Scootaloo ran.
She didn’t dare stop, not even to glance over her shoulder as she heard something smash far behind – the sound of a wooden door being blasted into a million splinters. Her muscles screamed in agony. She held the snowflake tightly in her mouth, taking the steps five at a time with help from her wings.
“GIVE IT BACK!” the Emberwolf roared.
Scootaloo ran faster.
“COME BACK! I’LL KILL YOU! COME BACK!”
The Emberwolf’s voice echoed ferociously, magnified by the crystal walls and ceiling. But, just like when she had first descended the staircase, Scootaloo heard other voices in the gloom, mysterious and disembodied. Like before, she couldn’t tell if they were real or inside her head. “Hurry!” they told her. “Hurry, Scootaloo. She’s gaining!”
In the corners of her vision, she saw them: her friends and family. Were they paintings? Reflections in the walls? Were they real or imagined? She didn’t slow down and check, so there was no knowing what she was truly seeing. But up the length of the staircase, illuminated by the glow of the magical snowflake, appeared countless images of Rainbow Dash, Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle. She saw Aunt Holiday and Aunt Lofty, and Mom and Dad. It was all the ponies who meant something to her, all the ponies who dwelt in the Land of her Heart. They waved at her, urging her to gallop faster.
“Fly, Scoots,” said a hundred Rainbow Dashes from the black, black walls.
“Run!” said fifty Apple Blooms and fifty Sweetie Belles.
“Faster! Faster!” said more of her aunts and parents than Scootaloo could count.
“STOP! THIEF!” the Emberwolf screeched. She sounded closer. The air grew hotter and the steps turned red.
But at last, Scootaloo glimpsed the top of the staircase – and an open archway awaited. Through it, she spied the maroon wallpaper of the living room.
Despite her stumpy wings, Scootaloo flew the last two dozen steps, cutting through the super-heated air. She tumbled, snowflake and all, into the living room. The rug was soft. The room was cosy, and it was full of normal: normal furniture and normal smells – wood polish, and the piney scent of the Hearth’s Warming tree. Of all the wonders she had seen that night, the room was the most incredible, heart-soaring sight of all, and her soul glowed from the joy of it.
She was back on her hooves in an instant.
She galloped to the foyer—
Hurtled up the stairs—
Dashed down the landing, towards the attic door—
Her hoof caught on something in the gloom.
SMACK.
In her rush, Scootaloo missed the book that rested on the floorboards, the same book she had dropped earlier that very night: the Daring Do novel she had been reading when the Emberwolf had first spoken to her. Her breath caught, and her face went WHACK against the floor. The snowflake shot from her mouth and smashed on the floorboards into icy glowing fragments.
The world stopped.
Everything stopped.
Scootaloo scarcely noticed the pain, the cut on her knee, the fact that her head felt like it had been split in two. All she could concentrate on were the shattered pieces of the Emberwolf’s most precious treasure.
She almost threw up.
“N-no,” she whimpered, “oh Celestia, no, no.”
How, how could this have happened? The snowflake had survived the fires of the Buried Continent! How could something so strong, so enduring, turn out to be so brittle?
A crash sounded through the cottage, and she smelled burning – bitter, acrid. The walls turned red as, downstairs, the Emberwolf burst into the foyer, and the light of its coal-flaming body flooded up the staircase.
Scootaloo left the fragments of snowflake where they lay and hurried to the attic door.
Please, she thought. Please be open. Oh please!
She placed her life into the paws of the blizzardwolves and whacked on the door – and the door swung open and revealed a second staircase.
A sharp laugh of relief escaped her. Daring Wolf had told the truth! Through the magic of the blizzardwolves, the attic door was unlocked!
“RAINBOW!” Scootaloo yelled as she dashed up the steps into the darkness. “RAINBOW!”
It was cold in the attic, and nearly pitch black. The only light came from the orange glow of the Emberwolf, who, from the sound of it, had made her way to the upstairs landing...
The attic was a wide space of old floorboards and bare rafters, and two low, slanting walls which met overhead to form a triangle. There were cardboard boxes filled with memories; books upon books rested on forgotten shelves; picture frames and mirrors; chests; photos; and dresses that hadn’t been worn for longer than Scootaloo had been alive. There was a mighty collection of cobwebs, along with decades’ worth of dust, which swirled in the air and made Scootaloo cough.
