I awaken into a dream of fire.
I am in a steep-walled, tiny valley — more of a pit — and beyond the cramped ledge on which I rest, the earth itself is liquid fire. It boils and churns, moving like water, and it glows so bright the night is like day. The air is permeated with heat; it dries my throat as I breathe in. And yet my body drinks all that heat in, whispering for more.
Some deep lupine instinct is screaming at me that fire is danger. But the scene is so surreal that instinct, for once, is an afterthought.
I fumble an arm loose from underneath my crumpled body, bracing a palm against the ground by my muzzle. Claws spread where my fingers should be.
I blink and look again. I am not me.
Rather: I am not what I was. Gone is the pale, fleshy, blunted mess that could not keep up with her pack without the power of the bloodstone. In its place is a lithe, reptilian body, honed to perfection. All over my body are fine, ice-blue scales, supple yet thick, and though I am within a furnace my core is not even warm. My fingers come to jagged points capable of casually ripping through skin and muscle. I run a long, skinny tongue around the inside of my elongated muzzle, and my teeth are equally sharp. I push myself upright, and a tail uncoils to keep my body steady and centered. Back muscles flex on instinct, and I become aware of another addition as batlike wings shift and resettle.
The world is more vivid than I've ever felt. I take a deep breath, and I do not need the bloodstone's power to scent the searing wind. I can hear every burp, every murmur of the song of the bubbling earth. My vision is bloodstone-sharp, but with all the brightness of color I see without it.
I am the me of my dreams. I am perfect. The me I was meant to be.
I leap up onto the wall of the fire-pit, scrambling up toward its rim. My body responds with precision and power, claws gouging into rock and catching as I ascend. Once, I misjudge a claw-hold, and my wings beat on reflex as I start to skid back toward the flowing earth, cancelling the drag of gravity while I readjust my grip. In moments I have zigzagged my way out of the pit to survey this new world of fire and power.
The fire-pit stands atop a towering mountain, and this new world stretches out to the horizon in all directions. The moon is dipping toward the ground and the sky opposite it is beginning to lighten, and in that liminal illumination I can see a blasted wasteland of jagged rock.
Confusion takes me for a moment. Where are the forests? What sort of prey could live in such desolation? I reflexively reach to my throat to touch the bloodstone, hoping it will whisper to me of the prey I cannot smell — and panic rises in me. It is not there.
The panic, fortunately, is brief. As I whip my head back to survey the ledge I arrived on, I can feel an unexpected weight atop it. I reach up, and my claws whack a curling white horn jutting from the side of my temple. The jolt shifts something on my forehead, and I realize that the circlet is sitting atop my head. It is smaller than usual — fitting snugly, as if it were meant to be there. And it is throbbing with power — but passively, in perfect silence.
It, too, has changed. The bloodstone reacts without hesitation or reservation to my thoughts. It does not release its power in controlled bursts as if afraid to overstep Father's approval; I call upon the bloodstone, and before I even understand the change, an impossible strength is surging through my body. I think to wonder whether I am simply beyond Father's call, but no: there are voices in the distance beyond my senses, whispering in the darkness of my thoughts, and among them is a massive slumbering presence that I know is him. I reach my mind out and press at his, and it is pliable to my touch just as my packmates always were. Somehow, Father is here, yet the bloodstone is mine.
A thrill runs through me. If the bloodstone is mine … then so is the pack. I drop to all fours to begin sprinting in the direction of those distant reptilian murmurs, but even with the bloodstone's power surging through me, this body feels unnatural that way; I settle for an upright lope, then accelerate into huge bounds as my instincts and my form begin to work in concert. Soon I am launching myself into the sky with each leap, feeling the wings on my back catch air and propel me forward into a diving glide down the mountainside, and the landscape rushes by with impossible speed as I hurtle toward the rising sun.
In the whispers of the bloodstone, I can feel the familiar presences toward which I travel draw nearer and nearer. Then, without warning, the slope underneath me drops sharply away, and I find myself soaring over a broad, flat valley with countless caves dotting the cliffsides.
