Ashes to Inferno

by Sun Aura

Phoenix

New hair, new outfit, new everything. She’d gone up to the roof of the school, long after classes were out. High places were nostalgic, a side effect of growing up on a city built into a mountain. Canterlot High’s rooftops were the closest thing to the view, though it was still far too flat for her tastes.

It was a place to think, but thankfully her thoughts were far happier. While the path that led her here was terrible, mostly from her own fault, she was happy for the place she had now. The fire inside her could be almost the perfect metaphor, how it Sparked and sputtered before roaring to life.

And even though her friends weren’t with her at the moment, even with Twilight in another Dimension, she could still feel it within her.

The fire under her skin wasn’t rage, it was a Hearth. Perhaps that was how ‘Hearth’s Warming’ got its name, from the Fire that became Home, and the Love shared there. But it was more than just ‘feeling’. She could smell the logs burning, the warm soup of cold winter nights, being held close and watching the snow fall.

She could almost hear a song, on she’d never heard but sounded so familiar. There were no words to make up, because she already knew them as they came.

“Power,” Sunset let herself sing. “Was all I Desired. But all that grew inside me, was the Darkness I acquired. When I began to fall, and I lost the path ahead, that’s when your Friendship found me, and it lifted me instead.”

It looked so simple now, as she sang what she somehow recognized as the ‘chorus’ of the song. The path of her life. When the Princess rejected her, she had come here. She’d met Flash, and his friends and family.

The only thing that kept her from happiness was herself. It wasn’t about forcing someone to return feelings, or pretending to be someone else so they like you. It wasn’t even about knowing everything about someone. It was just to care, to be there for them, and to let people be there for you.

“Ambition,” she let the next verse begin. “Is what I believed would be the only way to set me free. But when it disappeared, and I found myself alone, that’s when you came and got me and it felt like I was home. “

Home. That word was in itself confusing. What was ‘home’? For a long time, Equestria was home, but now it was just where she came from. But this place wasn’t home either.

Because Home wasn’t a place. It was the flame in her heart. Equestria, the Human World, or any other place. As long as she was with someone she loved, she would be Home.

Of course, there were some people, some Ponies, she had to fix things with eventually. A bird too. She wondered if Philomena would be mad at her, for leaving her behind. She laughed at the coincidence, feeling the chorus start up again, how perfect it was.

She wasn’t the little Unicorn, angry at a mare who she felt never loved her and scared of the world she was now in. Yet she wasn’t the Human girl, pretending to be something she wasn’t, and turning into the monster she never wanted to be.

She was Sunset Shimmer, someone who had changed so much over the years. And it was so much like the Phoenix. She had burned to ashes, but was now blazing with her own new Fire.

“Like a Phoenix burning bright in the sky,” she belted out, not caring who heard. “I’ll show there’s another side to me, you can’t deny!”

Reaching for Magic was so easy now. It sprung to life, and she felt herself lifted off the ground with a warm glow. The energy within her was begging to be used, and she didn’t dare deny it.

“I may not know what the future holds, but hear me when I say: That my past does not define me, because my past is not today!”

Out of the corners of her eye, she saw reds and oranges, as if the Fire was bursting out of her. And as she explored her own Magic, it seemed just as new as she felt. She could see connections, like tied strings between her to her friends throughout the town, and connections through the Portal.

It meant more to her than anything else, than ideas of what could have been, and even the thought of what could be.