The skylight was a large rectangle set in one of the slanting walls, and it was shut. Through the glass, Scootaloo saw nothing but blackness.
She trotted nearer to the skylight. “G-guys?”
Her friends didn’t reply: they weren’t there. The cottage was still buried under the snow.
Scootaloo’s heart stopped beating.
She sank to her knees. “Guys? G-guys?”
As though in response, Scootaloo heard the worst sound she had ever heard in her life: a cry of pain that sliced her heart clean in half and shattered her soul into miserable pieces. It was so loud that the cottage shook, the rafters groaned, and dust fell from the ceiling: the Emberwolf had found the snowflake, and the sound it made was beyond imagining. It was a shriek of absolute despair – the noise someone makes when they’ve lost everything in the world worth living for.
It was the end.
Scootaloo knew it in her guts.
The attic flooded with light as the Emberwolf rose up the staircase – but she looked different from before. She was larger. Her fur was no longer made from coal and crystal, but from pure flames, and her eyes were two burning pools of rage. When she opened her jaws, her throat, too, was made from fire, and she had rows upon rows of flaming fangs.
The nearest boxes erupted into flames. Scootaloo hurried back almost against the wall and under the skylight.
The Emberwolf halted at the top of the staircase. Her flaming body grew ever larger until she took up almost half the attic, and her head pressed against the ceiling.
“You broke it,” she snarled.
It wasn’t just her body that had changed, but her voice as well. It was low and guttural, a bone-quaking voice fit for the lands even deeper than the Buried Continent – places, Scootaloo imagined, where ancient monsters from the beginning of time lurked in never-ending darkness.
“Do you know what that was? Can you comprehend what you’ve done?”
Scootaloo shook her head. “It – it was an accident. I swear, I was gonna give it back – I didn’t mean to drop it—”
“But you did drop it,” the Emberwolf snapped. “I was a friend to you. I brought you into my home and taught you things about yourself that you would never have guessed without my aid. And this is how you repay me? By disobeying my rules? By destroying my most treasured possession?”
The Emberwolf stepped forward. The rafters ignited, and water leaked from the ceiling: the sheer heat of the beast’s body was causing the snow to melt into the house, through cracks in the old ceiling. First, the water came in drops and drips, and the drips sizzled on the smouldering floor. Then the cracks expanded, and now water poured into the attic, and the air grew hazy with steam.
Scootaloo backed closer to the wall until she was right in the corner. There was nowhere else to turn or run.
But then…
She must have been dreaming, for she heard a sound that made her soul blaze with hope: from somewhere outside, she heard howling. Although muffled by the snow, a moment later, Scootaloo gasped, because the howls became undeniable: the immense and magnificent cries of blizzardwolves. And with a leap of her heart, she realised that her wild hunch about the snowfall had been correct. It wasn’t natural. It wasn’t ordinary. Rather, in the same way that the Emberwolf lived in a country of heat and fire, so too did the blizzardwolves require a place to call home. The difference, however, was that they brought their home with them wherever they travelled.
They were blizzardwolves: beings of ice and winter – freezing souls of the Artic.
They were bringers of snow.
But perhaps, Scootaloo thought, they couldn’t command the snow to stop. Maybe that was why the cottage had been buried: because the beasts didn’t know how to stop it. It wasn’t in their nature to make the world beneath them anything less than completely blizzard-buried…
The blizzardwolves howled louder. They were somewhere right overhead, above the cottage, and above the ceaseless snowfall.
The Emberwolf’s body grew larger, hotter, brighter. It was ready to pounce—
With courage fuelled by those wondrous howls, Scootaloo swallowed her terror. She was the filly who had galloped to the Buried Continent. She was the filly who had lived as an emberwolf pup, and who had spoken with a blizzardwolf in an ocean found neither in dreams nor waking. She was Scootaloo, who walked with the sky inside of her soul and with Rainbow Dash in her heart.
She stood tall – tall like Rainbow – and breathed deeply and said the first words that came to her head.
“You look lonely,” she said. “Do you need a friend?”
