Werewolves of Knicknik

by Atuhor Name

CH. 17 Werewolves

Werewolves

Twilight blinked as she abruptly came out of the thick temperate rainforest and into a wide open plain of farmland. Commonly known as “the potato breadbasket of the north” she never expected it to be run by werewolves.

The werewolf settlement itself was… interesting. Twilight didn’t know what she was expecting, perhaps some old abandoned mining town or something or caves in the mountains. Turns out the werewolf town was some sort of werewolf sylvan glen of trees, as well as a farming village dug into the ground, like an earth pony co-op that decided to move underground. Small too, smaller than she would expect to tend to all these fields.

It was exactly the kind of place where she would have expected to see earth ponies shaping trees and growing crops. The only thing she knew about up here was that they grew a lot of root vegetables and had the world record for largest cabbage, she could see why now. Well, not exactly the fields stretched beyond where she could actually see from here, and there were periodic rows of trees that blocked her view, but she could understand why.

She finally understood the reason for all this when Rolled Oats waved for her to head underground. The tunnel wound around like an animal burrow for a while until she came into a much larger cavern with wooden supports. Twilight suspected it was to deal with snow drifts, but she wondered how they deal with the spring thaw.

“It’s built like this because of the snow drifts, with those fields out there you can get them to cover up entire trees.” Rolled Oats explained. “Also the wind, winter storms can get nasty.”

“Oh, you live here year round?” Twilight asked.

“Yep, we have to, the Fang of the First Queen is here.”

Down underground there were tunnels and more tunnels and vent holes and enchanted clouds as air scrubbers, there was even a second layer to this central cavern. It was down in the second layer that she saw the “Fang of the First Queen”.

The Fang was not an actual tooth but a boulder at least ten feet tall covered in glowing runes and shaped like a fang. The stone was stark white like a fang and Twilight could feel the magic inside of it, the magic felt ancient. She could see wisps of magic snake around the fang before floating up and dissipating. Even from here Twilight could tell that this was a powerful artifact.

“Come I think you should meet the queen.”

The ponies in the chamber stared at Twilight, as ponies were wont to do with any alicorn. She, looking back on them noticed that they were different than she expected. She was expected a bunch of scraggly ponies, thin, worn, harrowed by a lifetime living with a monster within themselves. What she got were a bunch of ponies who looked like they got out a lot to work in the fields, had very shiny coats, and smelled like dog shampoo. Even the unicorns and pegasai were significantly more fit and bulky than Twilight would have expected.

Looking around Twilight thought it was probably a good idea that she had put her bagrat back in her saddlebags, as there were quite a few ponies in their werewolf forms, it would be a bad idea for one of them to try and “help” her with the rat on her back. Twilight noted that some of the werewolves did just lounge around in their werewolf form.

They were seated around the Fang of the First Queen like it was some kind of temple or bonfire, no exactly like a bonfire. This was some sort of communal underground meeting room for ponies to sit and talk. Like these ponies were part of a pack, like wolves out in the wild, a big family basically.

Not to be confused with wolves in captivity which are closer to prisoners which form a hierarchy and alpha-beta dynamics. Twilight mentally amended in her head to nobody.

Twilight and Rolled Oats came to a stop in front of a pony and Twilight, ever the walking dictionary of unused, obscure and depreciated words in Equestria, started looking around for the queen. Instead there was just a stallion in some kind of naturey robes.

“Twilight Sparkle, Princess of Equestria, werewolf,” Rolled oats Said gesturing at her before gesturing at the stallion. “Expat Eclipse, Keeper of the Fang of the First Queen, he’s also known as Queen of the Werewolves.”

Expat Eclipse started off with a dignified demeanor like he’d been told Twilight had been coming and was prepared to meet her, albeit just in time. That demeanor fit in well with how he looked, he had a coat of dark grey with highlights of red like the borders of an eclipse, he had a beard as well as little tufts of hair on the tips of his ears, he had topaz eyes and was an earth pony. His cutie mark was of an eclipse. Despite what his coloring would first bring to mind Twilight thought he didn’t quite live up to it, he was trying but his personality got in the way, in her opinion he was too young.

“Isn’t a queen supposed to be a mare?” Twilight asked.

Rolled Oats and Eclipse looked surprised at that.

“Really? I never knew, I thought it was something related to werewolves.” Eclipse said.

