Rebirth

Disclaimer: I do not own My Little Pony, nor am I profiting off this literary venture.

----

"You have no idea how worried I, we've been about you Spike." His fur felt so different from the scales she was used to. "You should have told me how difficult things were getting, I would've helped. You know I would."

"I know, Twilight. It wasn't about the work, okay? Not really." He wasn't going to be the first to let go. This was home. She was home. "I... I wanted to find myself. See who I was. Does that make sense?"

Her grip loosened, but she wasn't letting go either.

"You're our friend, Spike. If you wanted to try new things, find something else you liked doing, you could've talked to us. All of us would have been glad to help." His legs held firm, both of their tears starting to dry.

"I know, Twilight. It's going to sound greedy but I... I wanted to find out who I was on my own. I wanted to see if I could stand up on my own, make sure I was making my own decisions instead of looking for help from everypony." Twilight didn't have anything to say to that, she'd been thrown horn-first into a position where she couldn't look up to somepony for help. It had been exhilarating, freeing. Terrifying.

For several long moments, growing increasingly awkward for their observers, their hug continued.

"I thought I lost you." Her grip was nearly painful, he didn't even want to imagine her expression. "Luna and I went to Fillydelphia to follow up on dark magic and we found out you'd been... Been eaten by that thing."

"I thought you were gone. D-Dead!" She hiccuped and he felt fresh tears matting his fur.

He felt terrible, guilt settling itself under his lungs. This wasn't what he'd wanted, this was never what he'd wanted.

"I'm sorry, Twilight." The hug got tighter, it was actually hurting him now.

"Don't be, Spike. You're here, I'm so-" She hiccuped again. "I'm so glad you're here."

"Twilight?" Rarity interjected, trying not to obtrusively stare at the other nearby Princess who was, somehow, asleep on her feet. "Perhaps it would be best if we took our reunion, err, inside instead?"

"What?" She wiped her tears away and looked around at the expanding audience. More than a few with cameras. "Oh, right. Inside is good."

----

"So, I met your other employer." Spike was keeping up with her relatively well, she noticed. Whatever magic had been employed in this change must have mimicked a ponies instinct set.

Or perhaps, she allowed, it had independently developed it somewhere between leaving the cannibalized train and encountering the dragon and whatever symbiosis between them was allowing him to utilize it.

She needed to analyze it. She also needed to discuss it with the only other legal expert on dark magic available.

Who was currently floating upside down and kicking at the air, drool puddling on the floor. Dead asleep.

She wouldn't begrudge Luna her rest, not after last night. Her own sleep had been fitful, to be sure, but no nightmares had plagued her.

"Mr.Lemon? Probably didn't have anything good to say about me, did he? Don't get me wrong, he's a nice pony, alright? He just-" Twilight laughed, interrupting his verbal stumbling.

"He seemed like a nice enough pony, Spike. And he had a lot of good things to say about you. Like being diligent and helpful even when other ponies weren't treating you the nicest." She opened the door to a bedroom, practically on the opposite side of the castle from her own, and gently levitated the slumbering alicorn onto the bed.

Ponies, Mr.Lemon had said, who disliked dragons for the sake of being dragons.

Where was the sense in that, she wondered. Had they completely forgotten the tale of Hearth's Warming?

Discord was real, Sombra had been real, monsters of lore and legend were lurking in the forgotten corners of the world. The attitude of the populace of Fillydelphia couldn't be allowed to spread, and containing it would only be a stopgap instead of a solution.

Twilight made a mental note to double check the weather reports from the north, see if a chill had been spreading.

Fighting Windigo's, after all, was not high on her priority list.

"He also mentioned some books that you'd purchased while you were working there." She saw him look down and scratch his mane from the corner of her eye. "How far did you get through them?"

"Not that far, really. The science and literature books weren't too bad, I guess. I was having a lot of trouble actually with the math and magic books. I didn't really get the harder math stuff and I can't even practice the-" She smirked when he went cross-eyed and stared at the horn protruding from his forehead. "Oh."

"Tell you what, why don't you go get your books from Rarity's and I'll help you go over them while we wait for Luna to wake up?" Spike smiled at her and rushed off to likely talk to Rarity who'd stayed in the entrance hall.

Wait. Back up. That wasn't right.

Those were not equine teeth he had.

Her own grin faded.

That meant the magic hadn't made a complete transformation, assuming that Spike was the one who'd been transformed.

On the other hoof, considering what she'd seen of the thing before...

No, no, it still didn't make sense. It certainly had looked like carrion but it wasn't expressing traits of what it had been subsuming. No bear claws, no wings or feathers and while certainly sharp, those were definitely dragons teeth and not bear or any kind of cat.

She walked into her study and pulled a notepad in front of her, a quill scratching away with her observations.

Spike's physical maturity had him at roughly early to mid adolescent. No cutie mark, supplied by the magic or discovered naturally, assuming it was even possible for him to develop one. Unicorn horn is present though whether or not it was capable of facilitating magical manipulation was untested.

That, she decided, was where the magical determination would start. With some luck he would be able to cast spells and hopefully, hopefully the magic would retain the signature of the artifact or spell that initially caused this... Metamorphosis, and would match up with a record of previously encountered phenomenon.

If not, it would reveal how deep the transformation was.

Gifting magic to a race resistant not only to magic, but to the idea of actively using magic?

'Actually,' Twilight thought 'Compared to everything else, the culture shock if other dragons found out about this isn't that big a deal'