I awaken, with a throbbing headache, from dreams of fire.
The first thing I notice is that my face is cold. This is remarkable because the rest of me isn't. I whimper, murmur, and paw at my muzzle — and my fingers pass through empty air.
I crack my eyes open. No longer is there a ridge of sky-blue scales in front of them, only the stubby silhouette of a nose. I bring my hand to my face, and it is blunt and fleshy. I scramble upright, adrenaline rising — and an enveloping shroud of fabric moves with me. I thrash my way free of the warm, thick fabric square, and find myself in a wide clearing in a familiar, sun-dappled forest.
I am home. How? The last thing I remember is the world of dragons — and the power of Ember's bloodstone blasting my apotheosis away. My hands shoot to my head. No horns. No crown!
I jerk my hands down to my neck, groping for it there. Still nothing. No. No! A wail begins to burble from my throat. I have lost everything.
"Gosh," a human voice murmurs from some distance behind me. "She looks pretty traumatized, Ember. Are you sure she'll be okay?"
I bolt, like prey, not caring where. I crash into the bushes, then once within their comforting cover, whirl around and bare my teeth. On the far opposite side of the glade — making no move — are two humans: one clad in gentle gauzy greens and pink hair over sun-yellow skin, and one with fiery hair wearing thick black-stained animal skins. Then I see the smaller figures at their sides: an all-too-familiar wolf with ice-blue fur, and her misshapen purple companion.
The gentle yellow human turns to the one who spoke first. "Sunset!" she chides. "Of course she's going to be traumatized if you startle her like that!"
Sunset meekly apologizes. The wolf, however, bites back a growl — and I realize to my shock that I can still feel her, a subdued echo of the whispers the crown once murmured into my throat. Not enough to reach into her with, but enough that when she locks eyes with me, the murky churn of her emotions still whisper into my heart.
I can sense, too, that she feels my fear and grief. She wears no crown, either. But it seems that she, like me, was left changed by that frozen moment with the bloodstones.
I WANT to say that, after what she did, she can rot, Ember's voice echoes inside my head. (She is no longer speaking with her muzzle, and yet all the others react to her words. I am beginning to realize how deep the mark is which the combined bloodstones left on us.) Then I feel her frustration soften, and she lets out a breath, and pity churns in her gut. But I can't hate her, seeing her like this. She's just a me I might have been. And more lost than I ever was.
Sunset nods. "I understand. Fluttershy and I will keep an eye on her. We're old hands at dealing with weird consequences of Equestrian magic." She glances back and forth between me and the wolf at her side and chuckles half-heartedly. "Though this is maybe a little weirder than usual."
"Speaking of which," Spike's high voice injects, "is this weirding anyone else out? You're just letting this ... human kid ... run off into the woods and hoping everything will work out?"
"Not into the woods," Fluttershy says, staring toward me with a sad smile. "Back to her home. Her life is out there. Her pack. Her friends. I'm going to make sure she knows we're here for her too, but she'll have to make the decision to trust us. If we had just locked her in a room somewhere to rehabilitate her, we would have scarred her forever."
Well, she won't trust me any time ever, Ember says understatedly. She limps over to Spike, her spine stiff, still favoring one hindleg. But at least the Bloodstone Crown is gone.
My face twists up, in the way that has never quite made up for my lack of ears to lay flat. I need no further reminders of my failure.
I back away until brush obscures my tormentors, then wheel and flee.
Halfway through the long, humiliating walk back to the cave, emotion overtakes me. I stagger over to a tree, sink against it, and throw my head back in a thin, weak, mournful howl. There is no reply.
I ball up, wrapping my legs to my chest, feeling liquid streak down my cheeks and pool up on my knees. And I sit there, rocking back and forth, until my tears are cried out and my mind has nothing to do but race in circles around my defeat.
I unwrap an arm, staring at it and flexing my frail, clawless fingers. Despite some tiny lingering touch of the lost crown inside me — barely enough to sense that my pack exists out there in the distance — I am weaker than I've ever been. Never mind what I did as a dragon; I don't even have the necklace any more which once made me a powerful wolf. There is no way I could ever lead a hunt now.
If only I had strength like Ember's, I think desperately. If only I could do the things she did.
I stew in that self-pity for several minutes. I close my eyes, and an even more relentless thought stabs in: that ice-blue wolf staring at me in pity. And that, finally, stirs up something besides grief. How dare she be more of a wolf than me here, after taunting me about her advantages over pure instinct?
