"I'm not sure EXACTLY..."

"I'm not sure EXACTLY: but this has happened before." Princess Luna begins, then launches into a lengthy explanation while pouring tea and pulling a bowl of crystals from her closet.

"The events I now will described occurred when I was a foal and my elder sister scarce an adult, just after we first harnessed the sun and moon..." she begins...

"In those days Discord was still abroad in the land and we were first gathering the Elements of Harmony to defeat him, but one day we came upon a dragon in much the state you are now, who cried for his mother and asked what he had done that she would abandon him."

"We comforted the man and heard his story, his mother had been traveling with him and his sisters from her latest clutch to a new lair suited for a growing family. It was early spring and the wind was blowing out of the Everfree, which even in those days was a place of untamed magic, though back then my sister and I thought we could harness and control it, which was why after Discord's defeat we built our castle there, the more fool we." Luna says wincing at some private pain.

"Anyway, as they passed low through the area which the Everfree's winds were blowing over he began to change: becoming much as you are now, and his mother carried him up and simply dropped him from over 3000 feet. Fortunately he figured out this whole 'flying' thing on his way down, and landed safely: he was 18 years old as of the day it happened."

"What happened to him afterwards?" Spike askes, the tale apparently finished.

"He became our traveling companion for a while, and some years later we found two of his sisters, very similarly changed, and describing the same trial that his mother had put him through. They left us then to go get answers from their mother, and I never saw them thereafter." Luna says sipping tea.

"So he never changed back? The transformation was permanent?" Spike probes.

"For the three turnings of the seasons I knew him at least." Luna responds. Then looks down at Spike's 'spike'. "You don't know how to make that go away again, do you?"

"No, and it's started to hurt." Spike admits embarrassed.

"Just sit still and I will help." Luna replies and moves closer.