“A Queen is traditionally a ruling mare of an independent state.”

“Oh well we don’t really care too much about older stuff like that around here, we’re trying to modernize, bring us up to the century of Princess Luna’s return!”

Twilight realized something, the term Queen hadn’t been used in millennia inside Equestria for it’s original definition, not when the princesses ruled. Not even for Naudia as changelings were all biologically monogender, or would that be a different word for a species that was designed instead of evolved? It was entirely likely the only place where the term still held it’s original definition inside Equestria was literally in the dusty old tome she found it in. To a common pony it was just “a term for royalty for them far off places” like emperor or king.

Eclipse leaned in closer and said to Twilight, “Incidentally if you know of any ways for us to modernize that give us things to do in the winter, it would be deeply, DEEPLY appreciated by everypony here.”

“I might have something like that, get back to me in a week or two.” Twilight said, this place was already feeling pretty welcoming as ponies in this hall got up to see the new alicorn princess. “In reality though I’m here because of how things are going downhill right now.”

“Oh. That.” Eclipse said all enthusiasm draining from his voice. “Yeah. I’ll leave you to discuss that with the keeper.”

“What happened to him?” Twilight asked Rolled Oats.

“He’s been trying to get ponies into town to become werewolves, it’s really hard to do, frankly a pretty thankless job, all that business over in Knicknik blockading the river means that even if ponies did want to come they can’t.”

That was when the Keeper showed up. The Keeper is a pony named Crescent Claw, she is markedly more businesslike than the “queen” and Twilight could tell something about her stance on werewolves instantly as Crescent was in her werewolf form. Her werewolf form had a crescent moon and a potato and she resembled more a bulky wire haired dog with an amber coat than a wolf.

It was nice to find this out before Twilight could suggest changing the title from “queen” to “keeper”.

“So a princess from Canterlot is coming out to the sticks to solve our problem with the cult over in Knicknik eh?” Crescent Claw tried to pull herself up Tall, unfortunately for her Twilight wins out there. Failing to intimidate Crescent says: “And what would one of you Canterlot ponies have done to stoop to talking to us? Lost a bet?”

“Uhh Cress, lemme tell you something.” Rolled Oats says before turning to Twilight. “We’ll be right back okay?”

During the subsequent discussion there are a couple exclamations from the keeper, notably “WEREWOLF?!” and “NO!”. Before mid-discussion she struts over to Twilight seemingly angry now.

“Rolled Oats has told me a very tall tale that I need you to disprove so I can put him on cabbage boiling duty for a week.” She said. “He tells me that not only are you a werewolf, you’re the strongest werewolf he’s ever seen, able to lift up an entire tree like it was nothing. AND that he ambushed you and he got the distinct impression that there was a possibility you might not have noticed if you weren’t paying attention.”

Crescent Claw let out an exasperated sigh.

“You can appreciate how hard it is for me to believe any of this, so I’m going to have to ask you to lay this discussion to rest for me.”

Twilight decided instead of saying anything to just transform instead. Quickly she shifted into her maned wolf form, becoming a tall purple coated wolf.

Crescent Claw’s jaw dropped her eyes froze stock still open staring at Twilight, she was in shock.

“Excuse me princess, but could I possibly ask you to do that again?”

Twilight shrugged and transformed back to pony then back to wolf.

“That,” Crescent sniffed. “That…” Tears began forming in her eyes. “That was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

Crescent turns away.

“Excuse me,” She’s having trouble keeping it together. “Excuse me, I need a minute. I need a minute all right?”

Crescent aimlessly wandered off and collapsed onto an empty bench in a daze.

“What happened to her?” Twilight asked.

“She likes werewolves, like REALLY likes the idea of werewolves. I would call it an obsession with her. I mean she came to greet you in her werewolf form.” Rolled Oats said.

“I could see that.”

“However because she really, really likes werewolves she’s acutely aware of the downsides of being a werewolf.” Rolled continued on.

“Oh this is actually something I’m interested in.” Twilight clapped her paws together.

“Why?” Rolled Oats seemed a bit stopped up by that.

“Because it’s a distinct possibility that I could help!”

Rolled Oats looked at her sharply, and not altogether in a friendly manner.

“You want to be very careful about how you say things like that around here, all right? Ponies might misinterpret things to imply that you might want to ‘cure’ them.”

