The Final Ember of Hope

I woke up seeing blue sky and clouds. Normally, that wouldn't be a problem, seeing as how I often enjoy taking naps in the outdoor park near my college when I am on a break between classes, but there was something odd about these particular congregations of floating moisture. My sleep-addled mind struggled to catch up with what my instincts were telling it, and it took only a second and a half for me to snap to full alertness when I came to an alarming conclusion: Those clouds were getting closer, and I was going straight down at what I could only assume was terminal velocity. To say that I, a 24-year old junior college student with as much maturity as those years spent in school could bring me, screamed like a little girl and lost control of my bladder would be an entirely accurate, yet understated, sentiment. I began flailing around wildly, sending my body tumbling head over heels through the air as I rapidly dropped past the cloud bank and got flashes of the landscape below me as I tumbled. I think I saw desert, and maybe a town, and what looked like some greenery as I struggled to stop spinning and eventually came to be parallel with the ground, arms and legs outstretched like the parachuting instructor on my trip to Cancun had taught me. I could see everything below me in vivid detail, down to the almost-identifiable figures moving about the small town that I had seen during my tumble. I could see the individual leaves on the grove of cherry trees below me, and the  I chalked the visual clarity up to adrenaline and ignored it for the moment, trying to think of a way to live through this fall without a parachute.

It was then that something... "tugged," on my consciousness and, suddenly, I felt an instinctual urge to flex muscles that I wasn't even aware that I had. The urge was the same kind that warns you to stay away from mother bears or to not climb on the lion habitats at the zoo: the kind that saved your life when you listened to it. So, not knowing what else to do, I flexed the unfamiliar muscles and, much to my surprise, out popped two magnificent, scale covered, draconic wings with wicked talons on the end of each bone. The rushing wind caught in the eight-foot span of scale-covered skin and painfully halted a large amount of my falling speed, though that was currently the furthest thing from my mind. I flexed the muscles in my back again and, lo and behold, the wings performed a flap that drove me forward several feet. What. The. Fuck? I reached out to touch one of them and saw that my entire arm was covered in the same shield-shaped, copper scales that the wings were covered in, though these looked much more solid. My hand ended in four digits, each with a razor-sharp talon that looked like they were made to rip flesh.

What. The. Actual. Fuck?!

I looked at my other arm and, now that I wasn't focused on how I was going to die painfully in a few seconds, I could see that it was in the same state as its other half. I felt my tail flick about in nervous agitation as I tried to process the fact that I seemed to have turned into some kind of dragon... I blinked as I replayed that last event in my head and, tentatively hoping that it was just my overactive imagination, I flexed some muscles in my lower back and felt a long, prehensile tail move to wrap around my waist and down my leg, showing that it was extremely long and dexterous. I also noticed that my mouth felt weird, and when I went to run my tongue over my teeth I figured out that there were two reasons for that strange sensation. One: my teeth were now razor-sharp killing machines that just about cut my tongue off, and two: my tongue was now forked and much more dexterous than it was when I went to bed the night before. I looked down and saw that I was completely naked--which is how I sleep. Hey, don't judge. More importantly, I also saw that my entire body was changed, including my feet which had been transformed into three very draconic talons on each foot clearly made for gripping earth... or prey

My brain tried to process this new information as it came, the poor thing, but this was just too much for it to handle all in one sitting. Waking up falling out of the sky, not where you had gone to sleep, and finding out that the body you had operated for 24 years had went and changed its hardware? It simply couldn't take it and shut down on me, sending me into unconsciousness a good thirty feet above the cherry trees that I had spotted during my free fall. I was promptly awoken by jarring pain as I slammed into the upper boughs of a tree and hit every branch possible on the way down, letting out every vitriolic curse that I could muster with each new impact. "Shit, fuck, damn, goddamn, fucking, holy shit, fuck, damn!" I finished as I finally slammed into the ground amid a rain of ripe, juicy red cherries, directly at the hooves of an off-white miniature horse with large, expressive green eyes and a surprised expression on her muzzle. Her hair was done up, and she was even wearing makeup for Christsakes! From where I laid, she appeared to be upside-down, and I was still coming to terms with being turned into a dragon-lady. I couldn't deal with makeup-wearing ponies with good hairdos! So, I closed my eyes and said what any person in their right mind would say if they found themselves in my situation.

"I swear to all the gods, if I've gone crazy, please let there be a hot nurse in my padded cell," I muttered just loudly enough to carry to the pony in front of me, before I promptly passed out.

