Heir of the Nightmare

Flashback III: Of Stars and Bears

Canterlot Castle

Eleven Years Before the 1000th Summer Sun Celebration

Celestia

It had been an exhausting day and she was sporting a few new bruises, but Celestia would have it no other way.

Twilight was with her.

The small filly was literally bouncing with excitement as she carried a large package on her back. They were moving through the castle out into the Royal Gardens, where a crystal table and Celestia's evening tea sat waiting for them. The stars in the night sky seemed to sparkle more so than usual that night, for Celestia had just set the sun and raised the moon.

"Princess! I'm so excited!" Twilight squealed giddily, her brown package bobbing up and down on her back as she skipped along, the cutie-mark of a large pink star surrounded by five smaller white ones that she had just received earlier that day shining on her lavender flank.

Celestia too, was excited. It wasn't every day she was reunited with her sister's daughter, though Twilight had no idea of their relation.

Of course, Celestia had no idea when she had woken up that morning that she would have an impromptu family reunion with her niece, nor had she anticipated the two of them having tea in the gardens just after Celestia had raised the moon.

It had started earlier that day, when Celestia was touring the grounds of her school with the headmaster. She had been walking quite briskly, eager to shed the rambling stallion trailing after her and return to her castle when the city had felt a disturbance.

A very...explosive disturbance.

After the initial boom that reverberated across the mountain, the tower above her had become illuminated with fiery trails of purple lightening that lanced through the air like shears in a wheat field. The shockwave had broken windows for miles inside Canterlot and rattled the walls of the city. Ponies that had not been rendered unconscious from the magical output pouring from the tower soon fled from the school and its immediate vicinity. Much to the shock of the fleeing onlookers, what appeared to be a fully grown dragon sprouted from the tower, breaking through the roof to look blinkingly down on the panicked pedestrians.

Celestia had immediately flown up to the top of the tower to quell the magical flare and to tame the dragon. Upon studying it, Celestia had realized that the dragon, while having the appearance of a fully-grown drake, had the mind of a newborn hatch-ling. Also, she discovered it was the same dragon that had been the small green egg she had given the school centuries ago.

Celestia had given the dragon egg to her school's professors for it to be used at the entrance exam in order to measure the candidate's magic. Few unicorns Celestia had ever known could have hatched the egg, the magical caliber required would have to have been on the same level as Starswirl the Bearded and Clover the Clever. Students that had reached the egg-stage in the admission process were already admitted (though the students were never told this, is was a well-kept secret among the alumni of her school), and the egg was to see the magical output the new students would possess. Celestia didn't think that children would have ever been capable of actually hatching it.

But there it was, staring back at her as she had hovered above it, not only hatched, but magically amplified a hundred times its original size.

Upon the clarification that the not-so-small baby dragon posed no threat, Celestia had dived past the enlarged drake and into the tower's room through the shattered roof, landing upon the crackling stone a few yards from the epicenter of the magical flare. Shielding her eyes from the brightness of the flare with a wing, she looked into the glaring purple light and beheld a shockingly familiar filly.