Immediately, Scootaloo peered down at her body – and it was the body she had been born with, with her pegasus wings, her coat of autumn and her swiftly beating heart. She had her tail back, her soft, beautiful tail. Her mane wasn’t crystal anymore but messy and scraggly, and it was hers, all hers, nopony else’s. She felt her legs and her chest then wiped the tears streaming down her face. Again, she wasn’t sure why she was crying – she was wearing a million-mile smile, so it was baffling to her that she was crying. Yet she couldn’t help it. It was as though something inside her soul swelled to bursting point and had to be released.
“I’m me again,” she whispered over and over. “Oh Celestia, I’m me again. I’m me. I’m me. I’m me.”
Scootaloo allowed herself a few moments to revel in the bliss of her pony body. But she couldn’t linger.
It was time to go home.
The air was warm as she crept through the Hidden Forest, but not unpleasant. The fireflies put her in mind of lazy summer evenings: those special hours between day-shine and night-time, when the first stars came out, and Rainbow Dash would start barbequing hay-burgers. However, there were no stars in the Emberwolf’s garden. Even if she managed to escape back up the tunnel and through the ravine, she would be met with glow-worms rather than the glow of true, night-grown stars.
Glow-worms, Scootaloo thought, wasn’t good enough anymore. Not for a pony who lived with the sky inside of her soul.
She whispered the words under her breath. She drew courage from them. “The sky inside of my soul,” she said. “The sky inside of my soul.”
The trees thinned and then the exit was in sight. But, twelve hoof-lengths from the tunnel and freedom, Scootaloo stopped. Her back of her neck itched. Though she scratched at it, the itch wouldn’t go away.
She groaned. Then she forced herself to turn back into the forest: because Daring Wolf had asked something important of her. She couldn’t begin to imagine how she would do it – how she would tell the Emberwolf that she had talked with her pack. She would sooner have walked up to a dozing chimera and jabbed it in the eye! Yet the task was hers all the same, for she was the filly who had dared to befriend the Emberwolf and venture into the Buried Continent. Daring Wolf was right, she realised. If she wanted to escape – if she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life trapped beneath Equestria – then she was out of good options.
“The sky in my soul, the sky in my soul,” she whispered again, faster this time. “I live with the sky inside of my soul.”
She tip-hooved towards the glade and halted by the oak trees.
There she was: the Emberwolf.
The beast was fast asleep in the grass. Her mighty chest rose and fell.
In her bloodstream, Scootaloo felt a spikey sensation made from knives and thorns and barbs. What if the Emberwolf woke up? What would the beast say when she saw that she, Scootaloo, had transformed back into her normal self? Yet, for all the Emberwolf’s hatred, and for all that she screamed and raged, right then, she looked… peaceful. For the first time since the monstrous being had emerged from the fireplace and into the living room, Scootaloo had no trouble believing that this was the perfect gentlemare who had asked her if she was in need of a friend. In that moment, Scootaloo could believe, quite clearly, that the Emberwolf had a name, and that she had once had family.
Now, it was up to Scootaloo to remind her of them.
But she didn’t dare wake the Emberwolf up yet. There was no telling how the beast would react – and Scootaloo had long since lost the protection of the hot cocoa’s enchantment. If the Emberwolf were to blast her with fire, that would be the end of her. She would become four burnt hooves scattered in the grass, and bones and ash.
Scootaloo shivered.
A mere hundred miles separated her from home. Yet, it may as well have been the length of a galaxy.
Under her breath, she said a word that the grown-ups in her life didn’t know she knew – a word she kept stowed away for when she needed it most. She cursed the blizzardwolves and Daring Wolf in particular.
“Just tell her you guys are sorry, huh? Yeah. Reeeal easy. I’ll just go and do that.”
As she whispered it, her gaze was drawn towards the frozen chest in the centre of the glade. It sparkled in the light of the Emberwolf’s body, and from the glow of the fireflies and the fireflakes. Scootaloo wondered how it could be covered in frost in the magma-heated heart of the Buried Continent. What was this magic? Why wasn’t she allowed to touch it? In fact, not just ‘not allowed’, but utterly forbidden…
What, oh what, had the Emberwolf stolen from her pack?
Curiosity ignited inside of Scootaloo and set her heart ablaze, and a shiver shot up her spine. She paced in a small circle at the edge of the glade. Why hadn’t Daring Wolf told her more? What had happened between the blizzardwolves and the Emberwolf? How was she expected to tell the Emberwolf that all was forgiven, if she didn’t understand what the beast was being forgiven for in the first place?
Suddenly, Scootaloo knew with terrible certainty that if she didn’t look inside of that chest – if she didn’t take at least the tiniest little peek – then she would wonder about it for the rest of her life. She would dream about it every night for as long as she lived.
One look inside surely couldn’t harm. A tiny, insignificant glance…
Scootaloo sneaked across the glade. The Emberwolf snoozed ten hoof-lengths away from the chest. Scootaloo kept a wary eye on her – then, with the tip of a hoof, she brushed the lid of the filly-sized chest. The frost was thick. The smell of conifers hung in the air, like midnight forests in the far snowy north. It was the smell of blizzardwolves.