At the last second, the Emberwolf stopped herself from pouncing. She was shocked.
“What did you say?” she asked after a lengthy pause.
Scootaloo cleared her throat. Her heart beat hummingbird-fast – and she fancied, over the ever-loudening howls, that she even made out the voices of ponies, and the beautiful sound of frantic shovelling.
“You look lonely,” she said, repeating the words the Emberwolf herself had first spoken to her earlier that night. “You look like you need a friend. But – I dunno that I can be your friend. Not when you’re acting like this.”
The words came to her unbidden: she wasn’t wholly sure where they came from. All Scootaloo was certain of was that she needed to distract the Emberwolf for just a few moments more – long enough for her friends to dig her from the snow.
The Emberwolf’s eyes brightened until they shone a spectacular red. “So be it. I don’t need you as a friend. You were a poor friend, Scootaloo, and you deserve every misery that’s befallen you.”
Scootaloo shook her head. “You wanna know what I think? I think you’ve been angry for so long that—”
She stopped, trying to find the right words to express herself. Words had always confounded her.
“I think,” Scootaloo started again, slowly this time, “you’ve been angry for so long that you’ve forgotten what it’s like to love. Am I right, Canis Major?”
The Emberwolf raised her heckles at the mention of her true name. She pricked her ears and flicked her tail of flames. Yet she didn’t attack. Instead, she said, “What do you know of love and anger, Scootaloo? My pack never loved me. They claimed that they did, but it was lies, all of it. Blizzardwolves are creatures of deceit.”
Outside, the ponies’ voices grew sharper – Scootaloo thought she made out the firm, determined tones of Twilight Sparkle, the Princess of Friendship, and the twang of Apple Bloom’s older sister, Applejack. Then she looked the Emberwolf in its blazing eyes, and she sweated madly, her lungs burned, and she took care to breathe as steadily as she could. She said, “I spoke to one of your family. Or it was one of your friends, I dunno which. They said you stole—”
The Emberwolf exploded. “They’re LYING,” she roared. Outside, Scootaloo heard ponies gasp. “The Prime Snowflake was PROMISED to me. It was my birth right! I was the firstborn daughter of the Elder Wolf! I was—”
Suddenly, Scootaloo didn’t care one jot about the snowflake.
She had had enough.
She had had enough of arguments.
She had had enough of ponies falling out with one another.
Dearly, bitterly, and with every fibre of her heart and soul, she wished that the arguments could be done forever. That the anger, at last, would stop.
“SO WHAT?” she screamed, and she stamped a hoof on the floor. The Emberwolf flinched in surprise. “How long ago did all this happen, huh? Long enough to grow that forest of yours? Your pack doesn’t even care about the Prime Snowflake anymore, or whatever in Tartarus you called it. They don’t even want it back – they told me I could smash it for all the difference it makes. They just want YOU. But you’re trying so hard to stay angry, you won’t even give ’em a chance.”
The Emberwolf shuffled on its flaming paws. “You are ignorant, Scootaloo,” she said, though she didn’t sound entirely certain with herself. “You don’t know the full depth of their betrayal. I have every right to be angry.”
“Oh c’mon!” Scootaloo shouted. Her throat was ragged; she hurt from screaming. But her anger was a fire, and now that she had started, she couldn’t stop until she had burned it up. “Sweet Celestia! You know what? Whatever. I believe you – the snowflake belonged to you. I don’t care though. You’re so angry that it’s killed who you are from the inside out. It’s ruined your heart. You can’t even remember what it feels like to love.”
Scootaloo’s body shook fiercely.
She missed her friends. She missed Rainbow Dash, and her aunts and her parents. She was so, so tired of feeling angry all the time.
She hung her head and stared at her hooves. “I want to be your friend. Honestly. You showed me sooo much cool stuff tonight. You taught me it’s totally OK to feel angry sometimes – that it can feel good and stuff. But ’til you admit you’ve taken it too far, I just… I can’t, all right? I can’t be your friend. Being around you is dangerous.”
Around them, the fires faded and vanished – perhaps the Emberwolf had commanded them to stop. Then, in time, all that lingered was a scattering of glowing embers upon the floor, the remains of boxes, maybe, and of books and photos, dresses and paintings. In the smouldering light, the clouds of steam turned a deep shade of red.
