First published
It's the week before Hearth's Warming. Scootaloo is curled up in front of the fireplace, drinking hot cocoa and reading a Daring Do novel.
And then the fireplace starts speaking to her.
A spiritual successor to my (formerly cancelled) six star rated story, It's Not a Cold Dark Place.
The filly sits in her room and presses her hooves to her ears, but she can still hear her parents. She hears them from down the corridor.
Dad’s voice is startled. He asks a question. “Where did you find—”
Mom cuts him off. “Never mind where I found it. Explain yourself! Explain yourself right this instant!”
The filly presses her ears harder. She whimpers. Although she doesn’t know how, she senses that the world has broken.
There was a filly named Scootaloo, who, for five nights a week, lived on the tail end of Ponyville. It was a place where houses became fields, where roads gave way to trees, and where the call of adventure sang upon the blue moon breeze. The cottage stood in a lonely meadow, and she loved it. It was built from half brick and half shambles, and it wore a sweater of ivy. Inside, the cottage was a jumble of warmth, peeling wallpaper, and rugs thrown carelessly over old floorboards. Best of all, Scootaloo was allowed to draw on the walls. She had permission to stick up photos of her friends wherever she pleased, so that, even on those evenings when Aunt Holiday and her wife were both working, she was never truly alone.
A few days before Hearth's Warming, after her aunts had gone to bed, Scootaloo lay on her belly on the living room floor, reading a Daring Do book in front of the fireplace. The night was still. The curtains were shut, and the room was silent save for the crackle of flames. A mug of hot cocoa rested by her side.
Despite the comfort, Scootaloo’s tail twitched. Her eyes glanced over the same few sentences. She looked at the sofa and then gazed into the fire. She let out a sigh.
And then a voice spoke to her.
“You there,” it said. Scootaloo jumped. The voice was refined – a gentlemare’s voice – and it had come from the flames.
“Wh-who’s there?” Scootaloo said.
“Someone who’s been watching you,” the fire answered. “Someone who’s on your side. You look lonely. Do you need a friend?”
Scootaloo frowned at the fireplace. Despite lying right beside the grate, suddenly, she felt chilly.
Fixing her attention on the fire, she said, “You didn’t just say that. You can’t have, ’cause fires don’t talk.”
Scootaloo spied no smouldering mouth amongst the tongues of flames, no possible way the fire could speak. Yet she heard its voice regardless.
“Hmm. I must say, filly, I’ve never let that get in a way of good conversation,” it said. “Are you sure you haven’t mistaken me for some other fire, perhaps?”
Scootaloo realised she was gaping. Not taking her eyes from the flames, she stood up, and in a firm voice said, “I’m not listening. I’m – I’m going to my room. Don’t talk to me.”
The fire sighed. Sun-yellow woodchips dulled to a deep red. “Alas! Goodnight, filly. I shan’t follow you upstairs, if that’s a concern. But we’ll speak later, and we have a long discussion about friendship. I promise.”
Scootaloo pretended she hadn’t heard that.
Abandoning her cocoa, she picked up her book and strode from the living room and, quickly, quickly, she rushed up the stairs, and, hurry, hurry, she galloped along the landing and past her aunt’s room. She tripped on her hooves; the book clattered to the floor, but she left it where it fell. She shoved open her bedroom door, slammed it behind her and dived under the bedsheets.
Her heart hammer-thumped in the darkness.
“That didn’t happen,” she told herself. “That did not just happen. If it had talked, you wouldn’t have run away. You’re way awesomer than that.”
All the same, Scootaloo shivered under the covers. A long while passed before she fell asleep.
Whenever Scootaloo made sandwiches in the kitchen, it was in the glare of a chalk dragon she had scrawled upon the pantry door. When she read adventure books in the living room, her two best friends, Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle, smiled at her from photographs on the walls. And each night, when she fell asleep, she was watched over from a dozen different photos by her foalsitter: a pegasus named Rainbow Dash, who was the best pony in the world.
In every way conceivable, and in every way yet to be conceived, Rainbow Dash was perfect.
Whereas Scootaloo’s coat was the colour of autumn, Rainbow’s held the soul of the sky: it was bright blue, and her mane and tail were streaked with rainbows. They were wind-swept, even when the wind was nowhere to be felt.
“It’s ’cause I let the sky into my heart, kid, and it’s lived there ever since,” Rainbow had once explained. A moment later, an awestruck Scootaloo had gathered her wits and asked what exactly this meant. Rainbow had coughed sheepishly and changed the subject. Even so, despite the lack of a clear answer, the words fascinated Scootaloo. She wondered at them. She treasured them. And from that moment, she vowed to live with the sky in her heart and Rainbow Dash in her soul.
And the way Rainbow flew…
At just-turned-eleven, Scootaloo struggled to hover so much as three hoof-lengths from the ground. Rainbow, however, cut through the sky like the sky was her ocean, and as though she was a dolphin, a swordfish. She flew with such speed and joy that Scootaloo’s heart ached at the sight of it. How she longed to soar beside her hero herself!
All of which was why, that night, Scootaloo needed Rainbow Dash more than ever: because that was the night she drifted in and out of shadows and nightmares.
She dreamed of fireplaces, of being gobbled alive by creatures made of flames, and then of Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle. She dreamed that her friends had changed. The pair of them had midnight claws and foulsome fangs, and fire cackling laughter. They circled her in a wide dark space. They chanted in the language of loneliness, with words Scootaloo didn’t understand the meanings of but which made her feel queasy.
“G-go away,” Scootaloo whimpered at them. “Leave me alone!”
Her two former friends laughed at her. Their claws glowed red as fire.
“You’ve changed, Scootaloo!” the demonic Sweetie Belle spat.
Scootaloo shrank back. “N-no I haven’t. I’m the same as ever.”
“You’ve gone and changed,” insisted the monstrous Apple Bloom. “You ain’t our friend no more. Friends don’t hurt friends. Friends don’t shout at each other, like what you did in your aunt’s living room.”
“I didn’t mean to shout! It’s just – I just—”
But Scootaloo didn’t know how to finish. She flinched and thrashed – she shot up in bed—
“Rainbow! Help!”
Her breath came in fearsome gulps; she glanced from the floor to the door to the ceiling. There was no sign of glowing claws nor venom dripping fangs in the inky gloom. There wasn’t any hint of Rainbow Dash.
It had been a dream. A vile, nasty little dream, and nothing more.
Scootaloo took a shuddering breath. She relished the firmness of her mattress, the warmth of her sheets. “Thank Rainbow,” she whispered, “it was a dream.” Then she scowled, for she remembered that Rainbow Dash wasn’t in Ponyville at all, let alone right there in the ivy coated cottage on the edge of Ponyville. In fact, she hadn’t seen the pegasus for months. It was hard to foalsit when living the life of a professional stunt flyer. It was hard for Rainbow to visit when touring across Equestria as the latest member of ponydom’s premier flight squad, the Wonderbolts.
Scootaloo sighed. Her gaze fell upon a calendar pinned to the back of the door, barely visible in the gloom. Around December 30th was a large circle with a scribble of a lightning bolt in it, a bolt coloured red, yellow and blue. It was a bolt that doubled as a promise.
But it wasn’t December 30th, not yet. It wasn’t even Hearth’s Warming Eve. Rainbow Dash felt further away than ever before.
Fumbling for her lamp, Scootaloo glanced at Rainbow’s smiling face from a cherished photo on the bedside desk.
She froze.
She reached out a hoof and touched the glass, where Rainbow should have been – yet Rainbow wasn’t there. The photo was empty. Although the sun still shined in the background, Rainbow Dash had simply… vanished. The picture showed just the trees and grass of Ponyville Common. Just emptiness.
Scootaloo held the frame with trembling hooves. She tilted it back and forth, as though hoping Rainbow would tumble back into the picture.
“Rainbow Dash,” she said. “Where are you?”
Scootaloo leapt from bed and rushed from one photo of Rainbow Dash to another, but the foalsitter was missing from all of them. So were other ponies from their own pictures: Aunt Holiday, Aunt Lofty, and Mom and Dad in twin halves of a photograph which had been torn in two.
The tips of Scootaloo’s wings itched. Kneeling by the bed, she pried open a loose floorboard and picked up a small tin box from the space beneath. Inside was a wad of photos. Some were ripped, some were crumpled, and others were scrunched; until a day previously, all had lived on the walls of her room. Now, when she flickered through them, all were empty of Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle…
Carefully, she put the friendless photos back in the tin, then placed the tin under the floorboards again.
Her hooves shook.
“Wake up,” she told herself, but from the frost in her blood she knew it was helpless. She was familiar with the texture of dreams and nightmares – so, she was sure this was really happening. She felt it. She tasted the air, and the air tasted cold and real.
She hurried to the upstairs landing, switched on the lights and peered at the walls, but the photos here were no different. She had stuck them all around with tape and drawing pins. There were swarms of them, and even one or two tacked to the ceiling! Rainbow Dash wasn't in any of them, nor any of Scootaloo’s friends and family.
She rapped on her aunt’s door.
“Aunt Holiday? Aunt Lofty?”
They didn’t respond so she knocked harder. “Holiday! Lofty!”
There was silence. Yet Scootaloo’s heart demanded action, so she tossed aside her manners, opened the door and shot into the room. It was lit by two small candles she couldn’t remember seeing before. The bed was neatly made, and the curtains were shut. The room was distressingly clear of aunts.
The itch in Scootaloo’s feathers grew. She had the distinct sense that she was being watched...
That’s when it happened. Upon the very edge of hearing, where noise becomes silence and silence becomes noise, she heard the tiniest voices in the world. “Run,” they told her, so quietly that she couldn’t tell how many of them there were, or if they belonged to mares, stallions, or colts or fillies.
“Wh-who said that?”
“You’re in terrible danger, darling one. Get out of the house. Run!”
Scootaloo backed out of the empty room, shut the door and hurried through the cottage. She checked the bathroom and the spare bedroom, and the not-quite-a-room yet not-quite-a-wardrobe Aunt Lofty called her office. At the end of the landing, she tried the door to the attic, but it was locked.
She thumped on the attic door. “Hello?” she called, but there was no response, not even the creak of a floorboard from upstairs. Nopony was there.
She paused and allowed herself to feel the thunder of her heart. Then she raced downstairs and dashed through the kitchen, through the pantry, and then through the dining room. She did not search the living room. She didn’t even glance at the door.
Exhausted, Scootaloo slumped on the bottom of the stairwell, sniffled, and wiped a cheek. “Brave ponies don’t cry,” she told herself, but the words were as flimsy as fragments of torn photos.
Just then, Scootaloo’s eye was drawn directly ahead of her, past the lamp on the small table in the foyer, and towards the front door.
She furrowed her brow.
Run, the tiny voices had told her.
She wondered if they had told her aunts to run as well. Had Holiday and Lofty heard the mysterious voices, then galloped away as fast as their hooves could carry them? But it was a silly thought, Scootaloo knew. Aunt Holiday and Aunt Lofty wouldn’t abandon her in the dead of night. They were the best aunts a filly could wish for, the most soul-proud and spirit-joyous guardians that had ever lived. Even in the face of all available evidence, Scootaloo refused to believe they would be so thoughtless, careless, cruel.
Yet the fact remained that, tonight, there were whispers in the bedrooms. The fireplace had spoken to her, and her aunts were nowhere to be found.
It was a night of the impossible.
She whimpered and thought of Rainbow Dash.
“Don’t just sit there, kiddo,” she imagined her foalsitter saying. “Take things into your own hooves. Do things.”
In her head, Scootaloo counted one, two, two-and-a-half, two-and-three-quarters, two-and-nine-tenths, three. She stood up and crept towards the front door and pulled it open.
She was greeted with the impossible.
Outside, there was nothing but pure whiteness which glittered in the lamplight, as though a wall of smooth marble had grown from the front steps and now blocked the entrance to the house. Scootaloo held a bewildered hoof to the wall, but she stopped short of actually touching it. Around the whiteness, the air was as cold as a howl of winter. The only sounds were her own worried breath, and the doom doom doom of her frantic heart.
Then she touched the wall and gasped as her hoof sunk into the snow: for indeed, it was snow. It was an incredible, unbelievable amount of snow.
Her aunts were missing, and there were whispers in the bedrooms and the fireplace was speaking. And now, as she had slept, the house had been blizzard-buried.
The Night of the Impossible had struck again.
With all the Rainbow-Dash-determination she could muster, Scootaloo tunnelled through the snow. She dug with her hooves. She screamed, “C’mon! C’mon!” but her hooves turned numb from coldness, and a minute later, her tunnel collapsed from the weight of snow. Scootaloo yelped! She shot back into the house before she was buried – and she was in the foyer again, and the tunnel was gone. The floor was covered in piles of loose snow.
Her breath emerged as clouds. She was cold all over. She was made from cold.
Scootaloo shiver-sighed, then shook the snow from her hooves, turned to her right and, out of options, finally pushed open the door to living room.
Her aunts weren’t there, of course, but the fireplace spotted her at once.
“Filly! What’s this ruckus you’re causing? Say what’s wrong.”
Scootaloo’s eyes watered. She wanted her aunts, she wanted Rainbow Dash, she wanted anything other than to be trapped inside this ceaseless nightmare. But she ignored the fireplace, and instead threw open the curtains to reveal yet more snow pressed against the glass, gleaming red and awful in the glow of the flames.
She drew in a deep breath. “AUNT HOLIDAY! AUNT LOFTY!”
The fireplace tutted. “Honestly, there’s no reason to shout.”
Scootaloo glared at the grate. “Fires don’t talk,” she warned. “If you’re not gonna say something to help, don’t say anything at all.” With a buzz of her wings, she galloped upstairs to her room. But when she opened her bedroom curtains, all she saw was the soul-entombing wall of snow.
Her wings drooped.
How deep was it?
“That’s impossible,” she whispered. But, from an undusted corner of her mind, she heard a cruel voice speak to her. The imaginary voice told her that, yes, it was impossible that the snow could be piled so monstrously deep – yet it was ‘impossible’ in the same way that ponies couldn’t disappear from photographs, or that fires couldn’t form invisible vocal cords and speak to frightened fillies in the week before Hearth’s Warming.
From above – from the attic – the rafters creaked. Scootaloo cringed. Was the snow piled so high that the whole cottage was buried? Could the old house support such an astonishment of snow?
There was a pounding in her ears. She realised it was the drum of her own heart.
Hardly daring to breath, Scootaloo crept from her room, then down, down the landing, and slowly, slowly, she descended the staircase. She breathed in. Her lungs filled with snow-fresh air.
She opened the living room door again and was drowned in warmth.
“Ah-hah!” the fireplace said. “So, you’re ready to talk, hmm?”
Scootaloo shut the door behind her. “What are you? What’s going on?”
Although the fireplace lacked shoulders, Scootaloo caught the hint of a shrug in its voice as it said, “Is that any way to talk to a guest, filly? One question at a time. What do you wish to know?”
Scootaloo was in half a mind to fetch the mop bucket and hurl it over the flames. “First,” she said, “my name’s not ‘filly’, it’s Scootaloo. Second, what’s with all the weird junk that’s going on?”
“I’m intrigued. What ‘junk’ are you referring to?”
Scootaloo rolled her eyes. “I mean, what happened to the ponies in the photos? What’s up with the snow? Why are you talking to me all of a sudden?”
The fireplace sighed. “On my honour as a bringer of heat and light in the gloom, I haven’t the faintest idea what photographs you are referring to. The snow, too, is not my doing: I suspect windigos – or perhaps it is blizzardwolves, oh curse their devilry. As for the final question, I would have thought the answer obvious, filly.”
Scootaloo huffed. “It’s Scootaloo. And what d’you mean, obvious?”
“I mean, is it not obvious I am no common little fire? I am offended. Humpf! I ought to leave right this instant.”
“Yeah, right,” said Scootaloo. “If you’re not a fire, what are you?”
The fire blazed brilliant bright, and it grew until it licked the ceiling with red shining tongues. Scootaloo leapt back in alarm.
The fire’s voice deepened. It was a voice with infernos in it.
“I am no simple fire,” it growled, “no puny blaze nor smouldering log pile. I am an Emberwolf, girl, and you would do well to treat me with the respect I deserve.”
The next moment stretched for a hundred years: a tightly coiled moment, which unfurled in horrifying slow motion. Scootaloo longed for a minute previously when the fire had been nothing more than a well-mannered albeit unsettling nuisance, and not the monstrosity which now lumbered from out of the flames.
It started with a rattle of wood and a crash of charcoal. Logs and woodchips flashed brightly, too bright to look at, and Scootaloo threw up her hooves to shield her gaze. Then came fantastic, world-ending heat. The rug smouldered. The walls blackened. It was warmth summoned from deep inside of the Earth, from the hidden country where ruby forests sprout from meadows of magma, and where lava-pods are harvested by the flame-foals.
Scootaloo screamed.
Yet, as quickly as it came, the worst of the heat died, and she lowered her hooves from her eyes and forced herself to gaze at the fireplace.
Something was crawling out of it. Something enormous.
It emerged log by flaming log. Although the fireplace was small, the terrible beast kept coming and coming, fire without end. Two paws the size of dinner plates went thwack on the carpet, and both paws were coated in flames. Scootaloo spied claws of coal and fur of charcoal. Next came the blazing snout, and jaws made from the material of sunlight, and which held fangs of fire and an infernal tongue. Lava-drool dripped on the floorboards and burned holes in the wood. The beast’s eyes were furnaces. The centre of the Earth was shiver worthy compared to the mountain melting heat of that ferocious gaze. And still the beast kept coming, out and out from the fireplace, until it filled nearly half the living room.