Twilight noticed even that passing mention got a distinct negative reaction from everypony in earshot. They started looking around with an alert, hostile glare that percolated out into the room.

“Well I’d need to know more about your situation before I could really specify,” Twilight said. “I suppose if you want general terms it’s possible I could help you become a werewolf like me.”

“I could see some benefits to that.” Rolled said.

“So what are the downsides you’re talking about?”

“Well first we need that fang of the first queen to stay sane. Without it we’d start to go berserk for meat. Then the transformation is a bit… uncomfortable? I wouldn’t call it painful but I would say most ponies aren’t going to transform unless they HAVE to.” Rolled Oats started to ramble. “Don’t even get me started on the winter. Ponies around here start to get a bit stir crazy during the winter to put it lightly, but we need to stay near the fang, and we’ve only got so many amulets to let ponies go down to Lower Equestria.”

Twilight might have thought he was done, but he wasn’t.

“Then there is claw clipping, that’s pretty miserable, and what the transformation can do to your coat and mane, tangles are NOT the worst of it-”

“It sounds like you run into a lot of problems I don’t have.” Twilight interrupted him.

“I could tell just from the transformation alone.” Crescent had come back, still sniffing and with red eyes, but she looked happy. “I’m sorry for not believing you at first, Rolled Oats really got my hopes up there and for once I wasn’t disappointed.”

“I’ll be honest with you I find a lot of what has been happening recently hard to believe myself.” Twilight said. “Right now I’m gathering intel to figure out who is behind those cultists, once the whole situation is resolved I WILL be able to help you out more directly. But what is happening out there right now is more important than it sounds like.”

“By the way, do you need me to prove anything else Rolled Oats said? I don’t want him on cabbage boiling duty for telling the truth.”

Crescent looked Twilight right in the eye and said:

“I don’t even care, that transformation is more than proof enough for me.”

------------------

Now that Twilight had been brought into “the pack” and got glad handed by the keeper in such a noticeable way that the werewolves seemed to all be really friendly to her. She heard them say things like “We had a werewolf princess on our side, who knew?” or “Thank you for coming out here to help us, nopony expected help on this sort of level.”

To which Twilight tried her best to smile and give an appropriate response. It really hammered home to her that she might have a conflict of interests here. Thinking back on the First Administrator, a serious conflict of interests.

I hope I don’t have to talk to Celestia anytime soon. Twilight thought, I don’t think I could handle that.

“Twilight would you like to use the Fang of the First Queen?” Crescent asked.

“What for?”

“To keep down the urge to eat meat and maintain your control in werewolf form.” Crescent looked uncomfortable. “Unless…”

“Unless what?” Twilight asked.

“Have you been eating… meat?” It seemed there was a hard limit to Crescent’s dedication to werewolves.

“I don’t need anything to maintain control over my werewolf forms.” Twilight tried to shift the conversation by dangling that pluralization into it and with that bomb.

Every pony in the area stopped and stared at her. Looking around at them Twilight realized that they were utterly floored by that statement, if they all hadn’t been quadrupedal Twilight suspected that some of them could have been literally floored.

“You’ve gotta be careful saying stuff like that here Twilight, or you could just become our savior before you leave this place.”

“I’ll tell you what, if you have a place to practice combat I’ll show you my other werewolf form.”

“We’ve got a spot up top prepared to practice for when ice devil season comes around.”

“Ice devils?” Twilight asked.

“Think dust devils but instead angry windigo remnants.”

“Oh.”

Twilight was lead up out of the caves and up to a training ground with straw targets of various kinds, most notably one that was behind some boards designed to swing randomly in front of an archery target. As well as a couple sets of chewed up straw training dummies.

She put on her lichen wolf pelt with the bagrat already inside of it and activated her shield, and then pulled out her actual shield, which was a buckler as well as her sling. She could just tell how this was supposed to work through the bagrat, as again tutorial text flashed onto her eyes.

“just a heads up I’m not quite sure how this one works yet, it’s a new artifact, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to break one of your training dummies, which one is going to be replaced soonest?” A pony indicated one of the training dummies. “All right stand back.”

Twilight squared up at the weathered training dummy activated the magic in her sling to summon in a projectile and flung a little ball of crunched up lichen spores at the target, her targeting sphere of magic limiting the scope. The little ball of lichen exploded into a cloud of spores, if you looked closely you could see the lichen already growing on the target dummy.