Then my thoughts finally slow as that churning uncovers the gleam of an idea.
I look back down. I flex my fingers again, more thoughtfully.
I glance around the forest floor until my sight settles on a fist-sized stone. Normally they are just obstacles on a hunt, hazards for scampering paws, but the memory of her hurtled boulders is all too vivid. I do not have a dragon's strength, nor its claws … and yet my form, with all its weaknesses, can do things no other wolf's can. Not even Ember's. I close my fingers around the rock, hefting it in my hand, and marvel for a moment at how perfectly these spindly, fleshy fingers curl around it.
My first throw goes wide of the tree I aimed at, but as I scamper to retrieve the stone the thrill of the hunt is beginning to stir, and by the time the shadows have shifted I am hitting the tree more often than I am missing. Later, when a lucky shot sends a stunned bird crashing down to the ground from its perch, I let out a yip of triumph and tear into its flesh with my teeth. Never mind my instant regret as I spit out feathers — I feel ambition blazing within me again, like a fire rekindled.
I hesitate for a moment at that thought.
And ideas begin to whisper inside my brain.
Father bolts to his paws as I finally approach the cave entrance several days later. There is alarm in his scent; his hackles are raised and fangs bared. However, his confusion is equally evident from the way he withholds his growl. He retreats, sidestepping back and forth as light dances around the cave from angles far at odds with the shadows outside.
Finally, he barks sharply. Daughter — an inner whisper translates, as I allow some echo of the bloodstone's power within me to respond to his fumbling attempts to connect — what is the meaning of this?
I square my feet off, and lower the burning tip of the branch I'm holding to the floor of the cave, causing its shadows to dance even more madly. My packmates back away in silence, ears flat.
Hello again, father, I think. (Even though I can no longer insert whispers of need into my packmates, I can still reach out to the surface of their feelings and make certain my message carries to them all.) Tonight you should allow me to lead the hunt.
No request, that. No demand. No challenge. A calm statement of fact.
At that, he does allow a growl to stir up, and circles the fire warily. Do you think threatening the pack with fire changes anything? Leading the hunt is for —
— the biggest and strongest, I interrupt. I bounce the tip of the burning branch to punctuate, watching the shadows lurch and half my packmates scramble back from the light.
This is no threat, I say. It is a demonstration of my strength. I am both wolf and more than wolf, Father. I am flame without fire. I am fangs without a muzzle. I am bloodstone without bloodstone. And I am the hunt without the hunt. Let me lead, and this magic will be the pack's.
Then I straighten up, standing to my full height and spreading my other arm. Were Father fully upright, we would be looking eye to eye, but cowed as my packmates are, I tower over even Father's crouching form. And as far as size — I believe I am tall enough to qualify.
I emphasize this by thrusting my arm upward, whipping the branch in a sudden arc from side to side. The rush of wind extinguishes the thin fire at the end, illuminating the air with a short-lived shower of sparks and leaving the cave in comfortable darkness. I take the stick, now tipped by a gently glowing ember, and plunge its base into the soft ground just inside the cave, watching thick smoke coil up from the tip and chase a motley cloud of insects outside. Then I turn around without explanation and walk downwind.
When Patient-Leap trots after me, ears perked in curiosity, Father begrudgingly follows, the others at his shoulders. And it is not long before they scent the fresh meat my own blunted nose can no longer directly discern.
In the clearing by the sunning-stone, I have taken two of my sharpened sticks and thrust them tip-first into the earth, stringing between them one of the vines I gathered from the thickets by the river. Hanging on the vine are the eight still-moist fish I speared from the water shortly before my return, and at the base of my makeshift pantry are the birds and squirrels I killed earlier that afternoon with the increasingly steady aim of my rocks.
Here is tonight's hunt, I say, feeling the hunger rise in my packmates. A gift from my magic. I crouch — for the first time since returning — deferentially to Father. Tell me to lead the hunt tomorrow, and you will find out what I can do when we run.
His shock quickly dissipates, to be replaced by an all too rare sensation swelling within him.
Pride.
Then he howls for Hunt Leader Ember, and my pack adds their voices.
I join in last, adding the final pitch, the one that joins our sounds together into something greater. And I close my eyes and bask in the sound, all the fire I will ever need burning within me.