Scootaloo glanced up from her hooves.
Canis Major had changed.
The wolf was far smaller than before, around the same height as Apple Bloom’s grown-up brother. Like a timberwolf, her body was formed from twigs, logs and branches; unlike a timberwolf, however, the wood was blackened. From the cracks in between the branches of her body, where her heart was, there leaked a dim, scarlet light.
Her charcoal ears hung limp and her eyes shone dull yellow. Her pupils were wide and round – and Scootaloo had never seen so much fear and sadness lurk within a pair of eyes before. In that moment, as she met the wolf's pitiful gaze, she felt the weight of a hundred years of anger and loneliness, like mountains bearing down upon her back, like a black hole hung around her heart; she felt the toll of hiding miles below the earth, shutting herself off from the ones who loved her. Scootaloo couldn’t bear it. Her tears flowed. In spite of the fires of a minute beforehoof, she was cold all over, and emptiness swelled inside her chest.
Canis Major spoke in a whisper. She sounded wounded, as though Scootaloo’s outburst had struck her directly in her heart.
“That’s… that’s not true,” she said. “I’m not dangerous. I’m not a bad blizzardwolf.”
Scootaloo gulped. “I know.”
“Then why did you say all that? I listened to you, did I not? I listened to the troubles of your heart. I showed you sympathy and gave you a chance at a new life. Doesn’t that make me a good friend?”
Scootaloo considered Canis Major’s kindness: because, beneath her rage, there were still traces of the blizzardwolf she once been before her fiery transformation. Canis understood her in a way that no other pony had ever done before – not Apple Bloom nor Sweetie Belle, not Mom and Dad, Aunt Holiday, Aunt Lofty, and not even Rainbow Dash herself. The wolf alone had taken Scootaloo’s anger seriously, and had taught her that feeling angry wasn’t something to be feared, but that it could help her achieve a deeper understanding of herself. Knowing the things that made her angry – knowing why they made her angry – threw into sharp relief the depths of her love for her family and friends…
But then Scootaloo thought, too, of Canis chasing her through the Buried Continent and up the crystal staircase. She remembered the wolf’s terrible roars. “I’ll kill you,” Canis had screamed at her. “I’ll kill you… I’ll kill you…”
Anger was a tool. It could be the greatest tool of all.
It could also be poisonous. It could destroy a wolf or a pony from the soul upwards and incinerate everything they held dear.
Scootaloo’s thoughts must have shown on her face, for Canis Major shook her head. Her eyes were wide with the dawning horror of what she had done, of how she had treated the first friend she had made in possibly a century or more. “N-no,” she said. “Scootaloo, listen to me, listen, listen. I’m sorry I shouted at you. Oh Gods. I’m a good wolf, I swear it. I’m a good friend. I’m good.”
Tears rolled down Canis’ cheeks. They weren’t made from fire.
They were wet.
Scootaloo didn’t know what to say. The wolf took a tentative step forwards.
“Scootaloo, please. You’re right, you’re right about all of it. There. Does that make it better? By the Elder Wolf, please believe me. I need you. I need a friend. I didn’t realise how much I did until tonight.”
Scootaloo opened her mouth to respond.
Nothing came out. There were no words left to say...
“SCOOTALOO! ARE YOU IN THERE?”
The new voice cut through the scarlet gloom. It came from outside: not Twilight Sparkle, and not even Applejack, but a voice Scootaloo hadn’t heard for months on end.
Rainbow Dash had come to save her.
With a gasp, she peered up at the skylight, hooves shaking, heart hammering. Then she looked back at Canis, whose eyes were wider than ever, and full of shock, fear, loneliness, sadness, and something else, something that might have been longing. The wolf’s chest rose up and down. She didn’t break Scootaloo’s stare.
Then Canis fled.
Without a word, she turned her charcoal tail and bounded down the stairs and through the doorway.
Scootaloo’s chest heaved as she collapsed to her knees, finally letting out the tension that had built within her.
She wanted to cry.
She wanted to sleep.
But she fought off her tiredness, and raised her head and yelled, “RAINBOW! I’M HERE! HELP ME!”