The air smelled of burning.
It was sweltering.
“Filly,” snarled the beast. “Enough talk – I’ve seen and heard enough of you to know you’re precisely the one I’m looking for. I’ve a proposition for you.”
Scootaloo ran. She zoomed up the staircase, burst into her room and attempted to force open the window so that she could try, once more, to dig her way to the surface. “C’mon,” she sobbed. “C’mon!” But whether it had frozen shut, or that the sheer weight of snow pinned it in place, the window remained steadfastly closed.
From downstairs, she heard the SMASH of something huge bursting through a wall, then the CRASH of gigantic paws.
Scootaloo drew in a determined breath. “I live with the sky in my heart,” she whispered. The phrase was as well-worn as an old horseshoe, and it gave her strength. “I live with Rainbow Dash in my soul.”
She hurried back to the landing. The heat was of a breed found in the lungs of volcanos.
“Filly!” growled the Emberwolf from the foyer. Standing near the end of the landing, Scootaloo couldn’t see it: she saw only the top of the staircase. But she heard the steps groan under the weight of coal heavy paws. “I do not wish to harm you. I just need to talk with you. It’s important.”
Yeah, right, Scootaloo thought. Sure. It’s important to talk to your food before you eat it – like I’m falling for that! Then she barged into her aunt’s bedroom and opened the curtains. Again, all she saw snow, and the window wouldn’t budge. She would have to smash it open and tunnel her way out. It was her only chance.
She glanced around for something heavy – a clock, a lamp.
But she stopped. Because just then, in the volcanic heat of her panic, the sensation of being watched returned. She heard the whispers again too. Perhaps terror sharpened her senses, or perhaps they spoke louder than before: but this time, Scootaloo made out two distinct voices. Two very familiar voices. The sound of them should have filled her with hope, but instead they froze the blood in her veins and the marrow in her bones.
“She’s coming,” said the first whisper.
The second one added, “Hide, darling one. In the closet. It’s not much of a hope, but it’s all the hope you’ve got.”
Scootaloo’s lower lip trembled. She flared her wings, closed them again, then peered around the empty bedroom. She knew those voices. But why couldn’t she see their owners? Where in Equestria had they gone?
“Aunt Lofty? A-Aunt Holiday?”
Deep down, Scootaloo knew that the sound of her aunts’ voices should have sent sunshine-relief blazing through her body. Yet it didn’t, because already, all her hope had burned up.
“Aunt Holiday!” she cried, “Aunt Lofty!” Scootaloo flicked her ears and wings and tail. She peeked under the bed and beneath the desk and then searched through the closets. They were auntyless.
She strained to hear their voices over the inferno. The fire was the music of dragons: all of downstairs must have been ablaze. Picking out a pair of whispers amongst the roars seemed an impossible task.
There was a SMASH, a BASH, and a BOOM, and Scootaloo jumped. The Emberwolf had made its way upstairs and was crashing down the landing.
“Guys!” she hissed. “Where are you?”
Then, thank Celestia, thank everything, she heard them again, her dear Aunt Holiday and beloved Aunt Lofty. Though she still couldn’t see them, it sounded as though they were somewhere near the bedside desk. “Hide, darling one,” they said. “Hurry!”
Scootaloo didn’t question them but bounded into the nearest closet, right into a heap of Aunt Holiday’s hiking gear. She shut the door and held her breath. Was it useless, she wondered, hiding when the Emberwolf already had her cornered? She pictured how Rainbow Dash would handle things. No doubt, Rainbow would confront the beast head on, and with a stamp of her hooves, tell it that she wasn’t afraid, and that it wasn’t welcome inside of the cottage.
But Scootaloo wasn’t Rainbow Dash. Instead, she cowered under a fluffy green coat, then shrank amongst piles of boots, trousers and cardigans. She heard the thump of charcoal paws pound into the bedroom. She bit a hoof and screamed in her mind. It was a soul scream, a spirit screech.
The closet became an oven; the heat came in waves. Scootaloo worried she would black out from it.
But then, in softer tones than she had expected, the Emberwolf said, “Please don’t make this difficult, Scootaloo.”
In her roasting terror, Scootaloo didn’t respond. Her tongue was paper. The gloom turned from red to yellow as, outside of the closet, the bone-scalding heat of the Emberwolf’s body set the bedroom alight.
The Emberwolf sighed. “Trust me when I say I am not a creature of nightmares. I am someone who has seen the misery scrawled upon the walls of your heart – for my own heart bears the same bruises. Please, Scootaloo.” It paused for a moment. “Will you at least talk with me? If you don’t like what I have to say, I promise to leave you alone.”
Scootaloo furrowed her brow. The words made no sense to her. What kind of monster demanded to sit down and talk about feelings? Monsters wanted to feast on foals! They lived to devour helpless fillies in the dead of the night!
With a gentle, flaming paw, the Emberwolf opened the closet and bowed its head. It made no move to singe so much as the smallest hair on Scootaloo’s mane.
Scootaloo squinted her eyes and took in the room. The floor was fire-painted, and the ceiling was black with smoke. The edges of the doorframe were charred from where the beast had squeezed its way through.
All the while, the Emberwolf stared down at her with its infernal eyes, its mighty head larger than Scootaloo herself. However, it wasn’t the eyes that caught her gaze, nor its fangs or claws: there, by its paws, was a mug of hot cocoa.
It was steaming.
Scootaloo stared at the mug, then peered wide-eyed at the Emberwolf itself. When the beast spoke again, it was in soothing tones suited for Hearth’s Warming.
“I am not a monster, Scootaloo. I am merely one who believes that everyone deserves a chance, and that all beings, great and small, deserve a friend. I kept your cocoa warm for you. Drink up.”
Scootaloo’s instincts screamed at her not to touch anything that the Emberwolf offered. Yet, despite the terror of a few moments previously – despite the queasiness which lingered in her belly – she couldn’t help but stare into those blazing eyes: for she wanted to believe. Perhaps it was because her life depended on it, but she wanted to believe that she was wrong about this humongous beast, that it didn’t wish to sizzle her to a pony-fried crisp, but that it was being honest with her. She wanted to live in a world where everypony deserved a friend, even when that ‘pony’ was a monstrous wolf made from coal and fear and fire.
Bringing the hot cocoa to her lips, Scootaloo braced herself for scalding, scorching, roasting, torching. Yet the drink turned out to be precisely the right temperature to remind her of snuggling in the living room on a December evening. Warmth flowed under her skin – heat of a sort different to anything else she had experienced that night. It was home-warmth. What’s more, the hot cocoa tasted of a thousand flavours of honey and magic.
A volcanic smile split across Scootaloo’s face. “What d’you do to it?” she whispered. But she didn’t wait for a response before taking another gulp, and then a third and a fourth. She needed more of it, more and more; and the more she drank, the more marvellous she felt, until she hopped from the closet and into the fires of the bedroom. Somehow, she knew that the flames wouldn’t harm her. Indeed, she giggled as they nipped playfully at her hooves, caressed her coat and tickled her wings. And the fire smelt of too many delectable things to count: ruby strawberries, lava liquorice and bowls of flame berries. Scootaloo shut her eyes and shivered in delight.
When she opened her eyes again, the secret enchantments in the hot cocoa had worked their magic on her.
The fire looked different.
Before, it had been blinding brilliant, but now she saw brilliance of another sort. She found, suddenly, that she could stare straight at the flames without harm, and that they appeared more vivid, more alive, more real. They dazzled her with all the splendour of a red-soaked rainbow, with colours she had never dreamed of, ranging from darkest scarlet right to the fringes of brightest pink and sun-blood yellow. There were endless shades of orange mixed in with tongues of indigo. There were purple flames and there were red flames. Scootaloo was wonder-dazed. It was the same difference as looking at an old and faded photograph, and then seeing the same scene in real life with her own, living eyes.
She saw her aunts.
It was no wonder she couldn’t find them before. They flickered on the bedside desk: they had been transformed into candle flames.
Scootaloo’s heart beat in wondrous terror and terrified wonder. Truthfully, she wasn’t sure how she knew it was them. Certainly, the candles didn’t look much different compared to before. But whatever the enchanted cocoa had the done to her vision, she saw, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the candle flames contained the spark of her aunts’ souls, the glow of their spirits.
“Darling one,” whispered the candle on the right. Scootaloo recognised it as Aunt Holiday.
“Be strong,” whispered the other, the flame that was Aunt Lofty. “Don’t listen to anything else she tells you. Don’t give into her lies.”
Before Scootaloo could ask what Lofty meant by this, before she even had a chance to feel shocked at what had happened to her aunts, the Emberwolf growled at the candles and said, “Enough with you two. I am many things, but I am no liar.” She turned back to Scootaloo. “They don’t know what they’re talking about. They don’t know what I’ve been through. They have no right to judge.”
Scootaloo looked up at the Emberwolf and gasped: with her wondrous new vision, she discovered that it was the most magnificent creature in existence. Its fur glowed golden. Its tail was formed from a combination of dancing flames and thin strands of glinting red crystal. Firelit patterns smouldered over its body, lines, spirals and zig-zags which dimmed and brightened with the beat of its sun-blessed heart. The firey bedroom seemed dull compared to limitless beauty of the Emberwolf.
Its eyes were wonderfully, mesmerizingly warm. Scootaloo could have stared at them forever.
“Your aunts are safe,” the Emberwolf said, and Scootaloo knew in her bones that it was the truth. She knew that the heat wouldn’t melt them, and that their flames would endure for all time. “Forgive me for what I did to them, but it was a necessary evil. The hearts of grown-ups are fixed and stubborn – there are precious few of them who dare to see past my appearance. They would never have let me talk to you. But I assure you – I promise you, with deep and abiding seriousness – that once we are done, I will turn them back to their normal appearance.”
“Don’t trust her!” hissed the candles. But more and more, Scootaloo lost herself to the spell of the Emberwolf’s eyes, those fire-kissed eyes that were so huge and mesmerizing. She bit her lip, unsure of what to do and who to trust. What if her aunts were wrong? What if there was the slightest chance that the Emberwolf was exactly what it claimed to be: simply a beast who was seeking friendship? If that was the case, what kind of filly would she be not to even give it a chance?
If the Emberwolf wanted to kill her, it would already have done so. It would already have devoured her…
The Emberwolf raised its head and howled, and within its howl were the songs of a dozen phoenixes. Scootaloo quivered in bliss at the wonder of that dozen-phoenix-howl.
So did the fire.
In fact, the flames – which were busy eating the walls and swallowing the floor – all halted in their tracks so that they could listen to the Emberwolf’s howling. They stopped flickering. They were as still as photographs. When the howling stopped, the flames remained frozen in place, and the house fell silent.
Scootaloo was dumbfounded.
“How did you do that?” she whispered.
The beast met her with a sly grin. “When you are an Emberwolf, you can command fire to do anything you please. I can teach you, Scootaloo. I can teach you to control fire.”
Scootaloo goggled at the Emberwolf, marvelling at its astonishing promise. Her voice was weak from wonder.
“You’ll teach me to what?”
The Emberwolf didn’t answer. It turned to leave.
“Hey!” Scootaloo blurted. “Um – I wanna talk to my aunts.” For although she now dared to trust in the beast, there remained part of her, the smallest whisper near the bottom of her soul, that warned her she was being reckless. Just because it was the Night of the Impossible, that didn’t mean that monsters were suddenly friendly, that they were suddenly nice. No, it was best to be careful, even despite her newfound trust.
She needed to talk to somepony.
She needed her aunts.
The Emberwolf paused before the doorway. Then it faced Scootaloo, bowed its head and said, “Of course. If you have something to discuss with your aunts, I won’t stop you. Take as long as you need.”
Without another word, it squeezed its flaming way through the doorframe, flicked its crystal tail, and bounded down the landing. Scootaloo stared at the empty doorway – then she sighed, and looked around the bedroom. The flames remained frozen in place. They were beautiful to touch. They didn’t burn, but rather they gave her the same feeling as sinking into a hot bath: her skin tingled at the sensation of those flames. And whenever she touched them, they vanished into thin air (though, there was so much fire in the room there was little chance of her vanishing the whole lot).
The silence was thick; it made her feel off-balance.
She wandered over to the twin candles on the bedside desk.
Aunt Holiday. Aunt Lofty.
She was closer to them than her own parents. How could she not be? Mom and Dad’s jobs took them all over Equestria – which was how Scootaloo had come to live with her aunts for five nights of every week.
“Aunt Holiday,” she whispered. “Aunt Lofty. What do I do?”
The tiny flames that were Aunt Holiday and Aunt Lofty danced upon their wicks. Scootaloo might have worried about accidentally blowing them out – but, more than ever, she saw there was no reason to be nervous. These ponies-turned-flames were alive in ways unknown to normal fire. They were full of love. They blazed with wondrous life.
In a voice which sounded as though it was spoken from a hundred miles away, Aunt Holiday said, “Hiding didn’t work, darling one, so you’re going to have to be brave. You’re going to have to be very, very brave. You will have to be outstanding.”
Scootaloo shook her head. “I don’t wanna be brave. I want you guys to make everything better.”
“We’re sorry, Scoots,” Aunt Lofty said. “We can’t help you with this.”
“But why?”
Even as she said it, Scootaloo felt silly. Of course she had to do this on her own! What use were a pair of candles against a demonic wolf?
Aunt Holiday shushed her. “Do you trust us, dear Scootaloo? Then lean in close and listen hard, because this is the most important thing we’ll ever say to you: you don’t need our help.”
Scootaloo’s mouth became drier than ever. “That’s not true. I—”
“But it is true,” Aunt Holiday said. “And do you know the reason? Do you know why there isn’t another filly alive who we’d trust to take care of this? Because you are the bravest foal in Ponyville. Probably the bravest filly in the world.”
“You walk with the sky in your heart,” Aunt Lofty added. “You live with friendship in your spirit. You fly with Rainbow Dash in your soul.”
“If anypony can face the Emberwolf,” Aunt Holiday said, “anypony at all, then it’s you, our darling bravest one. It’s so unfair that we must ask this of you: but go downstairs. Find out what it wants from you, then figure out how to get it to leave. The snow, too. We don’t know how, but Lofty and I are convinced that the wolf has something to do with it. It must do.”
“What about the photos? D’you know what the Emberwolf did to ’em?”
Scootaloo’s heart sank at the response. “Hmm? Photographs? We don’t know anything about any photographs, we’re afraid,” said Aunt Lofty.
“But listen,” Aunt Holiday added with fiery urgency. “Never mind about that – concentrate on your escape. And if it turns out that you can’t save us, then promise us – promise us – that you won’t wait around. Get out of here. This house could collapse at any moment.”
Scootaloo made to shake her head again – but instead, she found herself nodding, and her resolve crystalized like the rubies that formed the Emberwolf’s tail. She had a goal, now. It was an impossible, shoot-for-the-moon goal that seemed harder with every passing second – but then again, this was the Night of the Impossible, wasn’t it? She was the filly who held Rainbow Dash in her soul! She was the foal who could walk through fire, stare straight into the flames and see their true and shining beauty! In that moment, it didn’t enter her head that she might need to abandon her aunts: because she wouldn’t let them down. She refused to.
Aunt Holiday spoke again. “We love you, Scootaloo.”
“We love you more than you’ll ever know,” Aunt Lofty said, “And it’s not just us, either, but your mom and your dad, and Rainbow Dash, and your friends as well.”
Scootaloo shivered at the mention of her friends.
“What if you’re wrong?” she said. “What if Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle don’t love me? What if I’m just a horrible filly who doesn’t deserve friends?”
But Aunt Holiday said, “Do not doubt yourself. Instead, believe in your friends, and in the glow of their love.”
“Go,” Aunt Lofty said. “Be fierce. Be brave. Be Scootaloo.”
Scootaloo nodded again, solemnly. “I love you guys too,” she whispered. Then she turned around and trotted into the landing. She walked with the sky in her heart, and she didn’t look back.
Scootaloo cantered through frozen fire.
The floors, walls and ceiling were angry with flames – yet, thanks to the magic of the Emberwolf’s howl, the flames were motionless. They remained, however, awash with million shades of heat and colour: with reds and yellows, and all the different shades of purple-violet-indigo which were known to ponies. Scootaloo wondered how she had never noticed the beauty of fire.
Like in the bedroom, the flames vanished whenever she touched them. It meant that, as she marched through the landing, she left a thin trail through the fire behind her. But she didn’t look back. She pressed forwards, her heart aflame with determination, and she passed by the Daring Do novel she had dropped on the floor earlier that night. It was charred around the edges, yet otherwise surprisingly intact.
Then she was downstairs, and, in the foyer, she stood before the living room door. Here, the floor was strewn with rubble from where the Emberwolf had burst through the living room wall. Yet, she couldn’t see a hole in the brickwork, for it was hidden behind curtains of those wondrous frozen flames.
Scootaloo drew in a deep breath. She bit a hoof and whispered, “You’ve got this. You’ve got the sky in your heart, so there’s nothing you can’t do.”
She opened the door and entered the room.
The Emberwolf sat by the fireplace. Its head brushed against the ceiling.
“I’ll be brief,” it said, laying its dazzling eyes upon Scootaloo. With a paw, it gestured for her to sit on the burnt sofa, but Scootaloo shook her head and remained by the door. “I have waited a long time indeed to find somewolf who would understand me. Forgive me, but these past few weeks, I have watched you from the fireplace. You intrigued me – you, with your coat the colour of fire. Yesterday, I observed as you and your friends stood right here in this very room. I ached when your friends argued with you. They abandoned you, and left you crying. In that moment, I experienced a most startling revelation: that all this time, I hadn’t been looking for somewolf at all, but somepony.”