Twilight leapt at the target with a roar and activated her lichenthrope form. Almost instantly the wolf lichen pelt spread out across her body giving her a bipedal shaggy green werewolf appearance and shifting her into a knuckle walking charge. Twilight slashed at the training dummy with magically charged up wolf claws that, as they cut through the cloud, pulled on it dragging more and more spores into the fresh cuts from her claws in their wake, and causing an intense growth of lichen that only accelerated the growth of the cloud. The second slash pulled even more intensely on the cloud and there was an explosion, the training dummy vanished in a cloud of straw and lichen, and something else.

She stood there a little bit scared of how strong she was now. Despite what the words “straw target” might say to you, this was a densely packed lump for archery and biting, designed to stop arrows dead and be chewed on by wolves. Now it was a diminishing cloud of straw and a growing cloud of lichen.

Twilight instinctively pulled the lichen back to her, which flowed through the air towards her increasing the size of her werewolf coat. With the cloud out of the way there was no sign of the straw target.

She could feel the lump in her stomach staring at the empty space there. This was terrifying, she did that, Twilight Sparkle did that. This wasn’t like Tirek when she needed the magic of four alicorns or something. This was a cloud of death focused down, and from what she understood about it made her magic used against Tirek look like an overpowered sparkler. The thought “magmatter is 8e35 times stronger than normal matter” flashed into her head again, not that that should directly effect the power of the spell but it was a reminder of the inconceivably, unimaginably, strong materials the spell was intended to attack.

Then somepony said something that made Twilight’s stomach drop even further.

“Hold up a sec, where is the piece of railroad track we had it tied to?”

There was evidence of the rusty piece of railroad track, a rusty stump of iron and fragments, that was all that remained.

Twilight let her second werewolf form recede, returning to being a maned wolf with a lichen wolf pelt on her back, a significantly longer pelt than before. It had felt so natural, she would learn that spell from just a couple casts, it was easy, she didn’t feel even a little bit tired. Just judging by her current magic reserves she couldn’t even estimate how many times she could cast that spell before she was too tired to do so. The number climbed and climbed past the point where mental math could handle it.

Somepony was pointing at something and shouting, there was more shouting, and then Somepony touched her shoulder.

“Twilight you all right?” It was Crescent Claw.

“I think so.”

“Great! Because that was the coolest thing I think I’ve ever seen, just like out of a comic book, but here, I got to see it, it was REAL!”

Looking around Twilight saw the other werewolves were not scared by her magic, quite the opposite they were enthusiastic. Twilight saw two of them, in werewolf form bounce up and down in excitement. The excitement finally culminated in a howl and Twilight finally realized why Crescent Claw was so enthusiastic about her werewolf form. Their werewolf forms were all based on dogs.

“Twilight?” Crescent asked, Twilight realized she was out of and had missed something.

“Huh?”

“Boy that must have taken a lot out of you to cast, I said ‘how do you control a spell that powerful it so perfectly?’”

“What do you mean?”

Crescent pointed at the razor thin line in the grass around where the target had been, you could see where each individual blade of grass had been.

“Did you put up a shield around the spell?”

“No, that’s just where the spell ends.”

“WOW! That level of control, I can’t even imagine what it must take.” Crescent was gushing both paws on her cheeks her eyes literally sparkling. “To think that the princess of magic is not only one of us, AND she has this level of control, how many years did you, no wait this was what Celestia’s training was about, to tame the wolf inside of you?”

Twilight looked down at the line in the grass. This was very obviously controlled, extremely controlled and while bits of the straw target and even the rail were outside that circle, the real damaging and dangerous spell stopped at a point Twilight expected she could pinpoint if she knew about how wide the straw target was.

“I didn’t need training to control this werewolf form, but it’s not perfect yet, I think I can do better with control on that spell.” Twilight said to Crescent.

The werewolves around Twilight gasped, she had found the thing they valued the most.

“Really!?”

“Yeah, I wanted to show off a bit with a big spell, but I think I could limit it a lot more than that.”

Twilight was literally carried back underground by a crowd of cheering werewolves to have a celebratory feast. Coming down into the caverns through a different entrance Twilight could already smell cabbage.

