//------------------------------// // Wolf Filly // Story: Emberwolf // by Lucky Dreams //------------------------------// The house fell quiet. It was the rarest species of hush, found usually in the grey nights after a forest fire, when the ground is ashen, and the trees are no more than blackened stumps. The moon-breeze blows through the stumps and whips up the ash. All sound is chocked. That was the silence Scootaloo experienced in the living room. It was a quiet which told her that the world had changed and there was no going back. The Emberwolf looked solemn. “Trot through the archway,” it said, “and you need never worry about arguments again. Enter the archway and live with fire in your heart! Or else you can wait here, and I shall leave you alone and never return. You can wait for the snow to melt. By morning – and I make this promise with all the embers in my bones – your aunts will be back to normal. Life will return to the way it was. That means shouting. It means arguments. It means friends who will never, for the life of them, understand how you feel… “The choice is yours, Scootaloo. Choose carefully.” Scootaloo didn’t hesitate but stepped closer to the fire-door. Now that she had allowed herself to feel anger – now she had tasted that most forbidden of emotions and discovered its wonder – she needed more of it, more, more and more. Briefly, she thought of her aunts trapped upstairs on the bedside desk. “Believe in your friends,” they had said, “and the glow of their love.” Right then, however, the glow of Apple Bloom’s and Sweetie Belle’s love was nothing compared to silver-tongued promises of the Emberwolf. She grinned at the beast, then marched right up to the fire-door. Her heart pumped flames through her bloodstream. Her ears flicked wildly, and her wings twitched in excitement. “I’m ready,” she said. And through the fire-door, she saw a staircase, and the stairs led down and down. The steps were carved from black crystal, and the taste of bonfires was in the air. She was so alert, so awake, that could have galloped for a day and a night. Scootaloo stepped onto the staircase, then took another step, another, another, cantered down into the dark. A warm breeze rose from deep below and whipped her mane. The world was black. The only light was a red dot at the very bottom of the staircase, perhaps a hundred miles away. “Keep moving,” said the Emberwolf from behind. “Let the fire into your heart. Feel your anger. Feel how good it is.” It was good, alarmingly so. Scootaloo worried whether it was wrong to enjoy it. Was she allowed to? Wasn’t it better to hide away her fury in a lonely corner of her soul and keep it under lock and key? Yet the knowledge of its wrongness, the fact that grown-ups wouldn’t approve of it, made her anger taste more delicious than ever. She glanced over her shoulder to ask the Emberwolf if it was right to feel this way. She halted. The Emberwolf wasn’t there. Scootaloo couldn’t even see the living room, for the archway had vanished behind her. There was nothing but pitch darkness. She gulped. Her hooves tingled as, around her, she heard voices in the gloom. It was the voices of her parents. “Everything’s going to be fine, little one,” Mom said, to which Dad added, “There’s nothing to worry about, Scoots. Mommy and Daddy are just… talking. That’s all. We’re just talking.” Although she heard them as clear as day-shine, Scootaloo knew they weren’t really there. They couldn’t possibly. At that very moment, Mom was in Los Pegasus on a business trip, whilst Dad’s job had called him away to Manehattan. Was this some strange magic of the staircase, she wondered, that it could mimic the voices of her parents? But then Scootaloo considered what the mysterious voices had said – and in an instant, her questions evaporated as flames surged through her muscles. She didn’t care, anymore, whether Mom and Dad were really on the staircase alongside her, or if the voices were simply a dark enchantment of some sort. The nerve of her parents. The nerve of them. They had treated her this way for months: nothing more than a little filly who couldn’t grasp that something had broken. She was too young to understand, they said. Everything was fine, they said. Everything was as right as rain: never mind the fact she saw way, way more than grown-ups could ever believe possible for a filly of eleven. Shaking, Scootaloo trotted down the steps once more, trying her best to ignore the terrible voices which continued to speak from all around. “Everything is fine.” “Me and your mom love each other.” “All is fine.” “Everything will be fine.” Scootaloo spat on the black crystal. Her parent’s voices died away, replaced by the voices of Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle. “You ain’t bein’ fair on us, Scoots, said Apple Bloom from nowhere, from everywhere. Scootaloo picked up her pace. Her trot turned into a canter and then to a gallop. Yet, no matter how fast she ran, no matter how quickly she dashed towards the red light at the bottom of the staircase, she couldn’t escape from the voices. “Shut it,” she snapped at them. The voices ignored her. “You never want to play with us anymore,” said Sweetie Belle. “Why are you being such a meaniehead all the time?” “You’ve changed,” said Apple Bloom. “You’ve changed,” insisted Sweetie Belle. “Changed.” “Changed.” “Changed.” “Changed.” “Changed.” Something detonated inside of Scootaloo. Something changed in the air. “SHUT UP!” she yelled. The black walls exploded with heat. The steps and ceiling erupted with light, so that Scootaloo felt she ran through the inside of a fire tornado. She was surrounded by loops of flame and rings of lava. Her ears were assaulted with roaring howling screeching. Yet, it wasn’t enough to drown out her own voice as she screamed, “SHUT UP, SHUT UP! LEAVE ME ALONE!” Her parents always argued. Her best friends didn’t understand her pain. And so, she ran, she galloped down and down and down, deeper into the Earth, and she let herself feel her anger – truly feel it. The sky was driven out of her heart and replaced with fire. She beat her wings and felt a tingling sensation in her hooves – except they were no longer hooves at all, but they were paws. She felt like invisible dragons pulled on either end of her belly, until her body was long and slender. Lightning flashed in her stomach. Her wings frazzled and burnt to cinders. Her nose grew longer and became a snout. Her coat was fire. Her bones were coal. When she swished her tail, she heard the clink of blood-red crystals, for the hairs had turned into thin strands of ruby, as had the hairs in her mane. Then, at last, Scootaloo reached the bottom of the staircase and burst through a second fiery archway and into a field of ruby-red grass. She was not, however, Scootaloo anymore. She had transformed. Magic had taken hold of her, fire-magic, and she was an emberwolf pup. She was Scootalwolf. She grinned. Her wolfish new body glowed bright, hot, fierce, wondrous. Scootawolf raised her fiery snout in the air and howled. Then, from nearby, she heard the voice of the Emberwolf. “Oh, well done, very well done!” it told her. “A most splendid transformation. I knew you had it in you!”