Scootaloo felt queasy in her stomach. She didn’t want to think about the previous day’s argument.
She narrowed her eyes at the Emberwolf. “It’s not nice to spy on ponies.”
The Emberwolf shrugged. “It is not nice to shout at them either.”
Scootaloo looked uncomfortable. “Hey! I didn’t mean to shout at my friends. I just—”
“I wasn’t referring to you, Scootaloo,” the Emberwolf said. “Frankly, you had every right to lose your temper with them. I saw everything. Everything. I saw how your friends mistreated you. I watched as they told you, without any trace of thoughtfulness, that you are not the same filly as you were before. They told you that you’ve been ignoring them for months, withdrawing from them, and locking yourself away in your room. Hah! As if they could ever understand what you’ve been through. As if a filly could endure all that you’ve seen and heard, and then be expected to remain the same.”
The Emberwolf dropped its voice to a dangerous growl. “But I understand, Scootaloo. I understand you in ways Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle couldn’t begin to comprehend. I understand the hurt your parents have put you through. I’ve lived it. There was a time, a most wretched time indeed, when my own pack abandoned me when I needed them most. So, I get you. I am probably the only creature alive who does.
“Tell me,” it finished in a sizzling whisper. “Get it off your chest. What do you hate most about your friends and family?”
Tears ran down Scootaloo’s cheeks: the fat, untamed tears of which only the fiercest foals are capable of. Her nose was clogged; her mind was clogged; she didn’t know what to say or what to do, and she wasn’t certain of things anymore. Why was it that this fire-headed beast seemed to know her better than her so-called best friends? Neither Apple Bloom nor Sweetie Belle had wanted to hear of the midnight arguments between her parents, of how unfair the world was, and how red-hot roasting she, Scootaloo, always felt in her belly these days.
The hairs in her mane prickled as she considered the Emberwolf’s question. She thought back to the fateful morning in August, the morning that had struck from nowhere, blasting apart her life with the force of a lightning bolt: the morning Mom had discovered the letter hidden in Dad’s study. Scootaloo didn’t know what the letter had said or what the big deal was. But from a stolen glance at it, she had seen that it had been hoof-written in purple ink, and that it had ended in a string of x’s.
That day had marked the first argument.
It hadn’t been the last.
Scootaloo couldn’t meet the Emberwolf’s gaze. “I, um…”
“We do not have to talk here, Scootaloo. If you find it easier, we can talk in my home.”
Scootaloo’s ears perked up in curiosity. “Your home?”
The Emberwolf turned its gigantic head towards the fireplace. “Wherever there is a fireplace, there is a doorway. When you are an Emberwolf, the doors are easy to open.”
With that, it breathed over the fireplace, and there, the frozen flames began to move again. They arranged themselves into the shapes of two ponies Scootaloo recognised at once: miniature versions of her parents, who were made entirely from fire.
Her miniature parents screamed at each other.
“What was your plan, huh?” Scootaloo’s tiny mom shouted at her miniscule dad. “Were you going to run off with her and start a new life? No, actually, don’t answer that. I deserve better than this. Your daughter deserves better than this. For once in your life, think of Scootaloo, why don’t you?”
Scootaloo gasped. She remembered that argument. She remembered cowering under her covers on a stormy night. But before she could ask how the Emberwolf was doing this – how it knew about her most private memories – her parents vanished in a flicker of flames. They were replaced with blazing versions of Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle.
“Scoots, we’re worried about you. We don’t see you no more,” the little Apple Bloom said. “You always lock yourself away in that there room of yours.”
“Stop being mopey all the time,” said the mini Sweetie Belle, pressing her flaming hooves together. “Pretty please?”
Scootaloo gawped at the fireplace. The flaming versions of her friends repeated the very words that their real-life counterparts had spoken a day beforehoof, right there in the living room. Her stomach twister-twirled. She wanted to run again, dash upstairs and slam the door and hide under the covers for a billion years. But her hooves felt as though they had mountains tied to them. She couldn’t move. Her wings drooped, and her tail hung limp.
“Stop it,” Scootaloo whispered to the Emberwolf. “I don’t like this. Make ’em go away.”
The Emberwolf nodded then breathed over the fireplace. With that, the fiery versions of Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle became normal flames once more.
“My apologies,” the Emberwolf said, “but it was unavoidable. I needed to look inside your heart and see what was in there. I had to riffle through your memories, so that I can craft a special doorway just for you.”
Scootaloo frowned at the Emberwolf. “You keep talking ’bout a door, but I don’t see one. I just see the fireplace.”
She didn’t like how the Emberwolf looked at her. Its grin was too wide, and there were too many fangs. “Oh, wait and see, Scootaloo. Wait and see.”
The Emberwolf howled again, long and loud, and Scootaloo’s heart turned golden with wonder as the flames, all of them – all the fires that charred the floor, those that consumed the walls, and the red wisps upon the ceiling – were suddenly unfrozen and began to dance their way towards the fireplace. Flames flowed in through both the open doorway and the giant hole in the wall: it was all the fire from the foyer and the flames from upstairs. The flames washed harmlessly over Scootaloo, drenching her in sumptuous warmth. They were glowshine beautiful. They tasted of smoulder berries and smelled as fresh as dreams. Then the flames poured into the fireplace, even though it should have been too small for such a hugeness of fire.
Scootaloo didn’t think about her parents’ arguments anymore, nor of how she had shouted at her friends. Rather, she simply wanted them with her. She wanted Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle. She imagined Dad draping a loving wing over her trembling body and Mom holding her hoof. She thought, also, of Aunt Holiday and Aunt Lofty, flickering on their bedside desk. Was it too late to grab them? Would the Emberwolf keep its promise, Scootaloo wondered, and transform them back into ponies?
She stared at the Emberwolf.
Then a strange realisation crept over her: she trusted the beast. It listened to her. And although what it had done to her aunts scared her, terrified her, petrified her, she knew beyond the darkest shadow of a doubt that it would turn them back. She trusted its words implicitly.
At last, the Emberwolf stopped howling. “Keep your eyes on the fireplace,” it growled at her.
Yet Scootaloo couldn’t help but glance around the living room. Everything was back to normal, like the inferno had never happened. The hole in the wall was fixed and the wallpaper was its usual maroon. The rug was untouched by fire; the sofa wasn’t burnt, but plump and purple. The Hearth’s Warming tree cast its jolly glow over the furniture. It was as though nothing had changed since Scootaloo had first heard the Emberwolf’s crackling voice from the grate earlier that night, and a swift peek through the living room door showed her that the rest of the house was back to normal as well.
The wall of snow, however, remained sparkling through the window. The house was still buried.
She paid the snow little notice, because the fireplace turned blinding.
Even with the protection of the enchanted cocoa, Scootaloo could hardly bear to look at it. A house’s worth of heat had just been herded there, collected into a space no bigger than herself. It didn’t look like normal fire, but a white sphere that rested on the logs, huge, perfectly round, and as smooth as a dragon’s egg. The air around it shimmered fantastically. It was as though the brightest star in the night had plummeted from the sky, straight down the chimney and into the fireplace.
The Emberwolf breathed in deeply. On its coat, the fiery patterns glowed brighter.
“You must be the one to open the door,” it said. “Dig into your heart, and then tell the egg what makes you angry. Tell it what makes the heat rise in your blood.”
Scootaloo wasn’t prepared for this question. Anger was forbidden. It was something to sweep away under dusty rugs in the basement of her soul, and to be piled into the unlit places of her mind: over the past few months, Scootaloo had learnt that grown-ups didn’t like it when foals were angry. Even Rainbow Dash – Rainbow Dash, who understood her better than anypony! – didn’t like it when she was angry. “Be cool, Scoots,” Rainbow had said to her a few weeks ago, when Scootaloo had fumed about an especially dreadful argument her parents had had a few days previously. “Live with the sky inside your heart. Let the wind carry away your anger, and stuff.”
But there was no sky there in the living room. The wind didn’t blow inside that little house buried under the snow.
… On the other hoof, neither were there any grown-ups about…
Scootaloo frowned to herself.
Why shouldn’t she be angry? Who was stopping her? Why were Mom and Dad allowed to be angry, whilst she herself had to stay quiet about things, and bottle up her rage until she exploded at her friends? It wasn’t fair. She stamped a hoof. It wasn’t fair.
“It’s not fair,” she said, facing the white burning orb in the fireplace. “It’s not fair. It’s never fair.”
“What’s unfair, Scootaloo?”
Scootaloo met the Emberwolf fearsome gaze. But then she bowed her head, and her cheeks flushed from shame.
The Emberwolf snorted. Sparks flew from its nostrils. “This is a safe space,” it said. “By the whiskers of the Grand Wolf Herself, you have so much to angry about. Feel it! Shout it! Scream it!”
Something cracked inside of Scootaloo. It flooded her with heat.
“I HATE IT!” she screamed. “I HATE it when Mom and Dad argue. Why don’t they get along no more? I don’t get it. I DON’T GET IT!”
She stamped on the rug again and looked up at the Emberwolf. Her eyes glistened with tears.
Her voice broke.
“I’m the reason they hate each other,” she whimpered. “I dunno how. But I know it’s me.”
It was awful to admit these secrets out loud, to hurl them at the wolf and at the incredible sphere in the fireplace. Yet, somehow, it felt good as well. It felt, in fact, almost impossibly wonderful. Some hidden, raging part of her was finally given a voice, and there was so much that she needed to screech and scream about.
The Emberwolf nodded. It looked pleased.
“That was a delicious bout of anger, Scootaloo. The egg liked it very much.”
Its gaze fell on the sphere in the fireplace. Scootaloo stared at it too.
The egg burst.
An orange crack split along its surface, out of which emerged snakes of flame, arms of fire, vines of lava, tendrils of magma. The fire-snakes moved ferociously, and with minds of their own. They dove through the air and wiggled along the floor. There were dozens of them, overflowing from the split in the sphere, and each one of them was as long and thick as a foreleg.
Scootaloo yelped but didn’t look away. The fire-snakes mesmerised her – and although they moved with fearsome purpose, she sensed that they wouldn’t harm her. They danced with one another, twisted, twirled, coiled, curled.
Then the snakes grew little eyes and little mouths, and they stared to sing.
“Twist the flames and coil the heat,
Loop the blaze and burn the peat.
Roast the logs on open fire,
Give in, give in, to soul-deep ire.
Melt away your bones and skin,
Bake your spirit: give up, give in!
Shed away your pony shell,
Become wolf-proud: a hound of hell!”
At last, the snakes formed themselves into a flaming archway over the fireplace, and the wall inside of the arch bubbled and fizzled and melted into nothing. The wall was gone, taking the fireplace with it, and the remains of the flaming egg. There was only blackness now. It was framed by the arch, which was tall and wide enough that even the Emberwolf itself could have strolled through without having to duck or squeeze.
The Emberwolf faced Scootaloo. “It is as I said. Where there is a fireplace, there is a doorway. Through this door lies the answer to all your problems.”
The house fell quiet. It was the rarest species of hush, found usually in the grey nights after a forest fire, when the ground is ashen, and the trees are no more than blackened stumps. The moon-breeze blows through the stumps and whips up the ash. All sound is chocked. That was the silence Scootaloo experienced in the living room. It was a quiet which told her that the world had changed and there was no going back.
The Emberwolf looked solemn. “Trot through the archway,” it said, “and you need never worry about arguments again. Enter the archway and live with fire in your heart! Or else you can wait here, and I shall leave you alone and never return. You can wait for the snow to melt. By morning – and I make this promise with all the embers in my bones – your aunts will be back to normal. Life will return to the way it was. That means shouting. It means arguments. It means friends who will never, for the life of them, understand how you feel…
“The choice is yours, Scootaloo. Choose carefully.”
Scootaloo didn’t hesitate but stepped closer to the fire-door. Now that she had allowed herself to feel anger – now she had tasted that most forbidden of emotions and discovered its wonder – she needed more of it, more, more and more.
Briefly, she thought of her aunts trapped upstairs on the bedside desk. “Believe in your friends,” they had said, “and the glow of their love.” Right then, however, the glow of Apple Bloom’s and Sweetie Belle’s love was nothing compared to silver-tongued promises of the Emberwolf.
She grinned at the beast, then marched right up to the fire-door. Her heart pumped flames through her bloodstream. Her ears flicked wildly, and her wings twitched in excitement. “I’m ready,” she said. And through the fire-door, she saw a staircase, and the stairs led down and down. The steps were carved from black crystal, and the taste of bonfires was in the air. She was so alert, so awake, that could have galloped for a day and a night.
Scootaloo stepped onto the staircase,
then took another step,
another, another,
cantered
down
into
the
dark.
A warm breeze rose from deep below and whipped her mane. The world was black. The only light was a red dot at the very bottom of the staircase, perhaps a hundred miles away.
“Keep moving,” said the Emberwolf from behind. “Let the fire into your heart. Feel your anger. Feel how good it is.”
It was good, alarmingly so. Scootaloo worried whether it was wrong to enjoy it. Was she allowed to? Wasn’t it better to hide away her fury in a lonely corner of her soul and keep it under lock and key? Yet the knowledge of its wrongness, the fact that grown-ups wouldn’t approve of it, made her anger taste more delicious than ever. She glanced over her shoulder to ask the Emberwolf if it was right to feel this way.
She halted.
The Emberwolf wasn’t there. Scootaloo couldn’t even see the living room, for the archway had vanished behind her. There was nothing but pitch darkness.
She gulped. Her hooves tingled as, around her, she heard voices in the gloom.
It was the voices of her parents.
“Everything’s going to be fine, little one,” Mom said, to which Dad added, “There’s nothing to worry about, Scoots. Mommy and Daddy are just… talking. That’s all. We’re just talking.”
Although she heard them as clear as day-shine, Scootaloo knew they weren’t really there. They couldn’t possibly. At that very moment, Mom was in Los Pegasus on a business trip, whilst Dad’s job had called him away to Manehattan. Was this some strange magic of the staircase, she wondered, that it could mimic the voices of her parents?
But then Scootaloo considered what the mysterious voices had said – and in an instant, her questions evaporated as flames surged through her muscles. She didn’t care, anymore, whether Mom and Dad were really on the staircase alongside her, or if the voices were simply a dark enchantment of some sort.
The nerve of her parents.
The nerve of them.
They had treated her this way for months: nothing more than a little filly who couldn’t grasp that something had broken. She was too young to understand, they said. Everything was fine, they said. Everything was as right as rain: never mind the fact she saw way, way more than grown-ups could ever believe possible for a filly of eleven.
Shaking, Scootaloo trotted down the steps once more, trying her best to ignore the terrible voices which continued to speak from all around.
“Everything is fine.”
“Me and your mom love each other.”
“All is fine.”
“Everything will be fine.”
Scootaloo spat on the black crystal.
Her parent’s voices died away, replaced by the voices of Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle.
“You ain’t bein’ fair on us, Scoots, said Apple Bloom from nowhere, from everywhere. Scootaloo picked up her pace. Her trot turned into a canter and then to a gallop. Yet, no matter how fast she ran, no matter how quickly she dashed towards the red light at the bottom of the staircase, she couldn’t escape from the voices.
“Shut it,” she snapped at them.
The voices ignored her. “You never want to play with us anymore,” said Sweetie Belle. “Why are you being such a meaniehead all the time?”
“You’ve changed,” said Apple Bloom.
“You’ve changed,” insisted Sweetie Belle.
“Changed.”
“Changed.”
“Changed.”
“Changed.”
“Changed.”
Something detonated inside of Scootaloo.
Something changed in the air.
“SHUT UP!” she yelled.
The black walls exploded with heat. The steps and ceiling erupted with light, so that Scootaloo felt she ran through the inside of a fire tornado. She was surrounded by loops of flame and rings of lava. Her ears were assaulted with roaring howling screeching. Yet, it wasn’t enough to drown out her own voice as she screamed, “SHUT UP, SHUT UP! LEAVE ME ALONE!”
Her parents always argued. Her best friends didn’t understand her pain. And so, she ran, she galloped down and down and down, deeper into the Earth, and she let herself feel her anger – truly feel it. The sky was driven out of her heart and replaced with fire. She beat her wings and felt a tingling sensation in her hooves – except they were no longer hooves at all, but they were paws. She felt like invisible dragons pulled on either end of her belly, until her body was long and slender. Lightning flashed in her stomach. Her wings frazzled and burnt to cinders. Her nose grew longer and became a snout. Her coat was fire. Her bones were coal. When she swished her tail, she heard the clink of blood-red crystals, for the hairs had turned into thin strands of ruby, as had the hairs in her mane.
Then, at last, Scootaloo reached the bottom of the staircase and burst through a second fiery archway and into a field of ruby-red grass. She was not, however, Scootaloo anymore. She had transformed. Magic had taken hold of her, fire-magic, and she was an emberwolf pup.
She was Scootalwolf.
She grinned. Her wolfish new body glowed bright, hot, fierce, wondrous.
Scootawolf raised her fiery snout in the air and howled.
Then, from nearby, she heard the voice of the Emberwolf. “Oh, well done, very well done!” it told her. “A most splendid transformation. I knew you had it in you!”
Scootawolf turned around and found the Emberwolf staring down at her. Pride shone within its eyes. Where had it come from? How had it gotten there? From a second staircase, perhaps?