-------------------

The feast did not include any meat Twilight noted, which was good, she didn’t want to eat any meat from Equestria. No matter how good a hamburger might be, whatever the ones she tried were actually made out of.

“So Twilight.” Crescent Claw asked, Twilight knew exactly what she was going to ask. “How do you have so much control over your werewolf form? Some kind of magic item? Meditation? Anger management?”

“It comes with the transformation.” Twilight told a half truth, she didn’t quite consider this slime werewolf form to be a true werewolf.

“Wooow.” Crescent was seriously fangirling over Twilight. “How did you get this transformation?”

Twilight didn’t like lying this much but she wasn’t sure what she could say. She decided to deflect again in a way that she knew would work.

“I’m still doing research on this but I’m pretty sure once all this stuff with cultists is resolved I’ll be able to start granting it out to other ponies.”

“WHAT! Well then lets get going, right now!” Crescent shouted, all ready to get up and get going right that second.

“Hold on,” Twilight said grabbing Crescent in her magic. “I was sent here because the situation is actually even more dangerous than it seems right now. I’ve actually been told that stuff like that lichen attack I used might not be strong enough to stop whatever is behind the cultists.”

“You’re kidding right?”

Twilight’s look said more than she actually needed to say.

“Oh.”

Crescent perked up.

“Well this is when you call your friends in and do some kind of rainbow thing right?”

“We don’t even know who to shoot the rainbow at, that’s why I’m here. I need you werewolves to help me figure out who is actually behind all this and what is going on here.”

“Well,” Crescent's demeanor seemed a lot more like the keeper when she first met Twilight now. “Knicknik is denying us supplies, and they’ve got those creepy ‘Equestria Royal Guards’ in town.”

“Equestria Royal Guards? They don’t generally leave Canterlot.” Twilight noted the air quotes.

“I don’t think they’re guards, I don’t know what they are, I’m not even sure if I want to know. But what I think is happening is we’ve got two groups that are fighting here, and I don’t just mean werewolves vs Knicknik. I think what we’re seeing is one group infiltrated Knicknik and is in control and now they don’t want their investment spoiled so they ‘made’ those guards. And another group is out in the woods somewhere, and they seem to want to control the waterways. My guess on the second group is some sort of outside mining company that wants to take over.”

“Why would a mining company want all that? There are plenty of natural harbors around here.”

“Yeah but none of them have a pre-built trail network that leads to a perfectly sheltered natural deep water and also ice-free harbor.”

“Hmm, so it’s either a company with investments in the area, or possibly somebody from across the sea that wants jade exports then?”

“Yep. I mean it could be somebody who wants our potatoes but I’ll be frank, they’re potatoes.”

“What do you think the cultists are after.”

“I honestly don’t know, they seem like the really strange ones here. I mean I can see why Knicknik accepted their guards, whoever is in control and since they put those things up front, that way when things get nasty if all goes well there won’t be any of them left. Hay, I’d dump em all into a volcano for a haypenny.

“But I think those townsponies aren’t getting the whole picture and what they’ve actually done is holed themselves up away from the local food produces, IE: us. And the ponies who might have to put those ‘guards’ down might be us.”

“Why would you and Knicknik fight?”

“Isn’t it obvious? The cultists have clearly taken over in there. We’ve been probing these guards to see what their secret weapon is like but it’s hard to determine anything about them. Some of the wolfpack think that they’re just scarecrows, I disagree, I think they’re some kind of secret weapon.”

They were interrupted when Twilight’s tablet started making a ringing sound. She pulled it out of her pack to look at the screen.

“Oh dear, it’s that late already? I have to meet back up with Naudia.”

“I thought you were going to stay around here, you aren't?”

“Can’t, I’ve got to start investigating whats happening around here and stopping it.”

“Are you sure you can’t stay? I want to see what other moves you’ve got and stuff.” Crescent claw gave Twilight literal puppy dog eyes.

“Nope, but I will be coming back fairly regularly, possibly to get help with the investigation.”

Twilight looked back down at her tablet again and realized that the alarm was actually that Naudia was actually approaching their rendezvous point right now, which meant she had to rush.

“Oh no, I’ve really got to fly now, tell the, uh… queen I’ll be back later.”

And with that Twilight zoomed off to meet Naudia, now they had a place to start investigating and that was the important part of this visit. Good relations with the werewolves was secondary, and she didn’t even have to pull the meat card this time either.