I rocket toward the ground, tucking my wings for the sheer joy of the impact, and land with a boom that reverberates across the rocky plain. The weight of my impact deforms the stone, my muscles singing with such power that even breaking the earth takes but a thought. I reach into my bloodstone crown, and see its red gleam flare to life on the top of my muzzle as I draw out even more power, sending it outward, amplifying its call across my pack:
Shake off your sleep.
Then I feel the stirring of my people in response, and I realize how inadequate the word "pack" is.
I have been focusing on the few familiar presences in my mental landscape. Father. Howls-Off-Key and his lackeys. Thick-Pelt and Wide-Paws. Patient-Leap — though her presence is so distant I have no words for it. The rest of them are here, but they are quickly overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of the reptilian forms which begin slithering and stomping and stalking out of their cliffside retreats.
Every last cave contains a beast. (A dragon, the bloodstone whispers. I am a dragon. Lord of the dragons, by the bloodstone's power.) And every single dragon reacts to my summons.
My enthusiasm for a hunt wavers. The size of my pack is overwhelming my instincts. All I can do is scamper up onto a nearby rock pillar as dragons of every hue and size and description converge.
I glance around the crowd, trying to make sense of it. That doesn't help. I fall back to picking occasional faces out of the swarm which feel familiar. That red one, for instance: thick, grumpy, a head over my height. The feel of his mind is that of Howls-Off-Key, ambitious yet craven. The skinny ones constantly behind him, white and black of scale, deferential to his power so long as there is no greater command: Sharp-Eye and Harries-The-Herds. Thick-Pelt, sitting near the back with a vacant stare: a subdued green with an awkward gait and straying eyes and lolling tongue.
But I repeatedly lose sight of them as the crowds shift, so great are my people's numbers. If I were to take my pack, and each of those wolves were themselves a pack, and each wolf in that pack were a pack, those wolves would still be dwarfed by the number of faces staring up at me in confused obeisance.
"It's too early, Ember," one whines from the front, a lumpy grass-green one with stubby wings. "What'd you call us here for?"
That only confuses me further. Wanting to delay the hunt is understandable, if contemptible. But not understanding the one thing which brings the pack together? Is this one a cub that needs to be taught? Is he feigning ignorance as a challenge?
I am trying to figure out what to do when the earth trembles, and I turn to see Father stalking up behind me. My focus evaporates in shock. He is no dragon, but a mountain. The entirety of my body is the size of one of his claws. His body casts the valley in shadow.
However, he approaches the pillar — lesser dragons scrambling out of his way, lest they be flattened by a careless clawfall — and lowers his head in respect.
Then his eyes lock in on my crown as I am remembering to breathe.
"Ember!" he booms. "I see your mission to retrieve the Bloodstone Crown from the other world was a success!"
A murmur ripples through the crowd. Father's head jerks away from me, and a snarl curls onto his muzzle.
"When my daughter the Dragon Lord succeeds," he roars at the gathered dragons, "you cheer!"
The dragons behind me erupt in whoops and hollers. The sound is near-deafening. I whip around, crouching low to the pillar, baring my teeth. But I let my hackles subside as I feel the emotions of my dragons through the bloodstone: the cacophony of birdlike shrieks is a sign of support.
A voice rises above the madness as the cheering dies away. "Yeah, yeah, some success," Howls-Off-Key says with a dramatic roll of the eyes. "Now she can dress up with a fashion accessory that matches her scepter."
I feel a growl rumble low in my chest. Howls is always like this. Testing the line — seeing how much he can get away with. Father had no tolerance for it, but Father is no longer in charge, and now this challenge is mine to suppress.
"Well, at least she did one thing right," Howls says as his lackeys snicker, poorly hiding their muzzles behind claws. "Got rid of that pony-loving shrimp." He bares his fangs at me and lifts his eyeridges, in a gesture which looks threatening but which the bloodstone's whispers tell me is some sort of mating display. "You want some red scales to go with that trinket?"