There was no time to worry: because Scootawolf discovered that being an emberwolf pup was the greatest feeling in existence. She glanced at her new body. Her fur was made from fine strands of red-hot coal, and like the Emberwolf, she was drenched in flames. But the flames didn’t burn her, didn’t scorch her, didn’t singe her. Rather, the sensation put her in mind of every night she had sat snuggled by the fireplace, toasty warm even as the freeze of winter had huddled around the cottage. She knew in her bones that, so long as she kept the fires of her heart stoked and burning, then she would never feel cold again.
Her stomach was a furnace. She blazed with so much energy that she couldn’t stand still, but she had to rush and run, bound and leap! Scootawolf jumped through the air and landed on her paws. She laughed and raced through the grass. She felt so light! She was feather-perfect. It was the feel of floating.
And where inside of the world had she found herself? It was somewhere deep underground, a buried continent not found on any maps. This was a place untouched by pony hooves. It was a land hidden from all those who refused to let fire into their hearts.
When she finally stopped running and returned to the Emberwolf’s side, Scootawolf was surprised to find no trace of the staircase. The fiery archway had vanished into thin air, and there were no burn marks to show where it had stood. However, she didn’t wonder for long at this mystery, for the pair of them stood on top of a hill overlooking the forests of the deep. They were as rich as rainforests, and steamy and hot. Unlike a real rainforest, however, the grass was made from ruby, and the trees were formed from all varieties of crystal, from basalt birches to crocoite redwoods, and trees with trunks of jasper. The leaves weren’t green but sumptuous red. They sparkled and glitter-glistened. There were rivers of magma and pools of molten rock. The ground itself glowed scarlet. Vast clouds of softly glowing mist engulfed the forests, making the air hazy, dreamy.
Above them shimmered stars.
Scootawolf gawped at the impossible sight. They were a hundred miles below the surface, yet the sky was the richest navy she had ever seen, and the stars were bright white and vivid blue. There were big ones and small ones. There were galaxies, mixed with shimmering nebula which seemed to vanish whenever she stared at them directly. Only in the corner of her eye could she spy them, like silver glowing clouds.
She peered closer – and gasped. Because amongst the lights of the stars, she spied stalagmites growing from the sky like the fangs of the night.
“Actually,” said the Emberwolf when Scootawolf pointed them out, “when they’re on the ceiling, they are called ‘stalactites’. Stalac-tight-to-the-ceiling! That’s how you remember it.”
“But – but what about the stars?” Scootawolf asked. “How in Equestria are there stars down here? That’s impossible!”
“Because they are not stars at all, Scootawolf. They are glow-worms.”
Scootawolf gaped at the stars-that-weren’t-actually-stars. They were glow-worms. They were millions upon billions of glow-worms, clinging to the navy crystal ceiling.
A shiver passed through her. Here the two of them stood inside the stomach of the Earth – yet, incredibly, it bristled with life. It teemed with heartbeats. For she saw now that it wasn’t just the glow-worms that called this land home, but that the forest too was alive with animals, with magma-birds blazing between branches and singing the music of the Buried Continent. Their songs were full of restless life. Their voices flickered, Scootawolf thought. They flashed, and they sparkled.
She spotted movement at the foot of the hill, near the treeline, and she smiled. She felt that her whole body smiled. With a wolf-proud bound, she rushed down the hill and scattered the herd of diamond deer that had wandered from out of the trees – deer with platinum hooves and opal antlers. Crystal monkeys hollered from the branches. There were bugs made from emeralds and sapphires. There were silver spiders, gold groundhogs, and a topaz tiger which pondered Scootawolf for a moment, before nodding at her and pouncing back into the forest.
And the smell, the wonderful, stomach-happy smell! The forest air smelled joyous. Scootawolf struggled to breathe it all in. The trees were ripe with crystal fruit, and she caught the scent of honey crystals spun from swarms of amber bees.
Her stomach growled with anticipation. With her mouth, she picked up a glinting apple from the ruby grass and bit into it greedily. Fresh, clear mineral juice burst into her mouth. It was sweeter than chocolate. It was more filling than a Hearth’s Warming dinner.
Scootawolf gorged on apples, crystal coconuts and pyrite pineapples until she thought she would pop. Then she wandered from the trees and back onto the hill and lay on her side in the grass. The soil was red. Close to, she saw that not only did the floor glow scarlet, but that its glow pulsed in time with the heartbeat of the Earth.
She closed her eyes and tried to imagine what the heart of the Earth might look like… a heart the size of Equestria, made from fire and electricity, and pumping in a cavern larger than the moon…
She sighed beautifully. Here, in the Buried Continent, she was separated from Mom and Dad’s arguments by a hundred miles of rock and fire. Her friends weren’t around to call her selfish or tell her that she had changed. Right then, she thought, the only pony she missed was Rainbow Dash.
(With a pang of guilt, she remembered Aunt Holiday and Aunt Lofty. Had they turned back to normal yet? Or were they still stuck as candle flames on their bedside?)
The Emberwolf stood over her again. “Time to get up, Scootawolf. Oh, you are going to love this, I promise you.”
Scootawolf gazed at the mighty flaming wolf. “Huh? What am I gonna love?”
The Emberwolf shot her a lava-wicked grin. “Why, we’re going to destroy the forest, of course,” it said.
Scootawolf’s ruby-haired tail stood on end. Her body flared brighter. “What? No!” she cried. “Why would I wanna do that? This place is awesome!”
The Emberwolf shook its head. “You misunderstand, little wolf pup. Just watch me.”
Before Scootawolf could protest, the Emberwolf bounded down the hillside towards the treeline. Its eyes became miniature suns in its flame-soaked head; its tail glittered, and the ruby grass turned molten beneath its paws. Even Scootawolf, with her body of coal, fire, and crystal, cowered under the murderous heat which suddenly radiated from the beast.
Scootawolf noticed how quiet it was. The fire-birds had ended their song and the monkeys didn’t holler. The crystal animals had fled, every sparkling one of them. They knew not to stick around when the Emberwolf was on the prowl.
“Wait!” Scootawolf cried. “What are you going to do?”
The Emberwolf halted and sank its claws into the red glowing earth. It reared back and drew in a breath that must have been a hundred miles deep.
Then it obliterated the forest.
It released its breath, and from its jaws poured flames upon flames, fire upon fire! A tsunami of heat blasted Scootawolf onto her back.
She scrambled to her paws. “HEY, STOP IT!” she screamed.
But the Emberwolf didn’t stop, not even when Scootawolf scurried over and scratched at its fur and bit at its legs and kicked and shrieked. There was nothing she could do but gaze in horror as the beast’s lungs finally emptied, and its fiery breath ceased. Then the two of them stared over a forest with the life burned out of it. It was a devastation of trees. For a mile or more, the forest was melted, molten, scarred. Where once there had been crystal trees heavy with life, now there were stumps, smoke, and mounds of glass.
The beginnings of a rage-quake rumbled through Scootawolf. Her body shook from shock, and her tears burned – actually burned, for, with her new body, she cried tears of fire.
“What’s WRONG with you?” she yelled. “Why did you do that?”
Scootawolf couldn’t stand how calmly the Emberwolf replied. She would rather that it cackled, or perhaps lose its temper at her and snarl and growl. But this gentleness, this patience, was more than Scootawolf could cope with. “Just watch,” it whispered, before sitting on its haunches and peering over the ruined forest. In its eyes, Scootawolf saw the peacefulness of a starry sky on a December night. It was hard to believe this was the same monster that had just melted half a forest.
If anger had a taste, then surely it was the taste of the air in Scootawolf’s mouth. It was hot. It was like chewing a mouthful of peppercorns.
“No!” she said. She stamped a paw in the grass. “I won’t watch. Not ’til you say why you—”
“Watch, dear wolf pup. Trust me.”
Scootawolf huffed. She plumped herself down in the grass, hating the Emberwolf.
Then something strange began to happen.
The forest hummed.
Scootawolf wasn’t sure, at first, what she was hearing. But soon, it was unmistakable: a note so low that it reached inside of her and jiggled her organs. It seized hold of her bones and rattled them, and it stirred the core of her soul. Without having to be told, she knew that something huge was about to happen.
Then, suddenly, it did.
The forest grew.
The ground crackled with bolts of electricity – electricity in its ripest form, freshly drawn from the beating heart of the Earth. The bolts were all different colours, pink and red, green and yellow, blue and purple and violet. They shot straight from the ground, tall as giants and as thick as tree trunks. They forked. They splintered. Scootawolf thought that the forks and splinters resembled the branches of trees.
A clap of thunder shook the walls and ceiling of the endless cavern – and with that, the lightning bolts froze in place. They crystalized, turned solid, and lost their glow. There was a pause. Then clusters of gypsum leaves sprouted from the branches and formed a sparkling canopy, and amber shrubs grew from the forest floor. There were brimstone bushes, and glades of tall grass made from ruby and rose quartz. It was as though nothing had changed whatsoever, and that the Emberwolf hadn’t so much as touched the trees, let alone melted them.
The Buried Continent held its breath…
Then the fire-birds flocked back to the trees and sang their music.
Life had returned to the forest.
Startling ferocity awoke in Scootawolf’s beating heart. She had never wanted anything so badly as for the Emberwolf to teach her it’s secrets: to show how to destroy a forest then bring it back to life. She would have given anything. She would have chopped her soul in half, then handed away her half-a-soul with a smile if only the Emberwolf would tell her how to breathe a firestorm: because, as she stared at the newly grown forest, the last few months flashed through her mind, and it made her want to SMASH things.
(“Think of Scootaloo,” Mom had screamed to Scootawolf’s father.)
Scootawolf pawed the ground.
(“Why don't you smile anymore?” Sweetie Belle had asked her in the living room a day beforehoof.)
Scootawolf’s breath was quick and shallow.
(“You ain’t the same no more!” Apple Bloom always told her these days. “We miss the real Scootaloo. You’re hiding her away, and we miss her.”)
Scootawolf growled. She wanted to unleash her anger on the forest and destroy the trees, break the branches, shatter the leaves. Best of all, when the trees regrew a minute later, she wouldn’t have to feel bad about what she had done. She could do it again and again, as many times as she liked until all her anger had burned away.
She fixed the Emberwolf with a soul-deep gaze. Her voice was rich with excitement. “That. Was. Awesome,” she said. “How d’you do that? Show me, please, please, please! I’ll die if you don’t show me!”
The Emberwolf chuckled. “I should hope not. Not when I finally have somewolf to share my secrets with.”
But then the laughter left its eyes and was replaced with steel-seriousness. It crouched down to Scootawolf’s level and said, “The secret is that the forest regrows all by itself. You see, this land is full of life. Life is in the air, and it’s in the rock and in the magma: for we are close, so extraordinarily close to the very heart of the Earth. This very instant, we stand a mere dozen miles right above it! And for dozens of miles all around it, everything grows. Everything flourishes. So, do not worry about harming the forest. You couldn’t, even if you wanted to. It is impossible. There is too much magic, here.”
“But – how d’you breathe so much fire?” Scootawolf blurted.
“You must draw upon your soul-fire,” came the Emberwolf’s response. “You must reach into the foundations of your heart. That’s where you’ll find it.”
“Find what? What will I find?"
“Your Heart of Hearts,” the beast replied in a whisper. “The part of you that makes you you.”
Scootawolf stared at the Emberwolf in wonder. “How do I find my Heart of Hearts?” she whispered back.
“I will help you, dear wolf pup. Be still. Be silent. Close your eyes and trust in my words.”
Scootawolf closed her eyes then stood as still as stone. Once upon a not-very-long time ago, the thought of standing still and quiet would have been poisonous to her, but that was before the arguments had started. It was before the gloom-ridden evenings spent with no company but the Daring Do books lent to her by Rainbow Dash. She was good, these days, at being quiet.
So, she shut out the world, shut out the cries and bird songs of the Buried Continent, and the scarlet glow of the earth. She ignored the mouth-watering scents of crystal fruit.
“I’m ready,” she whispered. “What do I do?”
A few seconds passed. The Emberwolf didn’t respond.
“Hello?” Scootawolf said.
Then the Emberwolf drowned her in fire.
It happened so fast! Scootawolf was swallowed by flames, was lost in heat, light and fire! Yet the fire didn’t burn her. It didn’t even singe her, and the heat was hot-bath-perfect. It was snuggle-under-the-covers warm. The flames were precisely the right temperature to make her feel loved and safe.
She opened her eyes.
Everything was white. And in the whiteness, she heard the voice of the Emberwolf from all around.
“I have sent you to the Land of your Heart, which is found in the very centre of your soul,” it said. “Be warned. This magic won’t last. Soon, you will be dragged back to the fires of the Buried Continent. If you are to find your Heart of Hearts, you must be fast.”
Scootawolf tilted her head, puppy-like, attempting to make sense of the bewildering words. “Wait, hold up. I’m where?”
“Hmm, I suppose it is complicated for a wolf so young,” said the Emberwolf with a sigh. “How best to explain it? You are inside of your dreams, Scootawolf. You are awake inside of a dream.”
The explanation was a pawhold. Although Scootawolf still didn’t entirely understand where the Emberwolf's magic had sent her, ‘in her dreams’ felt a good enough start. At the very least, it was an explanation that she could begin to grasp.
She nodded and said, “What am I searching for? What does my Heart of Hearts look like?”
“It will take the form of something important to you in real life,” replied the voice of the Emberwolf in the endless whiteness. “For some, their Heart of Hearts could be something as simple as an old jewel, or maybe a childhood toy. For others, it is possibly a book, a photograph, a painting, a snowflake. The only sure thing is that everyone’s Heart of Hearts is completely different from one another – but that you will know it when you see it. It will call to you, and you will feel its pull. When you lay a paw upon it, its power will flow through your body; when you awake, you can then draw upon that power, and you too will be able to breathe the fires of the soul.”
Scootawolf nodded again. In her mind, she went over what exactly she had to do: she had to search through her dreams to find her Heart of Hearts, and then touch it to borrow its power. Only then could she breathe fire like how the Emberwolf had breathed it over the forest.
One last question sauntered into her mind. “What does your Heart of Hearts look like?”
But the Emberwolf didn’t respond, and Scootawolf couldn’t feel its presence anymore. A few seconds later, the whiteness lifted. She wasn’t in the Buried Continent anymore, but she was in her dreams, and they were wide and green. Yet she paid no notice to the lush green earth but stared at the clouds gathering in the vast distance. They were shaped like anvils, and so huge that perhaps they weren’t clouds at all, but mountains which had grown tired of the ground and had floated into the sky.
“I live with the sky in my heart,” Scootawolf whispered to herself. “I live with friends in my spirit. I fly with Rainbow Dash in my soul.”
She felt a peculiar twitching, tingling, tickling on her back; she sighed in feather-blessed pleasure. Just like that, she peered over her shoulder, and although her body remained wolfish, she had grown wings again, more wondrous than anything even Rainbow Dash herself could have dreamed of! Her new wings were as wide as the Emberwolf was tall and they were made from pure red flames.
Scootawolf grinned at her fiery wings, then flapped them and took off from the grass. It wasn’t a moment too soon. Suddenly, the wide green earth vanished into nothing and was replaced with a sea of clouds: for the Land of her Heart was a country where nothing was permanent, not even the earth beneath her paws. Now, everywhere she looked – above and below – there was only endless sky painted black with storms. Fearsome winds tossed her between the angry clouds. The air was so cold that it stung like icicles. But Scootawolf wasn’t surprised by any of this: since her parents’ arguments had started, the Land of her Heart had become a cold dark place indeed.
Despite the cold and the dark, however, this awful sky was still a part of her. And so, from pure instinct, she sensed when to swoop to avoid lightning bolts, and when to flatten her wings so that the wind didn’t rip them from her wolfish body. The air was soaking wet, a mix of rain and sleet and snow and hail. She was drenched to her bones. Her fangs chattered, and the fires in her fur almost went out. But she flew on, fast and determined, and she was guided by a pull in her belly, a feeling that she was drawing close to something. Whatever form her Heart of Hearts had taken, she could tell that it was near…
Then the clouds parted—
And there it was.
Shock pummelled her. Scootawolf was so stunned by what she saw that, for a moment, she forgot to keep her wings steady, and started to plummet through the storm clouds. She caught herself and hovered in the air, forcing herself to stare at her Heart of Hearts. It wasn’t a jewel. It wasn’t a book, or a painting.
It was Rainbow Dash.
Yet not just any Rainbow Dash, but the one missing from the cherished photograph she kept on her bedside desk! Scootawolf wasn’t sure how she knew this, yet she felt the truth of it in her stomach. This new version of Rainbow Dash even looked like a photograph. There was a certain sheen to her eyes, a strange gleam to her body, like the glossy shine of photo paper. The colours in her mane and tail were faded, as though they had spent too much time in direct sunlight. You’re not the real Rainbow Dash, Scootawolf thought to herself. I’m gonna call you Photo Dash.
Photo Dash stood on a bank of jet-black cloud. Lightning flashed around her. Thunder roared. She ignored it, however, and beamed at Scootawolf.
Scootawolf hovered closer; the pull in her stomach grew stronger. Before long, she was close enough to hear Photo Dash talk.
“Wanna know something cool, kiddo?” Photo Dash said. “You’re not an emberwolf pup, but you’re a pony. That means you’ve gotta stop calling yourself Scootawolf. Your name is Scootaloo, and you’re way more awesome than what you’ve become.”
Scootawolf landed in front of Photo Dash, unsure of what to say. She didn’t know whether to hug her foalsitter, or glare at her and fly back into the storm clouds: for, now that she stood before Rainbow (or a version of her, at least), she realised that she hadn’t entirely forgiven the real-life Rainbow for abandoning her when she had needed her most. Never mind about Rainbow Dash’s dreams, and her talent for stunt flying! She should have been there for Scootawolf as the world was slowly flipped upon its head.