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I opened my eyes again to come face to face with the largest, reddest and most fierce thing that I have ever seen in my entire life looking down at me past its gargantuan snout, which was easily the size of a tractor trailer. He eyed me for a good long while as I stood absolutely stock still, petrified that I was going to be eaten and then I was going to die in the real world because I died in this freaky-ass dream. "You are not in a dream, Sophia Delacroix," the giant red dragon rumbled with all the speed of a charging glacier, seeming content to go at his own pace. "You are weak and lack in mental fortitude, yes, but you have not gone insane. I assure you, this is just as real as the fact that I changed your body and sent you to Equis while you slept," he continued, causing my eyes to open wide as I opened my mouth to protest, ask a question, I don't even know what, but was silenced by a simple narrowing of the eyes from the behemoth of a dragon. No matter what else, I could literally feel the power radiating off of this guy and knew that if I crossed him he wouldn't hesitate to kill me. "Do you like your new form?" he asked ponderously as a mirror conjured from nowhere, showing me what I looked like. Everything that I had taken note of while I was falling was still there, but now I could see that my face had changed as well. It was slightly more feminine than my original, human face, with nice cheekbones and lips that held the barest hint of a pout. This was off-put, however, by the burning orange, draconic eyes staring back at me coupled with two sets of ten inch, backwards-curving horns that gave me a mildly ferocious appearance. My ears had disappeared, replaced with two fin-like protrusions on the top of my head that I could swivel independently. Honestly, I looked badass, but considering the fact that I was transformed against my will, I contained my enthusiasm for the changes and just gave him a scowl.

"My name is Beliel. I am one of the four kings of Hell, and a God in my own right," he rumbled, causing something to shift within me just by the mentioning of his name. I knew that this wasn't a dream now, no dream could conjure up something that radiated this much power... or this much corrupt evil. "I have brought you to Equis for one reason only: to increase my own power. I have been trapped in a prison, only able to send out small portions of my power to influence the goings on of the world. But, a new game has begun, and I have selected you as my piece. Grow strong, defeat your adversaries, and sacrifice their souls to me. If you do, I will increase your power and knowledge for every soul you bring me, and if you win this game, you will receive a wish... a wish that can do anything," he finished, blowing a ring of smoke my way. I coughed and sputtered, attempting to wave the smoke away before I found myself surrounded in it, obscuring my vision and making me feel slightly groggy. I closed my eyes to blink, and when I opened them again, I was somewhere else.

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I opened my eyes and immediately screwed them shut, as my return to the waking world was accompanied by a bright light and a headache worse than anything I had gotten after a keger in freshman year. "Well, what in the hay is it? I ain't never seen no dragon looks like that in them books o' yers, Doc Grazer. We should strap it down, it could be dangerous!" a feminine voice laced with a heavy country accent said, her grating tone causing the headache to get worse. I groaned audibly and flattened my fins over my ears, hoping to drown out some of the noise... Oh, right, still a dragon-girl-thing.

"Now you hush, Cherry. She is a patient, and I will not treat her like a criminal for falling out of the sky, no matter what she is," a baritone male voice said with finality. I sighed and slowly opened one eye, then the other to allow them time to adjust to the light, and I found myself looking up at what was clearly the ceiling of an ICU--I had been in a few before, and they all looked the same. I looked down at myself and saw that I was laying on four beds--two across and two long--before I looked over to the two who had been talking before I woke up.

I blinked, then blinked again to make sure that my eyes were working when I saw the object of every little girls fantasy--and for some reason, many grown men's as well. Two ponies, straight out of My Little Pony with the cutie marks and all, were standing stock still and staring at me. I opened my mouth to speak, then closed it, then opened it again, and repeated the cycle several times as my brain worked through the bevy of emotions that I was feeling right now. I had always loved MLP, in almost all of its incarnations, and especially in the latest one. Generation four was awesome; it had well-written characters, phenomenal voice acting, and stories that were top notch by any daytime TV standard. And here I was, a Pegasister, looking at two ponies, one of which I recognized from the show. Finally, after much internal tears of happiness, I simply said, "Hi, I'm... Ember." What? If I'm gonna be a dragon-person, I'm gonna have a dragon name.

Cherries Jubilee, the one I recognized, narrowed her eyes at me and was about to say something when the grey, balding pony wearing the labcoat that had stuck up for me cut her off by saying, "Well, howdy Ember. Welcome to Dodge Junction. I gotta say, you did manage to make quite the first impression. Lil' Cherry over here just about keeled over when ya came crashin' through one of her trees. Tell me, you feelin' nauseous? Dizzy?"

I shook my head in a negative and sat up, massaging my head as the headache slowly faded away and left me keenly aware of the bruises that had resulted from my fall. I exhaled sharply as I moved wrong and triggered some sharp pain, letting out an involuntary gout of fire that bathed the room in a golden light for just a moment before it faded, leaving you to cough up a small ring of smoke and a very surprised, but unharmed, Doc Grazer standing off to the side. "Oops... sorry."