Behind him, Sharp-Eye glances up at my expression. His smirk instantly vanishes, and he pokes Howls' shoulder. "Garble," he whispers, but that's as far as he gets.
Howls-Off-Key — no, Garble — is a head larger than me and far more muscular. I am not confident enough in my new body to take him in a toe-to-toe dominance battle. But I have power resting on my forehead beyond anything he can imagine. So I reach into the bloodstone, and through it, into him.
My many moons of experimentation with the whispers of the bloodstone circlet have given me a good idea of the limits of its power. When it reaches into others, it does not connect to the part which makes them think and act. It reaches deep into their core, their instinct. So when I want one of my packmates to do something, I do not command them — instead, I make them need it, make their blood rise and breath quicken at the thought. Or, when necessary, I do the opposite.
I stare into Garble's eyes, and make him feel like prey.
I feel, more than see, his body stiffen. I crouch into a ready stance, slowly flexing one claw, and savor the terror I have unleashed into his veins at the sight of me. I have, however, also learned that fear is a dangerous tool; the cornered prey sometimes can lash out, and he is certainly the type to. So I also channel the adrenaline surging inside of him, shifting his hunger from the sexual to the literal, making him need the hunt.
Then I throw back my head and howl, and make him need to join my pack.
Garble is simple, as Howls was, and once his blood is up he is mine. He joins in with no hesitation, with no thought to the befuddled stares on the faces of his fellows. My voice is thin and high, but firm and melodic in a way my old body's never was; his is cracked and grating, but the urgency in it makes up for the finesse he lacks. It is a bizarre duet, lonely and lopsided, but the meaning of it is clear: he submits.
I hear the murmuring of the others stir up. They understand my lesson, but they do not understand what he feels. So I send a surge of power out from the stone, and call out to all their instincts the same way I did at sunrise:
Howl.
And one by one, as a wave of need ripples outward from my pillar and staggers my dragons, they blink and twitch and feel the flames of desire ignite. And they throw back their heads, adding their voices to the chorus, and my pack-of-packs-of-packs sings as one.
Then the wind shifts, and there is a new scent on it. Something besides my packmates and the fire-blasted landscape — something utterly foreign to my senses, but alive. I silence my dragons with a thought and turn toward the wind blowing down off the mountain, and a sea of heads swivels with mine.
Hovering above the cliff in the distance is a small equine form, its night-blue mane and tail whipping in the backdraft as its sky-blue wings pump to keep it in position. Like the humans of my home, it wears a covering of second skin, though I have never on a mammal seen skin of shiny yellow and blue. There is also something covering its eyes, but the pony pushes the pair of dark circles up to its forehead with a hoof as it stares back at us.
It — no, he — clears his throat. "Ah, Princess Ember?" the winged stallion says, voice hitching high. "I'm, uh, Soarin, and I was sent to bring an urgent message through the portal for you and Spike, but, umm, if this is a bad time …"
I can smell the pony's fear on the wind. I bare glistening fangs, my tail lashing in anticipation of a meal. My dragons, on the other paw, seem suddenly less certain; the belly-hunger I stir through the bloodstone is meeting a confused resistance. But when I subtly shift to the thrill of chase and catch, the hesitation vanishes. Even if they have all fed recently enough to not need another meal, the hunt is life — and my hunger to lead one is hunger enough for us all.
"I, uhh …" The stallion is openly sweating now, as his head swivels around the valley full of attentive predators. "You know, I'm just gonna go."
A snaky, wiry dragon who has been silently slithering up the cliff suddenly leaps at him, jaws snapping shut just shy of the stallion's hooves.
He yelps and bolts.
It is like a spark on dry grass. My dragons sense prey, and surge forward in a massive wave. Behind them, I fill my lungs, loosing another howl as I leap from the stone pillar. I surge forward through — and over — the slower members of the crowd, leaping off their backs with mighty bloodstone-propelled kicks. The howl echoes back from the far edges of my pack, and then I am carried away in the sound as I join the chase, countless voices united in a single exaltation:
We hunt.