That was what a good foalsitter was supposed to do, wasn’t it?
“What are doing here?” Scootawolf said, more forcefully than she meant to.
“Looking out for you,” said Photo Dash with a grin. She held her head proudly.
Scootawolf frowned at this answer. Before she could say anything more, however, they were joined by a dozen other Rainbow Dashes who had escaped from their own photographs, and who had fled to the Land of Scootawolf's Heart. They marched from the left and from the right, and in a great long line behind Photo Dash herself. A hoofful appeared from the sky and skidded to a halt on the wide cloudbank.
Scootawolf gawped at the hoard of Rainbow Dashes.
At last, she had found them: the missing ponies from the photos.
The extra Rainbow Dashes, around two dozen in total, gathered in a gaggle behind Photo Dash. One near the front said, “We’re all watching out for you, every one of us. We all sensed the Emberwolf coming, so we found somewhere to watch over you. Pretty neat, huh?”
Scootawolf’s fur bristled. It was exceedingly, exceptionally rich of them to tell her this, when the real-life Rainbow Dash had disappeared for months on end.
Scootawolf shook her head. “N-no,” she sobbed. “This is dumb – you’re just ponies from photographs. How are you s’posed to look out for me?”
Another voice sounded over the cloud bank. Scootawolf jumped. She knew that voice. And when she turned and looked at the new pony, she knew those eyes, that face, and that mane and cutie mark: a musical note drawn within a star, which itself was placed in the middle of a shield.
Sweetie Belle had come to speak with her.
“You’re wrong,” Sweetie Belle said, and there wasn’t just one of her, but a whole gang, advancing across the cloudbank. The Sweetie Belles were joined by ten different Apple Blooms. “There’s magic in the air tonight: the Emberwolf is one of the most magical creatures that ever lived, and you can never tell what’s going to happen when it’s around. So, tonight – so long as you’re near the Emberwolf and its magic – we’re more than just photographs. We’re memories, and we love you. You’re our friend.”
“You’re bein’ mighty silly, trustin’ the Emberwolf,” one of the Apple Blooms added.
Scootawolf realised she was blushing, and that her blushing caused her smouldering cheeks to cast a fierce orange glow over the surrounding ponies. Nervous, she clawed at the cloudbank. Although her body was made from coal and fire, ice pierced her stomach. She couldn’t stand here and take this. She had to speak. She had to defend herself.
“Hey,” she growled. “That’s not fair. The Emberwolf gets me. Not like you guys. You guys shouted at me. You said I’d changed, and that you didn’t like it.”
The Apple Blooms and the Sweetie Belles mingled with the Rainbow Dashes. There were even versions of Aunt Holiday and Aunt Lofty, and of Mom and Dad. Mom’s mane was crumpled, and a quarter of Dad’s tail was torn off, as though the pair of them had come from a photograph that had been ripped in half.
Photo Dash nodded at Scootawolf. “Yeah. Actually, that’s kinda the truth, ain’t it,” she said, much to Scootawolf’s surprise. “The Emberwolf makes you feel good about your anger. ’Cause, y’know what? Sometimes, it is good to be angry. When you’re angry about something, it means it’s important to you. When something makes you angry, then that’s a sign that you care about it.
“But Scoots," she continued, "what happens when your anger burns out, huh? What do you do then? D’you try and force yourself to stay angry forever? Sounds kinda tiring.”
Scootawolf opened her mouth – then closed it, and her heart hammered. Lightning flashed around them, painting the photo-ponies in light and shadow.
She couldn’t find an answer to the question.
Photo Dash stepped closer. “Why d'you follow the Emberwolf down the staircase? What were you hoping for?”
Scootawolf drew in a deep breath and whispered, “Is it so bad I just want somepony who understands me? Somepony who tells me that I’m not a bad filly for feeling angry?”
She trailed off as the lightning redoubled, and the rain fell with endless fury. Then Photo Dash stepped forwards across the clouds, closer, closer, and nuzzled her – and as Photo Dash touched her, something awoke inside of Scootawolf. She didn’t know what to call it, or what feeling to compare it to. But it was as though the Sun swelled inside of her, and that a mighty glow grew within her heart, casting blinding light into the furthest reaches of her soul: places where light had long given way to shadows.
She peered up at Photo Dash and her breath caught sharply in her throat. “R-Rainbow! What is this?”
Photo Dash spoke again. “Scootaloo,” she said. “I – I owe you an apology. I know what the real-life-me said about being angry, but she was wrong. She was dead wrong. It’s alright to be angry. It’s totally normal, and everypony feels angry from time to time. But this…” Photo Dash gestured at Scootawolf’s body, at the flames in her fur and the fires in her eyes. “This ain’t cool, Scoots. This ain’t you. And d’you wanna know something else? The Emberwolf sent you here, to the Land of your Heart, precisely ’cause it doesn’t ‘get’ you. Not fully, anyway. It forgot that, just ’cause you can be mad at your friends and family sometimes, that doesn’t mean that you don’t love ’em to bits, and that they don’t love ya right back.”
Photo Dash lowered her voice. Her words were full-to-bursting with love. “It thought that your Heart of Hearts was gonna be made from fire, like the same fire that consumes its own heart.” She smiled at Scootawolf. “It didn’t count on it taking the shape of somepony who loves you.”
Suddenly, Mom and Dad were at the front of the crowd. Thunder boomed. The rain picked up yet once again – oceans worth of hard, heavy rain.
Scootawolf trembled.
“We’re sorry, little one,” said Mom, “that your dad and I failed you so badly in real-life.”
“The Emberwolf’s magic is already fading, Scoots,” said Dad. “Soon, you’ll be pulled back to the Buried Continent, and you’ll have a choice: give into your anger and remain an Emberwolf forever. Or draw upon our love, and the love of your friends, and show the Emberwolf another path.”
“We love you,” said Mom.
“We love you,” said Photo Dash, and the other rabble of other Rainbow Dashes.
“We love you,” said the many dozens of Apple Blooms and Sweetie Belles.
Then Scootawolf heard the most startling voice of all: her own. The crowds parted to reveal a throng of Scootaloos of all different ages, for they had come from photographs taken from all different times in her life. They had orange coats, like fire. They had purple manes and tails and stumpy little wings. One of them, a toddler in pyjamas, said, “Remember. You ain’t Scootawolf. You’re Scootaloo.”
Before Scootawolf could say anything, her friends, family, and the throng of herselves waved in goodbye. The clouds vanished, and the world turned white again. The rain stopped. The roar of the thunder faded.
Everything fell silent.
“I love you guys too,” she whispered in the emptiness.
Then she blinked, and she was awake again, and she stood in the Buried Continent. The air was ferociously hot. The ground glowed scarlet and the crystal forest sparkled, waiting to Scootawolf to burn it down. Except, she wasn’t sure, anymore, that she wanted to harm it.
The Emberwolf flicked its tail in excitement. It was more like an overgrown puppy rather than the majestic wolf Scootawolf had come to know.
“You’re back!” it said. “And you touched your Heart of Hearts – no, don’t say a word! I can sense it! Now that you’ve gained its power, we can begin.”
Scootawolf didn’t want to begin: suddenly, the thought of blasting away the forest repulsed her. Every fibre of her – every bone and muscle – rejected the idea of harming something so rare and beautiful as the crystal forests of the Buried Continent.
She looked at the Emberwolf. Somehow, it seemed different.
Nothing about it had changed, as such: its body still burned, and its eyes remained two pools of light. Yet it was like when Scootawolf had drunk the hot cocoa in her aunts’ bedroom and had seen, for the first time, the true nature of fire. She saw, now, what the Emberwolf really was. It was a puzzle that she hadn’t noticed it before.
The Emberwolf was lonely.
In its burning eyes, Scootawolf spied something distant, and profoundly cold. The way the beast looked at her, it was as though it had spent a hundred years without a friend, or even an enemy. It had no-one. It had no-wolf else to talk with.
Scootawolf could have kicked herself. How had she not seen it? How had she not understood that the beast’s loneliness was as clear as its claws and the rubies in its tail? Right then, she longed to rush over to the Emberwolf, stroke it, hug it, and whisper in its ear that everywolf deserved a chance, and that everywolf deserved a friend. In her mind, Scootawolf thought, too, in lightning-clear detail, of the past few weeks and months. She thought of lying awake in bed, daydreaming of Mom and Dad embracing and putting away their arguments. Then she remembered all the days and nights she had spent alone in the fortress of her bedroom, instead of being out with her friends, playing, laughing and exploring…
Out of all the wolves to share its secrets with, and all the ponies it could have showed the wonders of the Buried Continent to, the Emberwolf had chosen her.
There had to be a reason for that.
There had to be.
Dad’s words sounded in Scootawolf’s head. “Draw upon our love, and the love of your friends, and show the Emberwolf another path.”
Scootawolf stood up straight. Her mind was set: she would not destroy the forest. Not a single crystal would be harmed. Rather, she would show her new friend something better than destruction and loneliness.
“Scootawolf?” the Emberwolf said. “What is wrong? Why are you walking away from me?”
She had turned her back on the Emberwolf. She walked from the edge of the forest and up the hillside.
“Scootawolf!”
The Emberwolf called from behind but Scootawolf didn’t peer back. Her walking became jogging and her jogging became a run, and she dashed through the ruby grass under that immense ceiling of glow-worm stars. What was she going to do? She didn’t know yet, she couldn’t think, but her heart insisted it would be enormous.
“Scootawolf! Come back!”
She ran faster.
“Don’t leave me!”
Now Scootawolf was near the top of the hill, and she heard the Emberwolf bound through the grass behind her. She wanted to tell it – tell her, rather – that there was nothing to worry about, that she had a friend in her, of course she did, of course, of course! She was Scootawolf, and she didn't abandon her friends. Yet, there was too much running in her paws to stop and explain this. Volcano-fury exploded through her blood. From somewhere, everywhere, she smelled liquid rock and burning crystal – and on her tongue, she tasted the scorching air of the Buried Continent and it filled her with life. Her wolfish, fiery eyes blazed with so much light that her vision threatened to turn white again. “Keep watching!” she said over her shoulder, with words half yelled and half laughed.
At the top of the hill, she drew in a joyous breath—
Released it—
And from her jaws burst fire, high, high into the air. It was the fire of her heart. Into the flames she poured the power of her friendship: she thought of Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle, of how they had always been there for her, even during the times when they hadn’t understood what was wrong with her. She thought of Aunt Holiday and Aunt Lofty. She thought of Mom and of Dad. Most of all, she thought of Rainbow Dash, who was a pony she loved so much, and who loved her back with equal strength, that Scootawolf’s Heart of Hearts had taken on Rainbow’s shape.
It wasn’t ordinary fire. It didn’t vanish, but rather it formed a path which sloped upwards into nothingness. It wasn’t merely orange and yellow, but all the colours of a raging rainbow, and as bright as jewels caught in sunlight: emerald, sapphire, topaz, amethyst. Each colour had a distinct scent. The green smelled of adventure. The red smelled of candy and friendship. The blue had the same scent of swimming in a lake with Mom and Dad, one happy afternoon on vacation two summers ago.
Without pausing to think, she leapt onto her rainbow of flames – a firebow – and ran into the air.
“Scootawolf!”
Still, she didn’t stop, but breathed out another firebow. It was wider this time and as long as a hoofball pitch. It curved through the air and around the hill. She peered down at the Emberwolf. The beast couldn’t join her – the firebow disappeared a few paces behind Scootawolf as she ran across it – but the Emberwolf sat on the hilltop and peered up at her, jaw agape, eyes wide as she feverishly drank in the impossible sight.
Scootawolf let out a joyous laugh. She imagined Rainbow Dash soaring through the air beside her.
Drawing in her deepest breath yet, she breathed out an entire sky’s worth of rainbow flames, flooding the Buried Continent with colour. She felt that the ceiling was in reach, that fake sky of a thousand-million glow-worms. How high up was it, she wondered? A mile? Two miles? The distance felt like nothing, for she hurried up her vast new firebow, her paws striking against red and yellow and green and blue and purple. The fire was warm under her paws. This is what eating starlight must have felt like, she thought, or drinking brightest moonlight.
Scootawolf was by the ceiling. She ran rainbows around stalactites and brushed a hoof against glow-worm stars. Now she was close to the roof, she saw that it, too, was formed from crystal. It was smooth as glass and navy-purple-black. It was the colour of mysteries.
Photo Dash’s words sounded in her head, along with those of her parents, and her aunts and her friends.
“We love you.”
“We love you.”
“We love you.”
At last, her legs ran out of running and her eyelids turned heavy. The tiredness came from nowhere: a smash of sleepiness. But she was only a little emberwolf pup, after all, and there is only so much fire a child can make…
Yet it wasn’t an unpleasant type of tiredness. Scootawolf searched inside of herself and discovered the energy for one last firebow. She aimed downwards and breathed a long thin rainbow slide, which descended all the way through the air of the Buried Continent and towards the hill. Even from the star-ceiling, the hill was easy to spot. It was like a ruby island in the ocean of crystal trees, guarded by a giant burning wolf.
She slid down, down, the rushing wind in her fur and tail and ears.
Her paws touched the red glowing earth, and the Emberwolf looked at her. The beast was trembling.
“How did you do that?” the Emberwolf whispered. “Tell me.”
Scootawolf grinned sleepily at her. “With the part of me that makes me me,” she said.
The Emberwolf led the way down the far side of the hill and into a thicket of topaz. Scootawolf kept close. The trees here were untamed, with twisting branches and twiggy claws, and leaves of glinting menace. Scootawolf spied faces in the trunks. They were ghoul faces. They had eyes found more often in nightmares than in real life.
“Stay close,” the Emberwolf whispered. “We walk in the country where the shadow snakes sliver, and where the Night Terror lies in wait by the Midnight Marsh. This is no safe place for an emberwolf pup.”
Scootawolf huddled nearer to the Emberwolf; she all but glued herself to her side. Here, the air tasted of foul creatures which stalked in the night. The scarlet glow of the earth seemed far duller, almost black. When she glanced to either side, there were places where she couldn’t see the trees for darkness.
“I don’t like it,” she said. “Can we turn back?”
The Emberwolf shook her head. “Shush, pup. There are voice snatchers nearby, watching us from the branches. Can’t you see them? Do you want to keep your voice? Then be quiet and keep following.”
Scootawolf squinted, and through the gloom, she saw eyes, white and beady, staring down from the claw-like branches. There were hundreds of them. They gleamed.
She didn’t speak after that – but soon enough, they reached the heart of the thicket and found the entrance to a thin, winding ravine, where the path sloped down, down, deeper and deeper down. The walls were jagged. The floor didn’t glow, for the rock was grown from the same darkness found at the bottom of the ocean. The only light came from their own fiery bodies, and from the glow-worm stars high overhead. When Scootawolf peered up, the top of the ravine resembled a snake of blue-navy-purple.
She didn’t dare look behind. What if she saw something more than darkness, there? What if she saw those vicious gleaming eyes again, trailing them, white and hungry in the gloom?
Scootawolf couldn’t stand it. She risked another question.
“Where are we going?” she whispered.
“Home,” came the response.
Scootawolf’s heart quivered. Home. She turned the word over in her mind. She examined it from every angle and was surprised to find that she liked the sound of it: a new home, where she would be safe from the horrors of this shadowy country.
They walked further along the floor of the chasm. They marched so deep that the sliver of ceiling no longer resembled a snake, but a mere twist of night-coloured cotton. The air was deathly silent. Scootawolf heard a low thumping in her ears, which may have been her own heartbeat, or perhaps the heart of the Earth less than a dozen miles beneath them.
Her paws were tired. Her soul was sleep-worn, and her heart yearned for pillows. But still, she didn’t look back, but stuck close to the Emberwolf; and when she glanced up once more, she saw that the walls must have closed in above them, turning the ravine into a tunnel. It was no wider than the Emberwolf, and so dark that Scootawolf couldn’t see the ceiling, even with their fiercely glowing bodies. It was like exploring an artery of the Earth.
Silent seconds stretched into noiseless minutes. Just when Scootawolf’s eyelids drooped, and her tail hung limp, the Emberwolf halted. The beast turned and grinned at her.
“Welcome,” the Emberwolf said, “to my garden.”
The tunnel bent sharply to the left, and there it was: the Emberwolf’s home.
Scootawolf had braced herself for a barren cavern, where the air was musty, and where fangs of rock stabbed from the floor and the ceiling. What she hadn’t expected was plants – actual plants, with not a crystal in sight. They covered the walls: thick, heavy vines shaggy with leaves. They were a hundred types of green and a thousand shades of moss. It wasn’t simply a cave, but a hidden forest, and it was huge. Gigantic. The more she looked, the grander the chamber seemed. Ponyville itself could have fitted neatly inside, she thought.
The floor was meadow-rich, and the grass was long. The forest was illuminated by a hundred-thousand sparks of fire which were littered all about in the grass, and strewn under oaks and conifers, and tangled in vines and branches. They were everywhere, a million specks of light, like a rain of stardust scattered over the greenery. Strangely enough, the tiny fires didn’t set the grass ablaze, nor scorch the tree trunks. They were harmless. And when Scootawolf walked through the grass herself, although her fur was made from scalding coal and flames, she caused the plant life no more harm than if her fur had been as grey and fluffy as a normal wolf’s.
Her stomach was where her heart should have been, and her heart was in her mouth.
“H-how did you do this?” she whispered. It was all she could think to ask.
