of Seadle, I’d say. None of us had been into the dragon lands yet. That was about to change.

It was the dozen of us, plus the Colonel. And the big surprise of that day, the seneschal was coming with us.

That would be Celestia’s war time seneschal, Foxtrot Red.

Yeah, that’s the one. Creepy as fuck.

How so?

Don’t know. You just had to be there. It was him that briefed us on the mission details. He was real punctual and formal, you know? In a sort of fruity way. But he was also really crafty, devious like. I can’t really put my hoof on it. Sometimes I wondered if it wasn’t him pulling all the strings in Equestria. I guess he just rubbed me the wrong way. Plus, he was a master sorcerer. Second only to Celestia herself, I suppose. He’d been keeping track of Operation Straight Flush all those years. He was cribbing off all the research. He was almost as good at teleporting as we were. That surprised us. He followed us all the way into the dragon lands. We didn’t think he could keep up with us, but he did.

We set out at the appointed time. A couple of hours later and we were at the old border, and then into the dragon lands.

There have been very few ponies who have actually seen the dragon lands.

Yeah, and for good reason. It’s a nightmare. Everything is scorched and black. You can’t see the sun, there’s so much smoke in the air. The ground is all carved up in these enormous furrows. I don’t know what it was about. It looked like some weird cross between farming and strip mining. The dragons supplement themselves with minerals, so maybe it was both.

And as we got further in we started seeing these weird buildings. We were moving too fast to get a good look at them. But they didn’t make any kind of sense. They had really weird surreal like shapes to them. We couldn’t begin to guess their function. You know, all this time the dragons were fighting the war with the ponies, they were also fighting a war on their own northern front. Nobody knows who they were fighting with, except for maybe the crown. And that mystery scares me sometimes. I wonder if those buildings didn’t have some sort of purpose in the other war. I guess I’ll never know.

Anyway, thousands of miles from our starting point, we reach our destination. We stop for a bit to recon from a bluff outside the dragon’s capital.

This would be the political capital?

No, the other one.

The home of the Winter Palace then, the ceremonial, religious and cultural capital of the dragons.

I can neither confirm nor deny that.

Go on.

We had to infiltrate one building in particular. We left the seneschal behind at the recon point, he wasn’t meant for fighting. The building itself was massive. A big low dome. It was sealed with some massive gates. Getting through the gates wasn’t too hard, even though they were pretty thick. It wasn’t much fun teleporting through those. We all made it, although there were a couple of close calls. We took turns, you know. One pony goes first, guesses the thickness of the wall. If he survives, he teleports back and tells us how thick the wall was.

Anyway, worse than the gates were the four guards that we had to deal with. Ceremonial guards. That makes it sound like they were pushovers when I put it that way. But no, these were the oldest, biggest, toughest dragons I’d ever seen. Probably tougher than any fighting in combat out on the front. They were powerful sorcerers in their own right.

You lost seven of your teammates that day.

Eight including the colonel. And it was to those dragons. They each put up a fell of a fight. I’m glad we didn’t have to fight them together. It was one at a time. It was the colonel that took out the last one. Or maybe it was the other way around. He ordered us on to the goal while he distracted that last one. It was the biggest. What a glorious bastard, the Colonel. You know, for awhile afterwards I expected him to make it back out, all cut up and bruised, but with that slimy grin still on his face. He never made it though.

But he saved the mission. We got to our goal. We picked up the “package.” Took it back to the recon point and handed it back to the seneschal. We then escorted him back to pony territory where he took off with it. Who knows where? Probably Canterlot. And that was the end of the big mission.

And you can’t tell me what was in the package.

No, sir.

Dancy Prancer

Dragon eggs. It’s the only thing that makes sense, given all of the evidence. The insertion team nabbed a clutch of dragon eggs.

Dragons can store their eggs for hundreds of years, you know. They’re the most precious thing in the world to dragons. It takes magic to store them. It’s easy for the dragons, but it’s not the sort of magic that ponies know much about. That’s what the other scientists on the Operation Straight Flush project must have been working on. Storing dragon eggs. Also, incubating and hatching them. Best evidence I have is all the griffon eggs they went through for the research. We almost drove them extinct, you know.

That’s my guess. We captured a clutch of dragon eggs and used them as bargaining chips. We forced a retreat of the dragons to pre-war borders.

Given the evidence, capturing eggs makes sense for the mission. But why would the dragons end the war over a few eggs? Surely the insertion team could only capture a few hooffulls of eggs. The dragons lost thousands of adults in combat.

Ah ha (laughs). That’s where my idea all comes together. It was called Operation Straight Flush. You know, names for operations like that are chosen entirely at random. It’s a counterintelligence measure. It keeps spies from guessing the nature of the operation, in case spies come across any paperwork. Except Operation Straight Flush wasn’t originally called Operation Straight Flush. No. In the first few weeks, it was called Operation Royal Flush. That was the random name that was drawn. The Crown changed it. I don’t know why. But the only reason that makes good sense is because they thought the random name was too close to describing the actual mission.

I’ve come to believe that the mission wasn’t just about capturing any eggs, but about capturing the royal heirs.

Equestria has captured, and probably hatched, the crown prince of dragonkind, and has used him as a hostage to keep the peace.

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