The Emberwolf snorted in her sleep. Scootaloo froze. What if the beast awoke, here and now, and saw her with her nose in the chest?
But then the Emberwolf started snoring again, and Scootaloo breathed a sigh of relief and set to work. With snowflake-softness, she slid open the bolt and lifted the lid. The hinges were stiff, and the wood was heavy.
White-blue light spilled into the forest.
Scootaloo gasped.
She had expected sapphires, or statues carved from ice, or shining white gemstones dug up from Arctic tundra. But she saw none of these. Instead, a single, enormous snowflake rested at the bottom of the chest. It was larger than a dinner plate and thicker than a pencil. It glowed from within, as though it had been hollowed out and filled with the soft blue light of a winter’s dawn. It was the most perfect thing Scootaloo had ever seen; it hypnotised her. And the closer she looked, the more detail she saw: patterns so complex that her head throbbed as she tried to make sense of them.
The Emberwolf grunted. Scootaloo jerked up her head – but the beast remained sound asleep.
Scootaloo looked back down at the snowflake.
“What is this?” she mouthed, before reaching into the chest with her hooves. She couldn’t resist. The snowflake sparkled like it had been sculpted from diamond. It demanded to be touched. When she brushed it, it was as solid as glass, and the air around it was blue-cold.
A thought came to Scootaloo, worthy of Daring Do herself. It was a madmare plan. It made her soul shudder, and she found it incredible that her hammering heart didn’t shake the fireflakes from the trees. Yet she realised, at once, that it was also the best plan she had...
She bit her lip. Briefly, she considered simply waiting for the Emberwolf to wake up, and then telling it what the blizzardwolves had said.
But she couldn’t do it. She didn’t dare.
“She’ll kill me,” Scootaloo breathed to herself. She remembered how the Emberwolf has reacted when she had accidentally destroyed a single fireflake – one amongst thousands. She thought about the sheer hatred in the Emberwolf’s voice whenever she had mentioned her pack. “Oh Celestia, oh Luna. She’ll kill me if she knew I’d talked with ’em…”
Scootaloo stared at the sleeping Emberwolf.
She gulped.
Then she thrust her head into the chest and grabbed the gigantic snowflake in her mouth. Its white-blue light shone over the glade. It turned the trees ghostly. Frost formed in the grass around Scootaloo, and in her mane and tail and feathers. It was like holding an ice sheet in her mouth, or like tasting a glacier. It was the coldest thing she had ever felt.
But she didn’t let go. Instead, she darted through the glade as quickly as her hooves could carry her, back to the entrance.
It wasn’t stealing, she told herself. Not really. Stealing was when you didn’t plan on returning something, but that wasn’t the case, here. In fact, she was relying on giving it back. For it was too dangerous, she knew, to disturb the Emberwolf in her sleep; so, Scootaloo’s mad half-a-plan hinged on the Emberwolf noticing that the chest was open and that the snowflake was gone. She wanted the beast to follow her. She was sure it would. She, Scootaloo, simply needed enough of a head-start…
She would lure the Emberwolf back to the surface. She would lead it through her aunts’ house and out of the skylight. There, in the open, the blizzardwolves would see them – and they would take care of the rest. They would calm the Emberwolf down… give her back the snowflake… welcome her back with open paws…
Deep down, Scootaloo knew that it was a useless excuse for a plan. But it was either that, or risking the Emberwolf's fury...
Please, she thought. Don’t wake up. Not yet. Not yet.
The hush pressed in around her. The trees watched her, judged her.
Soon, she was in the tunnel, and the path bent sharply to the right. The grass was replaced with rock and the snowflake was the only source of light.
The floor sloped upwards. The air grew hotter the further Scootaloo rose, until her lungs were two furnaces. Her vision swam. Her wings drooped by her sides. At what temperature did ponies melt, she wondered? Yet despite the skin-boiling heat, a chill of wonder shot through her – because the snowflake refused to melt. It didn’t even drip around the edges. Scootaloo held onto it tighter, like a freezing lifeline.
Seconds moved like minutes, and minutes passed by as slowly as hours. Then the tunnel ended, and the glow-worm sky returned far overhead. She was in the ravine again.
Something moved in the darkness ahead. Scootaloo shouted, “Go away! You don’t scare me, whatever you are!” And before the snowflake’s glow could light the creature-in-the-darkness, she heard it scuttle away on bone crunching claws, no doubt to foul smelling caves hidden behind cracks in the walls. Was it the Night Terror she had heard? Was it a murder of voice snatchers? Scootaloo didn’t know. She didn’t care. Though she was sweat-stinking – although, by this point, her legs were made from one third muscle and two thirds agony – she ran faster than ever.
She tasted determination on her tongue.
The glow-worm sky was closer than ever. The ravine walls grew shorter.
Then she was in the topaz thicket again. Away from the shelter of the ravine, and without the protection of her emberwolf body, the murderous heat scalded her. The magnificent chill of the snowflake was all that stopped her from being cooked alive in this strange, deep country.