The Emberwolf flicked her tail. There was a smile in her voice. “Didn’t I say? When you are an emberwolf, you can command fire to do anything you like. In my garden, I simply warn it not to burn the plants.”
“But how is this here? There’s not even any sun!”
For all that the sparks of fire shone brightly, they were scattered haphazardly, and the shadows between them were deep: they were no substitute for Celestia’s sunlight.
The Emberwolf didn’t answer but lay luxuriantly under a gnarled oak tree. Scootawolf sighed then wandered through the forest. The deeper she explored, the larger the trees grew, and the closer they clustered together, until the woods were as dense as the dreaded Everfree Forest on the outskirts of Ponyville. The trees towered over her, their leaves hiding the cavern’s tall ceiling and walls.
Even if it hadn’t been over a hundred miles underground, it would have been a strange sort of forest. The grass grew crazily all over the floor. Fireflies drifted between countless flowers of red, yellow and orange. They weren’t like the flowers in Aunt Holiday’s garden, but they were wild, brilliant, and their peppery scents assaulted Scootawolf’s nostrils. These were plants which didn’t feed on water, but on the fires of the Buried Continent. They were pollinated by enormous bumblebees that flew fatly through the air.
Scootawolf sniffed at the nearest flower. It smelled of green shadows, of unexpected life.
She sat in the grass. She hadn’t noticed before now, but she was shaking.
“Guys,” she said, so softly that it barely counted as a whisper. “Rainbow, Apple Bloom, Sweetie Belle. I wish you could see this.”
Just then, one of the fire sparks tumbled from out of a conifer tree and landed by Scootawolf’s paws. Startled, she jumped. But then she looked at it, and her jaw dropped open.
The fire was shaped like a snowflake.
It dawned on her that the fluttering in her chest was her beating heart, trying to pound its way out of her ribcage.
The fireflake was about the size of a saucer, and the six sides glowed orange and yellow, six sides chiselled from flames and sculpted to perfection. She tried to pick it up. The instant she touched it, it vanished like the frozen fire in Aunt’s house, leaving her standing in a pool of forest scented darkness.
Before she knew what was happening, the Emberwolf appeared from nowhere and loomed over her. “Scootawolf,” she growled. “What have you done?”
Steam billowed from her nostrils; her eyes raged. The change in her was as sudden as a crack of magma which splits and races across the ground.
Scootawolf backed against the conifer. “I—”
“You touched the flake, did you not? Don’t lie to me!”
Scootawolf glared at her. Anger mixed with her tiredness, so that everything felt difficult, heavy. Everything felt unfair.
“Hey!” she said. “There’s a billion of ’em. Anyway, you never said not to touch ’em, so what’s the problem?”
“The problem, Scootawolf, is that I did not think I would need to tell you. Did I do anything to damage your home? Yet here you are, destroying my precious treasures. How dare you.”
Scootawolf couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “What are you talking about? You set my house on fire!”
“A fire which I was quick to banish!” the Emberwolf retorted. “Did I not summon the flames back into the grate? Did I not restore your living room wall? No harm came to anypony. No damage was done.”
This was much too much for Scootawolf to take. But she took care to chain her rage tightly to her heart; for, in the Emberwolf, she sensed the vilest breed of anger, which lies hidden under a web of manners, like how a trapdoor spider waits in its hiding-hole. It was the same anger she had briefly tasted in the living room, when she had offended the beast by mistaking her for an ordinary fire.
“Don’t push her further,” whispered a voice in her mind. Perhaps it was Photo Dash. “It might be the last thing you ever do.”
The Emberwolf’s fur bristled. Her heckles were raised and her fangs were bared, and her body glowed more brightly than the Sun and the Moon smashed into one.
Her voice emerged as a growl. “Do you not realise what you have done, Scootawolf? Do you not comprehend what these fireflakes mean to me? They are irreplaceable. They are the diamonds of my soul. If you are going to live with me, you must never touch them ever again. Swear to me!”
“OK, sheesh, I promise!” Scootawolf said quickly, before the Emberwolf could work itself into a rage. She pointed at another fireflake lying nearby in the grass. “But what even are they?”
“What they are,” the Emberwolf replied, “is Never-You-Mind, and Never-Ask-Again. There are rules for living here. Three rules. The first, you have already broken: never touch the fireflakes. The second too you have managed to break: never question me. Yet the third is the most important of all.”
With her fiery head, the beast gestured to the right and through the trees, Scootawolf spied a glade amongst a ring of ancient oaks. They walked closer and stood on the clearing’s edge. In the centre of the glade was a large wooden box, like a treasure chest.
The chest was coated in frost. Scootawolf’s eyes widened.
The Emberwolf took a soothing breath. The fires in her eyes dulled from yellow to red – but, although she spoke softly, infinite danger lurked in the corners of the words.
“The third rule,” the Emberwolf said, “is that you must never, under any circumstances whatsoever, open the chest. If you can help it, then do not even look at it.”
More than this, the beast didn’t explain. She didn’t say what treasures were hidden in there, or why they were locked away. Yet, already, Scootawolf knew that it would be safer to taunt dragons than to so much as touch the lid of the chest.
For a moment, Scootawolf thought of the secret tin under the floorboards of her bedroom. She thought of photographs, and of her friends. Then she shook the thought from her head and watched the Emberwolf slink through the grass towards the chest.
“Wait,” Scootawolf called, for there was something more she had to know. “I don’t care if you don’t wanna talk to me about stuff – I mean, about what the fireflakes are or what’s in the chest. But if you want me to live with you, you’ve gotta at least tell me this.” Scootawolf paused, hardly believing what she was about to whisper. “Were – were you a pony like me, once? What happened to you?”
The Emberwolf stopped walking but didn’t answer.
Scootawolf stepped nearer. “Please! Tell me.”
The Emberwolf shook her head. When she spoke, her tone was one of locked chests and bolted doors: a voice crammed with secrets. “Do you want to know what happened, Scootawolf?" she said, turning back around to face her. "Do you want to know why I am the way that I am? Everyone deserves help. But not everyone is willing to give help when needed, not even my own wolf pack.”
Scootawolf gulped. “I don’t get what you mean. Why did your pack—”
Before she could finish, the Emberwolf bared her fangs and snapped, “Rule two – don’t question me! Tomorrow is a busy day. I will show you how to walk between fireplaces, and how to transform yourself into a being of pure flames. But now, it is time for sleep.”
Then she turned her back again, leaving Scootawolf trembling on the edge of the glade.
“Where am I sleeping tonight?” Scootawolf called after her.
“You are an emberwolf, and emberwolves do as they please. Sleep where you want.”
But Scootawolf stayed put: because just then, totally, completely, and absolutely, she didn’t want to be an emberwolf pup anymore. She was sick of it. Photo Dash’s words rang in her head. How utterly exhausting it felt, trying to feel angry all the time, even if it was the smallest smouldering back-of-her-mind kind of anger – and how exhausting it was to be in the Emberwolf’s presence. True, the beast had shown her a new way of living – yet the way the Emberwolf spoke to her now was unacceptable. Scootawolf hated it. She hated how scared she suddenly felt of the Emberwolf’s rage…
Then Scootawolf wondered: what did it matter that she had argued with Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle? With a longing that reached deep into her heart, she wanted them. She didn’t care anymore that they had fought. She longed to be with her friends – and with her family too, and with Rainbow Dash.
She sobbed. She wanted sheets, blankets and pillows, and for Aunt Holiday to tuck her into bed with a kiss and a story (never mind that years had passed since either of her aunts had kissed her goodnight).
She wanted hooves instead of paws.
She ached to have her old mane and old tail back.
She would have given anything to feel the softness of her old orange coat, rather than the burning coals which now covered her fiery body.
By Celestia, by sweet Luna, she wanted to be Scootaloo again.
“I live with the sky in my heart,” she whispered in a broken voice. “I live with Rainbow in my soul…”
With that, Scootawolf lay under an oak tree and curled into a ball. Sleep claimed her, and she thought no more.
“Hey, kid,” said a voice from nearby. It didn’t belong to the Emberwolf. “Wanna know something strange about the phrase, ‘Live with the sky inside of your heart?’”
Scootaloo opened her eyes. Something was wrong: her instincts warned her that she wasn’t truly awake. Yet, at the same time, neither was this a dream – for she was well familiar with the feel of dreams, and so she knew at once that this was something else, somewhere halfway between sleeping and waking. It was dark – gloom of a kind she had rarely encountered in real life. The cold darkness froze her skin and wormed its way into her muscles.
However, it wasn’t until she raised a paw to her eyes that she realised what was off about things: the fires in her coat had extinguished. She couldn’t flex her claws. She couldn’t, because she didn’t have them anymore.
She had hooves.
With a gasp, Scootaloo pressed a hoof to her cheek. Her face was soft and squishy, and her nose twitched, and her eyes were wet. When she sat up straight and spoke out loud, it was with a pony’s vocal cords, and with a pony’s lips.
“Wh-who’s there?” she said.
“Oh, y’know, a friend of a friend,” said the someone-in-the-dark from somewhere in front of her. For a spirit-jolting moment, Scootaloo thought it was Rainbow Dash. The voice possessed the same toughness as the cherished foalsitter’s, a voice made for adventures, and which had lived through a thousand perils. Yet the voice sounded too old for Rainbow Dash. It was too low, and much too deep. Did it even belong to another pony, Scootaloo wondered?
“Anyway, as I was saying,” continued the someone-in-the-dark. (Scootaloo’s ears perked up. They were pony ears, light and fuzzy, and they were glorious.) “To live with the sky inside of your heart is actually an old blizzardwolf idea. Ancient, in fact. Though, strictly speaking, ‘heart’ isn’t the right word. The proper saying is ‘Live with the sky inside of your soul’. Much more poetic, don’t’cha think?”
Scootaloo decided that, despite the darkness and the mysterious voice, she wasn’t in the least bit scared. The voice wasn’t unfriendly, but something about it was fireside-welcoming – a voice for telling spooky ghost stories on a cosy Hearth’s Warming Eve.
All the same, she wished that the someone-in-the-dark would shine a light over their face. She couldn’t see them at all.
“Um, I guess so?” Scootaloo said, answering the question.
(She stroked her leg with a hoof, she savoured it, treasured the warmth of her hair and the softness of her skin, the blood-red life that pumped through her veins. She was a filly again! Tears formed in her eyes, but she couldn’t understand why. She couldn’t wrap her head around those tears. Why in Equestria was she crying, when this was the most wondrous she had ever felt in her life?)
The someone-in-the-dark continued as though Scootaloo hadn’t spoken. “How Rainbow Dash could’ve heard it,” they said, “I’ve got nooo idea. We’re all familiar with good ol’ Rainbow, y’know. Oh, she’s never seen us, of course – but we live in the sky, and we’ve sure as thunderclaps seen her. She’s not… how should I put this? She’s not the most eloquent pony. Maybe she heard the saying from somepony else, and liked the shape of the words? Maybe she got ‘soul’ mixed up with ‘heart?’ Who knows, eh?”
Gradually, Scootaloo became aware of the sensation of movement. It was subtle, no more than the slightest tilting of the floor, the gentlest bobbing up and down of the ground. Whatever she was sitting on (and she realised that it wasn’t rock, but wood), she sensed that it was moving through the inky blackness...
The someone-in-the-dark cleared their throat. “Scootaloo,” they said. “Listen carefully for a moment. To live with the sky inside of your soul: this is a difficult task. The sky is open, and so you too must be open, much like the wide blue wilds I and my kind call home. You’ve gotta be boundless, ceaseless, endless, limitless. And, in the same way the sky is never afraid to bare its soul with the world – whether it’s happy with sunshine or angry with rainstorms – you too must be willing to bare your soul to others. Above all, you must be honest to yourself about your feelings. Only then can you know what it is to soar.”
Scootaloo stood up on shaking hooves. The floor rocked, but she held herself steady and faced where she thought the voice’s owner stood. “I don’t understand,” she said.
The someone-in-the-dark laughed. It was a Rainbow Dash laugh, and Scootaloo’s soul flooded with yearning.
“Give it time, Scootaloo,” they said to her. “Even with the guidance of the Elder Wolf, it was years before I understood any of this. Years! The lifespan of a pony! Yet, I am still learning. I’m very young, for what I am.”
Scootaloo pondered this. “You’re not an emberwolf, or I’d be able to see you,” she said, stroking her chin. “Your body would be on fire, and your eyes would be all lit up and stuff. But I don’t think you’re a regular wolf either.” A chilling thought struck her. “Wait a second. You’re not a timberwolf, are you?”
The wolf-in-the-darkness laughed. “A timberwolf? Hardly, Scootaloo. I’m a blizzardwolf, of course.”
Scootaloo didn’t need to see the Blizzardwolf to know that it was telling the truth – for the truth was all around. It was in the taste of snow upon the air, in the scent of conifers coming from its wolfish body, and in the marrow-freezing coldness of the breeze. A Blizzardwolf. It was a word she had heard only once before, very briefly, and earlier that same night from the mouth of the Emberwolf.
“Tell me, Scootaloo,” said the Blizzardwolf. “Do you trust your friends?”
Scootaloo’s mind raced. What a strange question from a strange, strange beast – she had assumed that if the Blizzardwolf had asked her anything at all, then it would ask about the Emberwolf. Were they mortal enemies? Had the Blizzardwolf come to save her from the Emberwolf’s burning clutches?
“Duh. Course I trust them,” Scootaloo said. “Why wouldn’t I?”
The breeze picked up until it was colder than the breath of windigos. Scootaloo shuddered.
“Well shoot, can you blame me for asking?” the Blizzardwolf replied. “It’s the li’l things, y’know. They make me wonder. I’m talking about things like, say, running away with a giant wolf made from coal and fire, just ’cause it told you that you were dead right to shout at your friends yesterday. Things like becoming an emberwolf pup yourself, then delving halfway towards the Heart of the Earth and abandoning everything you’ve ever known. Stuff like that. It makes me question if you’re actually friends with your so-called friends.”
Scootaloo stamped a hoof on the wood. The floor lurched; she gasped, but she caught herself before she fell. (It almost felt like they were on a boat.)
“Hey!” she said once she had steadied herself. “That’s not fair. All that doesn’t count.”
“Oh? And why not?”
“ ’Cause it doesn’t, OK? So what if me and my friends had an argument? They love me. I saw ’em in the Land of my Heart – or, I dunno, magical versions of ’em or something. So there.”
“Ah,” said the Blizzardwolf. Scootaloo sensed it move in the shadows in front of her. “You’re talking about the missing ponies from your photographs, right? Big deal. That was just a side-effect of the Emberwolf being in your house – it’s one of the most stupendously magical creatures in existence, y’know. All sorts of weird stuff happens in its presence. Photos come to life; your aunts get turned into candle flames. By the whiskers of the Elder Wolf, it’s impossible to say what might happen next!”
Scootaloo frowned. “You don’t get it. When I spoke to ’em, it was like they were real.”
“Well, maybe they did feel real,” the Blizzardwolf said, its syllables pointy and sharp. “But, so what? A photograph of a thing isn’t the same as the thing itself. How d’you know your friends love you in real life? What if your parents hate you? What if Rainbow Dash never comes back to visit ever again?”
Scootaloo shook her head. “Rainbow’s coming back.”
“How do you know?”
Something burned inside of Scootaloo; her blood RAGED. “Because she PROMISED!” she yelled. “Rainbow loves me. She loves me more than life itself and she’s coming back! My friends love me too, and – and—”
Her wings flared, her tail bristled, and if only she knew where the Blizzardwolf stood in the darkness before her, she would have kicked it square in its stupid snout. Instead, she breathed in, then released the pent-up words in one big torrent. “They LOVE me! They do, they do! They love me even though I was dumb, and I hurt them. But I’m never gonna do that again, never never never never never. I love ’em. I love ’em so much. Don’t you DARE say they don’t love me back. Don’t you DARE!”
Tears streamed furiously down her face and her nose was snotty. Her wings felt electric.
But then the Blizzardwolf did something that Scootaloo didn’t expect. It moved across the wooden floor, rocking the boat from side to side, and it threw its front legs around her in a hug. It was far smaller than Scootaloo had expected – no bigger than Mom. Its fur was soft. And, in spite of how shockingly chilly the Blizzardwolf’s body was, its embrace felt so much like one of Rainbow Dash’s that Scootaloo’s anger melted in an instant, and she felt that she was back home again reading books in front of the fireplace with her beloved foalsitter. She imagined that Mom and Dad were there too, and Aunt Holiday and Aunt Lofty, and Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle.
“And that,” said the Blizzardwolf, releasing Scootaloo from its hold, “is what it means to live with the sky inside of your soul. That’s what it’s like to be completely honest with yourself, and to recognise the fires of anger for what they truly are: fierce, yet purposeful. In your heart, you understand that the mere suggestion that your family and friends don’t love you is insulting. You understand that it’s worth getting angry about. Here is a secret, Scootaloo. There will always be those who’ll tell you to stifle your anger, to keep quiet, act mannered and polite – but whilst it’s true that raw anger is not always the best solution, at the same time, wielded properly, anger can be a force for tremendous good. It can be one of the greatest forces of all, in fact.”
The Blizzardwolf paused for a moment, then lowered its voice. “The flipside is that your anger must work hoof-in-hoof, paw-in-paw, and hand-in-hand with love. Your anger must be rooted in love, or else it will become untethered and dangerous. Like a fire raging out of control, it will consume you, and transform you into something you’re not, much like it did to the poor Emberwolf. You mustn’t allow your anger to turn you into a force of hatred instead of love…”
Scootaloo’s head throbbed as she tried to process what the Blizzardwolf was telling her. So, it had been testing her. It had been teaching her a lesson.
“That’s cool and all,” Scootaloo said, “but you could’ve just told me. You didn’t need to be such a jerk about it.”
The Blizzardwolf sounded uncomfortable. “I apologise. Deeply. Um… we blizzardwolves aren’t in the habit of talking with ponies so often… it can be difficult to remember where your boundaries lie…”
Scootaloo rolled her eyes. She was still annoyed – however, she decided not to press the matter any further. Because something dawned on her, and it perplexed her.
She squinted her eyes, trying to make out the Blizzardwolf’s body, but it was still too dark.
“Say, you’re a wolf, right?” Scootaloo asked.
“That I am.”
“Then how come when you hugged me, you had hooves instead of paws?”
But the Blizzardwolf said, “All will be revealed, Scootaloo. In the meantime, look up.”
Scootaloo looked up.
She saw a light.
It was a star, no more than a point of white in an endlessness of black. Suddenly, all of her questions tumbled away. Right then, that distant pinprick of light felt like the only thing in the world worth concerning herself with. She had never seen something so beautiful in her life...
Another star appeared in the corner of her vision, followed by another and another, until it seemed that castor sugar had been sprinkled over black velvet – and still more appeared, more and more! Some stars were blazing brilliant, others were small, and others still were red, pink, purple, or brightest blue. There were sapphire-stars and amethyst-stars. Only in her dreams had Scootaloo ever seen anything remotely approaching this many stars. Then, just as she had this thought, curtains of light shimmered into existence, and they were the hugest sight she had ever seen. It was as though they were woven from emeralds: vast sheets of pale-green light that danced amongst the stars. They stretched, softly shining, across the length of the night. Scootaloo didn’t have a name for them, and neither could she think of one. Words had been driven from her head.
“The aurora,” said the Blizzardwolf. Scootaloo had almost forgotten it was there. “The Northern Lights. It is the Soul of the Sky. Us blizzardwolves dance amongst them, and hunt herds of star deer upon its shining surface.”
In a daze, Scootaloo tore her eyes from the Northern Lights and saw two black sails. Just as she had guessed, they were on a tiny sailboat in the middle of the ocean. The water was choppy. The aurora turned the waves blue-green-white. And, sprouting like a plant from the front of the boat, she watched as a red lamp grew into existence by magic. The lamp cast its yellow glow over the sea, and over the sails and the blizzardwolf.
Except, it wasn’t a blizzardwolf after all.
It was Daring Do.
Daring Do grinned and nodded at a dumbfounded Scootaloo. “Well, the secret’s out, I guess,” Daring said. “No autographs, I’m afraid.”
Scootaloo gawked at her. It was Daring Do, hero of her favourite novels, Daring Do of the light brown coat and a mane and tail with all the greys and blacks of a night-time rainbow! Her clothes were battered from breathless adventures. She wore a Rainbow Dash grin. There was fierceness in her eyes, the look of a pony who was ready for anything.
... And they were the wrong colour.
In the novels, Daring Do’s eyes lay somewhere between red and purple. The imposter’s eyes, on the other hoof, were intense green, as though made from the aurora.
The Daring Do imposter shrugged under Scootaloo's glare.
“Hmm. OK, looks like you got me,” the imposter said. “This pony body of mine – it’s just a disguise. What gave it away? Oh gosh, it’s the eyes, isn’t it? They’re my normal colour, aren’t they?” She sighed, then shook her head, and her eyes changed from green to scarlet. “The pack decided it would be less alarming if I was in a more, um, pony-friendly form – and we knew that you liked these books. My true form, my blizzardwolf body, is quite terrifying for li’l fillies, y’know… I don’t even think I’d fit inside this boat if I was in my proper form.”
It was Scootaloo’s turn to sigh, but it was a good sigh. She appreciated that the Blizzardwolf wanted her to feel comfortable in its presence. Then again, she was a filly who had travelled deep into the Buried Continent, and who had done things that no pony or emberwolf had ever done before. She was the filly who lived with Rainbow Dash in her soul.
So, she said, “Thanks, honestly. But I’m the bravest foal in Ponyville. I reckon I could handle your true form.”
“Hah!” said the Blizzardwolf (though perhaps, thought Scootaloo, it was more accurate to call her ‘Daring Wolf’). “That’s what I said! I told ’em, ‘Scootaloo’s awesome, she can handle a big scary ice-wolf!’ But it was me against all the others, and… well, I s’pose that’s not important right now. We don’t have much time. Do me a favour, Scootaloo, and look up.”
Scootaloo looked up at the sails.
“No, silly, look away from the sails. Look to the stars!”
Scootaloo turned her head slightly and gazed at the millions of stars shimmering over the ocean. It was an ocean which existed in the place halfway between dreams and waking. It was somewhere that perhaps not even Princess Luna had ever visited.
“OK,” Daring Wolf said beside her. “Now tell me: what d’you see?”
“Um, stars?”
“Peer harder. Live with the sky inside of your soul. Let the sky speak to you, then answer again.”
Scootaloo stared and stared and stared, unsure of what she was searching for. Just when she wondered if she should give up and ask what she was meant to be looking at, suddenly, she saw it: there, in the glimmer of the stars and the shimmer of the aurora, she spied a flash of movement.
“I saw it!” she whispered back.
“Excellent, Scootaloo! But keep still. Keep looking.”
Scootaloo held her breath and continued to stare into the sky, eagerly this time. Then she yelped as – although her hooves remained firmly planted on the floor of the boat – she felt a sensation like being hoisted into the stars by invisible hooves, or like she was being sucked into the Northern Lights themselves. They filled all of her vision; then mighty images began to form in those green and shimmering curtains. The more she looked, the more vivid they became. She saw the cottage. She saw the living room, then the staircase, and then the door right at the end of the landing: the door which led to the attic. It wasn’t locked anymore, as it had been when she had searched for her aunts earlier that night. Instead, it opened to reveal the wooden staircase beyond, and a moment later, Scootaloo saw the attic itself. Built into the slanted roof was a window, a skylight, and it too was open. White light poured into the room. Peering in through the open window, standing on the rooftop, were Rainbow Dash, Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle. The three of them beamed at her and called her name.
“Scootaloo!” they said as one. “Come home, Scootaloo! Come back!”
Beside her, Daring Wolf cleared her throat. “Do you trust your friends, Scootaloo? Do you have faith in them? Then listen to what I say. Find a way back to your Aunts’ house and then make your way to the attic – for the attic is your only escape. Even as we speak, your friends are working hard to dig you out of the snow. We will unlock the door; we will unlock it with magic. In return, you must do something for us blizzardwolves.”
The pictures in the Northern Lights faded; Scootaloo looked back down to the sails, and then at Daring Wolf. She felt dizzy. And somehow, the blizzardwolf-in-disguise seemed so much older and wearier than she had done before.
“What have I gotta do?” Scootaloo asked. “If it means seeing my friends again, I’ll do anything.”
Daring Wolf closed her eyes. She breathed in and then replied in a whisper. “Bring our friend back,” she said. “She’s changed, Scootaloo, beyond almost all recognition. Our friend has changed into a monster.”
Scootaloo shuddered, thinking suddenly of how the Emberwolf had spoken to her after she had accidentally destroyed one of the fireflakes. She had feared for her safety. The Emberwolf had made her feel afraid...
Daring Wolf’s voice wavered. “Scootaloo,” she said. “I am so sorry that I ask this of you. It is almost unforgivable of me, the danger I’m placing you in: yet I fear that, from this moment on, terrible danger lies in wait no matter which choice you make. So, tell her…” Daring Wolf took a steadying breath. “Tell her that her pack forgives her, and that we don’t care about what she took. It doesn’t matter anymore. She can smash the heirloom to pieces for all we care, if only she would come back to us – if only she would remember her true self.”
Daring Wolf opened her eyes, and they were filled with tears. Her voice was ragged.
“Scootaloo... we miss our friend, and we are so, so sorry for the part we played in her transformation into an emberwolf. Oh gods. We messed up, Scootaloo. We messed up. We lost sight of what was important. Canis Major. We miss her.”
Scootaloo gaped at Daring Wolf. “Wait," she said. "Canis Major? Is that her name?”
Daring Wolf didn’t respond, but shut her eyes and stamped a hoof on the floor: and with that, in the blink of an eye, Scootaloo awoke for the second time. Yet this time, it was for real. She was in the Hidden Forest again, in the enormous cavern under the Buried Continent. She was under an oak tree on the edge of the glade, right where she had drifted asleep.
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.
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!”
Outside, the blizzardwolves still howled and ponies still talked, shooting instructions at one another, digging frantically, never-endingly. Scootaloo could hear the shovels. She heard the crunch of hooves upon snow.
“RAINBOW DASH!”
The skylight brightened. A shaft of brilliant light stabbed through the window. She saw the tip of a shovel strike at the glass.
“SCOOTALOO!” Rainbow Dash shouted, and Scootaloo watched as, with a hoof, the wondrous pony brushed away the remaining snow from the window. It was like a dream. Scootaloo’s vision was hazy. She couldn’t make out Rainbow’s face, for a blinding white light shone directly behind the mare and threw her into silhouette.
“I’m gonna bust you out!” Rainbow yelled. “Get back from the window!”
Scootaloo hurried from the skylight. From somewhere outside, she heard Twilight Sparkle say, “Rainbow, we talked about this. Safety first!” But Rainbow Dash took up her shovel and, with the strength of a professional stunt flyer, she struck at the glass. The window shattered. A blast of freezing air pummelled Scootaloo and she gasped out loud: she gasped, because the cold was wonderful, beautiful, blissful beyond belief. After the soul-igniting heat of the Buried Continent, she ached to wrap herself in winter.
The next moment, Rainbow Dash hopped into the attic and wrapped her forelegs around Scootaloo, nuzzled the filly’s wings and said, “I’m here, kiddo. It’s gonna be all right.”
Her coat was soft, her hold was tight. Scootaloo pressed her face into Rainbow’s chest and felt the heart of the pony she loved most in the world; then Scootaloo’s eyes watered, her nose ran, and desperate tears gushed down her face. She tried to say Rainbow’s name, but her mouth quivered. She couldn’t say a single word. Now she was safe – now that the world was whole again – she finally felt the full weight of her exhaustion, and it was tiredness like she had never known. She could have passed out there and then on her hooves.
Rainbow Dash let go and knelt in front of her. Then Twilight Sparkle was in the attic as well, along with Applejack.
“Scoots,” Rainbow said. Her voice was loving but firm. It was the greatest voice in existence. “You’re not allowed to fall asleep yet, ya hear me? Where are your aunts?”
“D-downstairs. In their room. Rainbow, they’ve been turned into candles.”
If Rainbow Dash was shocked, Scootaloo couldn’t tell. The filly’s vision blurred from tears; she battled to keep her eyelids open. But she heard Applejack gasp, and Twilight Sparkle said, “Ooo, that sounds like a case of Temper Tantrum’s Third Law of Transfiguration. How exciting! Don’t worry, Scootaloo. I’ll fix this.” And then Twilight was gone, vanished down the stairs into the charcoal-rich darkness. Scootaloo wanted to stop her, warn her that she wasn’t alone down there. Yet, in her heart, she sensed that Canis Major was gone: that the mighty wolf wasn’t in the cottage anymore…
There was a clatter as, from the skylight, somepony hurled a rope ladder into the attic. But Rainbow Dash shook her head at it. “I’m gonna carry you outta here myself, Scoots,” she said. And the next Scootaloo knew, Rainbow had tossed her on her back, and Scootaloo held her hooves tight around the pegasus’ neck.
They flew from the skylight, through a long sloping snow-tunnel towards a bright white light.
They zoomed out of the tunnel entrance. Instantly, Scootaloo was beaten with heavy snowflakes that swirled viciously in the glare of four spotlights set up on towering steel poles, arranged in a giant square. The sky was a heart-quaking shade of black; clouds circled around a point high, high above them. Although the clouds reached for as far as Scootaloo could see, the snowfall itself covered a space of merely a few hundred hoof-lengths: to her shock, she saw that the rest of Ponyville was completely unaffected. Other than for a field or two around her aunt’s cottage, not so much as a single flake of snow had settled on the ground…
The storm flashed from within with lightning. Whenever it did, Scootaloo spied immense creatures silhouetted behind the clouds.
Blizzardwolves, she thought.
Her teeth chattered; ice formed on her wings: blizzardwolves were bringers of winter and of arctic-born coldness. They ran in circles inside of the clouds, their howls filling the air for a hundred miles around. Now that Scootaloo was in the open – now that she could properly hear them – she realised how beautiful they sounded. Their howls were deep and mournful: a primal strain of music. Perhaps they sensed that Canis Major had escaped from the cottage and back to the Buried Continent, never to be seen again.
Rainbow Dash skimmed over the surface of the snow mountain. It was a monstrosity of winter, at least three times the size of town hall, Scootaloo guessed, and possibly bigger. But when she looked to the ground, her heart raced. It wasn’t just Rainbow Dash and her friends who had come to rescue her.
It was everypony.
Everypony in Ponyville was dressed warmly, and they galloped about this way and that at the base of the mountain, working to uncover the cottage that had been devoured alive by snow. Mares and stallions were hard at work constructing half a dozen tunnels directly into the mountain’s heart. The walls of the tunnels were propped up with magic; teams of exhausted unicorns emerged from the openings five at a time, replaced immediately with unicorns who had rested. And a village’s worth of tents was set up in a field by the mountains edge, a little past the boundary where the blizzard suddenly stopped and the snow didn’t settle. The tent village was a flurry of activity. In the middle of it all, by a table covered in papers, Scootaloo made out Mayor Mare barking instructions to teams of ponies.
Nopony was exactly sure where the house was buried, Scootaloo realised… Rainbow’s tunnel – the one tunnel ponies had dared to make halfway up the mountain rather than at its base – had simply been the first to find her…
The pair of them landed beside an astonished Mayor Mare; suddenly, around them, ponies froze in their tracks and stared wide-eyed at Scootaloo, at the filly they had been working so hard to rescue. Scootaloo shivered – not from cold, but from the feel of those eyes, their amazement, their relief.
Then the whispers started. The word spread through the tent village. “She’s alive,” she heard ponies say. “She’s alive. Thank Celestia, she’s alive.”
“Is there anypony else?” Mayor Mare asked the two of them.
Scootaloo nodded weakly from Rainbow’s back. She wanted to tell about her aunts, and of how Twilight Sparkle was returning them to normal. But it was as though her voice-box had frozen, so supremely cold it was at the base of the mountain.
Rainbow Dash spoke on her behalf. “Lofty and Holiday are still inside. It’s all cool, though. Twilight and Applejack are gonna get ’em out lickety-split.”
“You’re sure there’s nopony else?”
Both Scootaloo and Rainbow Dash nodded. Curtly, Mayor Mare nodded back, but added, “Be that as it may, I’m leaving nothing to chance.” Then she looked away and started shooting new instructions to the assembled rescue ponies, who in turn relayed the new commands to those around them, along with the news, the wondrous, incredible news that one of the tunnels had been successful, that it wasn’t just Scootaloo who had been found but Holiday and Lofty as well. They were alive. It was a Hearth’s Warming miracle. They were all alive.
The unfinished tunnels were to be evacuated, the mayor said, and a team of ponies was to venture down the cottage and join Twilight Sparkle and Applejack. They were to give every inch of the buried building a thorough sweep. Just to be sure; just to be safe.
“Is there anything you wish retrieved?” Mayor Mare asked Scootaloo. The filly still clung to Rainbow’s back; she refused to let go of her foal-sitter.
Scootaloo pictured mugs of enchanted hot cocoa and a secret tin beneath the floorboards of her bedroom, stuffed with photos that may or may not have been empty of ponies. She hadn’t thought to check if the ponies had returned to their pictures. That wasn’t so surprising, she mused to herself. Generally, ponies don’t stop to look at photographs when being pursued by monstrous wolves made from coal and fire and fury.
Were the shattered pieces of the Prime Snowflake still there? Had Canis Major taken them back to her forest in the Buried Continent?
Mayor Mare tapped her hoof, so Scootaloo said, “Um, there’s a photo on my bedside desk – I dunno what it’s of. It might be of nothing, or it might have Rainbow in it.” (The mayor raised an eyebrow at this curious description but didn’t comment.) “Oh! And don’t forget my scooter in the kitchen, and there’s a Daring Do book I wanna finish as well. It’s on the floor in the upstairs corridor. It’s burnt around the edges. And…”
Scootaloo bit her lip. She wanted to add something, but she wasn’t sure if it was right of her.
“Err… by the book, there’s this… thing. It’s like a giant glowing snowflake, but it’s all broken into li’l pieces. If it’s there, could you get that as well?” She gulped. “I wanna see if I can fix it. Or get Twilight to fix it. Or Luna or somepony.”
Again, she could tell that Mayor Mare was itching to ask questions. But the mare resisted the urge, then passed on the instructions to the rescue team.
Then Rainbow Dash carried Scootaloo to a tent on the edge of the makeshift village, away from the celebrating crowds. The air was so freezing that it could have been imported straight from Antlertarctica. Scootaloo’s very bones shuddered. She craned her head around and stared back at the mountain: it was uncanny how, despite the vindictive cold, the blizzard contained itself to that perplexing circle of a few hundred hoof-lengths. There was magic involved here, she thought, make no doubt about it... the snowfall resembled a mighty glistening column which descended from the sky to the ground…
“Twilight sent the word to me, with magic,” Rainbow whispered, answering a question Scootaloo hadn’t realised she had been half-wondering about. “I flew all the way from the Fillydelphia Flight Dome and back to Ponyville as fast as I could. Your parents are coming too. They won’t be here for a couple more hours. They’ve gotta take the train.”