She snorted through her nostrils. She thought, Don’t stop, keep going. You don’t have long. And she galloped through the crystal trees and buzzed her wings and moved even faster.
She tried not to think of the Emberwolf. Rather, she pictured her friends and her family: Rainbow Dash, Apple Bloom, Sweetie Belle, her aunts and her parents.
Her soul smiled.
Then Scootaloo burst from the thicket and hurtled through the ruby grass of the hill. Now that she wasn’t an emberwolf pup – now that she didn’t have fur made from smouldering coals – the grass blades sliced her, pricked her, cut into her soft pony skin. She bit down harder on the snowflake.
With a final dash, she was at the top of the hill, and she panted and shielded her gaze: without her emberwolf eyes, the Buried Continent wasn’t beautiful anymore. Instead, it blinded. The trees were too bright to stare at, and the vast banks of mist resembled clouds of pure sunlight. Even the ceiling was bright. Away from the ravine’s gloom, she could scarcely see the glow-worm stars, for they were drowned in the red glare of that angry country hidden under Equestria.
She gagged. The land didn’t smell of a million beautiful spices anymore, but of sulphur, of rotten eggs congealing in the sun.
Scootaloo had had quite enough of life underground.
She pawed at the spot where the archway of fire had stood, but it looked no different to the rest of the hilltop. The archway didn’t reappear.
“Do not doubt,” Aunt Holiday had said to her that night. “Believe in your friends, and in the glow of their love...”
Scootaloo smiled. Suddenly, she had an idea.
The archway had been made from anger, and anger was strong: but love was its equal. Now, she was going to use pure, heart-shining love to rebuild the Emberwolf’s staircase.
I love you, she thought to her aunts (were it not for the giant snowflake in her mouth, she would have said it out loud). I love you with all my heart...
Just then, the ground trembled.
It was barely noticeable, no more than a tingle in her hooves. Scootaloo ignored it and shut her eyelids, breathed deep, and reached inside of herself. She rummaged through her mind, searching for the memories that felt warmest, softest, cosiest. She remembered too the sensation of breathing her first firebow: a fiery rainbow fuelled by the knowledge that there were ponies who loved her beyond imagining.
Meanwhile, the tremble grew into a low, steady rumble. Flocks of magma-birds fled squawking from the trees. Still, Scootaloo kept her eyes closed – and near the back of her mind, she discovered a memory of Rainbow Dash tucking her under her wing to shelter her from a rainstorm. Then she remembered herself, Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle laughing in their clubhouse. The joke was long forgotten, but the laughter remained in Scootaloo’s soul.
She breathed deeply in and deeply out. She imagined sculpting her memories into bricks; then, in her mind, she piled the bricks up and arranged them into an archway. In the arch, she imagined a door, just like the one to her own bedroom in her aunts’ house.
When she opened her eyes again, both the archway and the door were standing right in front of her – not in her imagination, but for real.
She gasped and stepped back, almost dropping the snowflake. No way, she thought. But then she touched the arch and it was really there, it was real, it was solid: somehow, incredibly, and by pure, love-guided instinct, she had done it. The bricks were marble smooth, made from light, and were the colours of dreams – all the colours of all the rainbows in Equestria. Around the archway, the air wasn’t sulphur stinking, but it smelled of hay fries, pizza, chocolate, laundry, dust, ink, paper, and logs in the fireplace. All her worries melted away in that heaven-sent smell.
It was the scent of home.
Scootaloo stared wide eyed at her impossible creation. She had no idea how she had done it, other than crafting it had felt like the easiest thing in the world…
Yet, there wasn’t time to marvel: in the distance, from the direction of the ravine, the rumble become a roar. Blades of ruby grass clinked together, and around the edge of the hill, the trees filled with whooping and hollering. There were bird cries, and the shrieks of fleet footed beasts. Something was coming, fast. It was a something whose anger was too terrible even for the Buried Continent.
From beyond the topaz thicket, a sheet of flames erupted towards the glow-worm sky. It was a wall of fire, a mile tall and scorching white. A terror-struck Scootaloo knew that it was the Emberwolf releasing her rage into the ravine: the fires had nowhere else to travel but upwards.
The ground quaked. Crystal trees tumbled and shattered on the floor into glittering splinters.
Scootaloo kicked open the door in the archway, and to her intense relief, the staircase – the impossible, black crystal staircase that only existed inside of the arch – had reappeared, and it was waiting for her to race up the steps.
From behind – still far away, yet too close for comfort – Scootaloo heard the Emberwolf roar.
“YOU WERE MY FRIEND!” the beast screamed. Another jet of flames exploded from the ravine. “FRIENDS DON’T HURT FRIENDS. I HATE YOU! I HATE YOU WITH ALL OF MY SOUL!”
Scootaloo didn’t wait to hear any more. There was scarcely time to register her universe-ending fear as she raced through the archway and slammed the door behind her and ran, ran, ran for her life.
Stage one of her plan had been one thousand percent successful: the Emberwolf was chasing her back to the surface.
Stage two rested on three things: on her faith that her friends would be waiting for her; on Daring Wolf’s promise that the attic would be unlocked; and on a wild hunch she had about the immense snowfall that had buried her home.