So, her parents were on their way – Dad from Manehattan and Mom from Los Pegasus. They were coming home early and in time for Hearth’s Warming. They were coming to be with her, and shower her with love…
At long last, Scootaloo slipped from Rainbow’s back.
They entered the tent.
A lantern of fireflies hung from the ceiling, and in the corner was a small bed, beside which sat a doctor on a chair, who gestured for Scootaloo to trot over so that he could look at her, check her temperature, make sure she was OK. Scootaloo ignored him however – because Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle were there too.
The three fillies stared at one another. Apple Bloom opened her mouth but closed it again.
What could they say to one another? What could any of them even possibly begin to say?
There was nothing, Scootaloo decided. There were no words in heaven or Equestria to get across what needed to be said. The language they required was of a silent variety, a language of heartbeats, and of flinging their hooves around each other as though the world was ending, and there was nothing else more important than clinging firmly to your best friends.
Scootaloo didn’t say a word, but stepped closer to them, like she couldn’t believe they were there – as though they might vanish like shadows in moonlight. Then she sniffled, trembled, and flung herself at them and held them tight to her, tight against her coat, and Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle returned the embrace with equal ferocity. Scootaloo’s tears burned. She wasn’t sure who she had buried her face against, whether it was Apple Bloom or Sweetie Belle – but whoever it was, her tears matted in their hair. All three of them were crying, in fact. The tent filled with their sobs, their laughter.
“G-guys,” Scootaloo whimpered. “I never thought I’d see you again. I love you guys.”
Apple Bloom clutched her tighter. “We know,” she said.
“We love you too,” said Sweetie Belle.
Then Scootaloo pressed her face even closer to whoever’s coat it was, and she couldn’t tell who was speaking. Perhaps nopony was speaking at all; perhaps the voices were simply in her heart. Either way, they said:
“We love you.”
“We love you.”
“We love you.”
Half an hour passed, during which the doctor grumbled about hugs, visitors and other assorted nuisances; yet Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle were allowed to stay. Soon enough, Scootaloo was pronounced well – tired, perhaps, and her mane and tail were oddly singed, yet aside from that, she was in perfect health.
“She shouldn’t be alone tonight,” the doctor said sternly, looking at Rainbow Dash. “I recommend either she spends the night in hospital, or that somepony stays awake and watches over her.”
“I’ll take her back to mine,” Rainbow told him. “She’ll sleep waaay better there than at the hospital – and in any case, the hospital’s super close, too, so she’ll still be near you guys. But I ain’t taking her ’til she’s seen her aunts.”
At this, the doctor rolled his eyes, but he didn’t argue under the look that Rainbow gave him. It made Scootaloo want to hug her foalsitter all over again; and more than that, she realised Rainbow Dash was right. Exhausted though she was, she couldn’t fall asleep until she saw, with her own eyes, that Aunt Holiday and Aunt Lofty had been returned to normal, that they had hooves again instead of wicks and manes and tails instead of flames. They were still trapped in the cottage: everypony else had been evacuated from the mountain save for them and Twilight Sparkle, who had sent on the message that their transformation would be trickier to reverse than she had thought. The magic was… peculiar, Twilight’s message said. Its strength was remarkable, and yet the curse had been cast in such a way that, by dawn, it should have completely worn off!
The problem, however, was that the cottage could collapse at any moment: it was likely it didn’t have until dawn. But Twilight wouldn’t dare take them outside until they were ponies again, in case the wind blew them out…
Scootaloo frowned at the mountain and the storm clouds.
Why hadn’t the blizzardwolves left yet? Were they still hoping that Canis Major would return to them? But Canis had run back to the Buried Continent; according to the rescue team, she had taken the Prime Snowflake with her. There had been no traces of it, the team said…
Applejack joined them in the tent, along with Rainbow’s other friends – Fluttershy, Pinkie Pie, and Sweetie Belle’s older sister, Rarity. All gazed in silence at the snow mountain.
What if the blizzardwolves never left? What if the storm never cleared? What if the snowfall spread until it wasn’t just the cottage that was buried, but all Ponyville, forever and ever?
Between these thoughts and worrying for Aunt Holiday and Aunt Lofty, Scootaloo felt like she might be sick.
Then she felt something else as well.
At first, she thought it was her nerves, or the cold, or her tiredness: in the tips of her hooves, she felt a tingling sensation. It was faint – easy to ignore. But as the seconds passed, it grew more distinct, more vivid – and from the sudden stillness that descended over the crowded tent village, she knew she wasn’t the only one who felt it. She looked at Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle and they looked right back, confused. Rarity and Fluttershy shuffled on their hooves and glanced at one another. Rainbow Dash drew close to Scootaloo and draped a comforting wing over her back. And through the open flap, ponies halted in their tracks and muttered nervously with one another.
The blizzardwolves stopped howling. The only howls, now, came from the wind and from the thunder.
Three ponies hurried through the crowds towards the tent. It was Twilight Sparkle, followed by—
“Aunt Holiday!” Scootaloo cried. “Aunt Lofty!”
Her aunts beamed at her, Holiday with her coat of pink and Lofty with her blue hair and purple mane. They were ponies again, living, breathing ponies with hearts and hooves and warm, warm bodies. They rushed into the tent and swept Scootaloo up in their forelegs.
“You made it!” Holiday said.
“We’re sorry, darling one,” Lofty added, “but the house is gone. It collapsed behind us just as Twilight escaped from the attic. But never mind. You’re safe. We’re all safe. Oh Celestia, we love you.”
“I love you guys too,” Scootaloo said. She knew that the news of the cottage should have been like a kick in the stomach, yet, to her surprise, she found that she didn’t care. It hurt, oh yes, it hurt: but Aunt Holiday and Aunt Lofty were ponies again, and there was so much she was desperate to tell them.
But the tingle in her hooves – in everyponies hooves – grew more intense. Scootaloo quaked in the entrance of the tent, and all eyes were fixed on the mountain.
“Have the tunnels been emptied?” Twilight whispered to her friends. “Is anypony still in there?”
The others shook their heads. “Not a soul, darling,” Rarity whispered back.
Now ponies pointed upwards, and a wave of gasps swept through the crowds: because, abruptly, the blizzard stopped. The last snowflakes settled on the mountain and then the snowfall was no more. Did this mean the blizzardwolves had left? Yet when Scootaloo looked to the sky, she could still see them running in silent circles inside the clouds, illuminated by lightning.
“I wonder what they are,” she heard Twilight whisper beside her. She too stared at the clouds; Scootaloo sensed she was talking more to herself than the others. “They’re not windigos, but what else could they be?”
Scootaloo opened her mouth to answer – but then she heard a familiar sound: a low rumble that became a steady roar. It was the sound of something too terrible even for the fury of the Buried Continent. It was a noise to shake her to her to the living centre of her soul, and small avalanches tumbled down the slopes of the snow mountain; the roar of a beast made from coal and fire, forcing its way through solid earth like a build-up of magma beneath a volcanic vent.
Canis Major had changed from her charcoal-form and had become the Emberwolf again.
She was coming for her.
Scootaloo’s eyes widened in horror. “Oh Celestia,” she said, quickly. “We’ve gotta get outta here. We’ve gotta go now.”
Before she could bolt, Applejack said, “Whoa, hold ya horses there, nelly. What’s going on?”
Everypony was looking at Scootaloo: not just those in the tent – Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle, Rainbow Dash and the other grown-ups – but the crowds through the open flap as well.
Why were they staring? Why were they waiting?
“No time to explain,” Scootaloo said. “We have to move!”
“She’s right,” Aunt Holiday said. “Something terrible is coming. We should all leave at once.”
Too late.
For a moment, the roaring stopped, and the night held their breath.
Then…
Light.
It came from the top of the snow mountain: a flash of white, brighter than the Sun, brighter than anything Scootaloo had ever seen, dreamed or imagined; a light like the stars crashed from the sky and ploughed into the Earth. All of Equestria must have seen it, and the lands beyond the oceans, and the distant kingdoms even further than that.
As fast as it came, the light dulled hugely – still almost too bright to look at, but, if she squinted, Scootaloo could just about manage it. Then it dulled even more, and now it merely bathed all of Ponyville instead of the entire world.
The roar returned, louder than ever. It was the voice of hurricanes, tornadoes and firestorms.
Scootaloo’s heart somersaulted.
From the summit of the mountain, the light became a jet of flames that stabbed into the night, halfway towards the clouds – as tall as the mountain upon which the city of Canterlot was built. The pillar of fire was three times wider than the trunk of an ancient redwood, and it contained all the colours of a rainbow. There were bands of lilac, and blue, and green; there was fabulous yellow and radiant red. Scootaloo’s eyes filled with joyous tears as she realised her mistake: Canis Major wasn’t coming for her after all. It was the opposite. Canis had listened to her. The wolf had dared to allow love and friendship into her heart again. She must have done, because, as Scootaloo had discovered earlier that night, love is the only force powerful enough to fuel the flames of a fully-blown firebow.
For miles around, the storm clouds were no longer black but dazzling. All Ponyville was illuminated by the firebow’s brilliance; the ground shimmered with red and green and blue; around Scootaloo, ponies were soaked in light and colour. They seemed to glow.
“Oh Celestia,” Rainbow Dash whispered beside her. “It’s beautiful.”
Ponies sniffed at the air and sighed in pleasure. Scootaloo did as well. Even from the tent village, she could smell the remarkable scents of the fire: the spiciness of the red, the sweetness of the yellow, the pine forest freshness of the green and blue and purple.
The pillar of rainbow-fire began to melt the snow mountain. Torrents of water sloshed down the sides and into the tent village and came up to ponies’ hooves. But nopony seemed to notice, nor care.
Then through the firebow shot a bolt of astoundingly blue light – in an instant, the roaring ceased. Scootaloo heard only running water and the cries of the wind, for the thunder and lightning had stopped as well, and the firebow made no sound at all.
It was frozen.
The flames were suddenly coated in a thick skin of ice, and the ice continued to glow with rainbows. Scootaloo’s soul soared from the sight of them.
Then the crowds screamed, and a unicorn shouted, “What’s that?” And ponies craned their necks and pointed to the top of the pillar. They cried, they shuddered, they wept.
Scootaloo peered up.
She gasped.
At the top of the frozen pillar sat Canis Major, her body so enormous that, even halfway towards the sky, her presence was formidable. Her fur was made from snow which glistened in the rainbow light of the flames. Her mighty tail, so much longer, thicker and grander than a normal wolf’s, wound around the top of the firebow, and the tail was formed from ice. The former-emberwolf looked down at the tent village. Her fangs were icicles in her mouth and her eyes shone with harsh blue light.
She stared directly at Scootaloo.
Scootaloo’s heartbeat slowed; time itself slowed. She didn’t blink. Around her, the rest of the world seemed to fall away into blackness, until nothing remained but herself on the ground and Canis Major sitting in the air... the blizzardwolf’s eyes shone with infinite sorrow… yet, Scootaloo caught the flicker of something else there as well…
Hope.
In her eyes, she saw that Canis Major hoped that the world could be made right again, that fires could be tamed, and that she was a better wolf than what she had become.
Scootaloo gulped.
And then she smiled.
“Good luck,” she mouthed.
Canis Major drew in a deep breath and nodded back at her. Scootaloo heard her voice in her head, as clearly as though the blizzardwolf stood right in front of her; it must have been magic. “To you as well, my friend,” Canis said in Scootaloo’s mind…
Time sped up again.
Scootaloo remembered that she was standing in the entrance of a tent, that the air was freezing, and that she was hoof deep in icy running water. Ponies were frozen in awe and terror at the tremendous wolf.
With a last smile at Scootaloo, Canis leapt from the pillar and ran into the night, as though on invisible steps in the air. She vanished behind the storm clouds. Then the clouds dissipated, vanished, and the stars returned, more stars than could be counted by a hundred ponies in a thousand years. The sky was boundless and brimmed with hope, and the possibility of change…
Everypony, everywhere, was quiet. The wind wailed. The water ran.
Rainbow Dash broke the silence.
“What in Tartarus was that?”
In spite of the cold, Scootaloo felt warm all over and tingly in her skin: an electric feeling. She didn’t know what to call it – yet the feeling was too huge to keep to herself. It was, perhaps, joy in its ripest form. It was the knowledge that the world was a bigger place than a lonely cavern with a fake sky lit by glow-worm stars, and where the only company was fire and crystal. Life could be fixed. This was a world where wolves and ponies could change.
Scootaloo beamed at Rainbow Dash. She didn’t hesitate.
“That was my friend,” she said, simply.
Afterwards, the makeshift village was evacuated. It didn’t take a weather pony to see that the mountain had grown unstable; there was no telling when it would fall and smother the tents in a snow tsunami. However, Twilight Sparkle, along with some of the more adventurous pegasi, couldn’t resist the call of the frozen firebow. When, later, she flew back to meet the others at her castle, they had rarely seen her so excited.
“It’s incredible!” she told them. They were gathered in the entrance hall: Applejack, Fluttershy, Rarity, Pinkie Pie. “It’s solid ice, yet when you touch it, it’s warm. It has magic which I’ve never even read about – and – and—”
She sat down, quivering with excitement and muttering about all the books she was going to need to properly study the frozen firebow.
The Pillar of Hope, ponies were already calling it.
Throughout the little town, ponies bathed in its magic: magic which radiated from the ice, a feeling of absolute love. It was the feel, ponies said, that the world could always stand to be a kinder, more welcoming place…
An hour later, Princess Celestia and Princess Luna arrived, the two of them having been far away on a royal engagement. From Twilight’s tallest turret, everypony gazed at the Pillar of Hope rising on the edge of Ponyville – the princesses saw at once what others could not: that the firebow’s magic was strong and enduring. Thousands of years would pass before it melted, and in that time, its light would never fade.
“That’s impossible!” Twilight insisted when they said this. “That defies Aurora North’s theorem of Light Everlasting!”
“So it does,” said Celestia with a grin. “Yet the Pillar of Hope shines anyway.”
The Princess stretched her wings and legs. It had already been a long night of travelling for her. “I think,” she continued, “that the Pillar calls for a close-up inspection. But how about a cup of tea first, hmm? Put the kettle on, Twilight.”
Scootaloo was around for none of this.
Once the tent village was abandoned, and after a last hug with her friends, Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle were sent home to bed. Aunt Holiday and Aunt Lofty headed to Twilight’s castle, where they intended to remain until dawn. Transformation magic was dangerous, after all. It was best to stay near Twilight and make certain there were no unexpected side-effects from their ordeal.
Scootaloo climbed onto Rainbow Dash’s back.
They flew through the limitless night. The horizon was pink, for the Sun was beginning to rise… Rainbow’s cloud mansion came into view…
Then Rainbow led Scootaloo to the spare room, lay her in bed and tucked her under the covers. The sheets were soft and the mattress was made from freshly plucked clouds. Rainbow Dash pulled up a chair, sat beside her and said, “I ain’t leaving you. I’m staying here ’til you wake up, and that’s a promise.”
Something lurked in Scootaloo’s mind. The thought had entered her head in the tent village, and she hadn’t been able to shake it off. “Rainbow?” she whispered. “Ages ago, remember when you said you let the sky into your heart and it’s lived there ever since?”
Rainbow Dash leaned closer. “Yeah? What about it, kiddo?”
“Um… what did that mean?”
Scootaloo’s face flushed. She remembered how the first time she had asked this, Rainbow had coughed and changed the subject. This time, however, Rainbow placed a gentle hoof on her cheek, and her voice was soft but serious. “It means,” she said, “that I should’ve taken you more seriously, and not treat kids like they’re too dumb to understand. You want the truth? I’ve got nooo idea what it means. I heard it from somepony else, and I thought it sounded cool, is all.”
Scootaloo sniffled. It was the answer she had hoped for, yet the one she had been scared she wouldn’t receive.
“You don’t have to go away again, right?”
This time, the question slipped out of her – she hadn’t meant to ask it. She felt her cheeks burn even hotter.
Rainbow gave her a loving smile, pulled the blanket down a little and placed a hoof over Scootaloo’s heart. “Wherever I go,” she said, “no matter how far away I am, I haven’t left you. Listen to me, yeah, and don’t ever forget this: you are Scootaloo, and you are loved. You’re loved beyond reason. There ain’t a filly alive as awesome as you.”
She spoke with such sincerity that Scootaloo knew that what she said was the deep, immutable truth. Rainbow Dash’s words were stronger than the forces that push mountains from the earth and lift the stars at night…
Scootaloo smiled from perfect happiness; her eyes welled with fat, burning tears. Through the gap in the curtain, she saw that the morning was red and orange and yellow, as though splashed with fire. It was like the sky itself was telling her that things were going to be different, that life wasn’t such a cold dark place as it sometimes appeared…
In the space of a whispered, “Sweet dreams, kiddo,” from Rainbow Dash, Scootaloo was asleep.
Her dreams flooded with oceans, and she sailed on the water upon a luxurious bed. She dreamed of her parents, of her aunts and friends, and of Canis Major and Daring Wolf leaping playfully between floes of rainbow coloured ice; then she dreamed just of Rainbow Dash, who sailed under the blankets with her, and held her close and warm. The stars gleamed. The Northern Lights shimmered before being replaced with a pale pink glow on the horizon; from above, dawn-drenched clouds reached out for them, lovingly, caringly. The ocean was silent. The air was cool and still. Scootaloo felt calm.
She was loved.
She was safe.
She was home.
