Curse of the Dracopyre

It's always been this way.  I just... drift.  I wander from place to place, never there for more than a month.  I meet ponies, make a few friends, but i always feel the call to again leave.  To wander.  To roam.  Its all i ever wanted, even back in THOSE days.  Was I happy back then?  I couldn't have been, not with the constant to and fro and the hustle and bustle of the city life.  Canterlot was different back then, back before Nightmare Moon was banished.  I know, I was there.  Of course, not within a few feet "there", but everypony in the city saw the fight that took place over the city.  The sky back then, both the sun and the moon casting a bright shadow over the world.  It was glorious.  And it was then that I knew I was missing out.  I was just a guard back then.  Of course, that is too be expected of a pony named "Gallant."  I never figured out what that meant.  Wasn't it an old term for a knight?

Gallant or not, I am just walking along the path, wishing, as always, that the changes would return.  Ponyville should be in sight soon.  Its been so long now, since I came close to my own adventure.  Yet I haven't aged a day.  I often wonder how long it's been.  Would Celestia remember me?  I doubt it.  I was just an ordinary guard, until that day.  The day I joined with the world of beasts, and became a monster.  It's the reason that I wander, looking for the answer.  Its the reason that I feel the power, just under the surface, breathing.  But it's just a thousand miles away.  This life is nothing!  It always had been!  I want MORE!  I want fun, I want power, I want my adventure.  I deserve one!  I want to matter.  That's why I quit and left, all that time ago.  I slept for a long time in the tunnels under Canterlot.  Then why I left it for parts unknown.  I ate grass off the ground.  Can you believe that?

So i wandered the badlands sometime before she was banished.  But it was my damned friend who found me there.  How could he have possibly found me?  He should have left me to rot.  I don't even remember his name these days.  He said that the roars could be heard all the way in Canterlot.  What was I doing so close to the city?  Had I somehow got turned around?  He said that when he found me, I was a bleeding mess of flesh.  Bones, organs, flesh, everything had been torn apart.  Yet I was still alive.  He said my blood was green.  I still don't believe it.  I still don't know what attacked me, what set me on this path.

I never knew my father.  My mother raised me alone in Canterlot, working two jobs to put me through school.  I failed her when I applied to be a measly guard.  An earth pony like me, what better way to push others around?  My early brutality was trained out of me.  Or so I thought.  After my friend had found me, i begged him to leave me.  I didn't want my first adventure to leave in such a state, but he had none of it.  He carried my bloody body on his back, until a contingent of other guards found us.  Of course, they brought me too a hospital, where it was said that I should be dead already, my mother so sad that I was going to die.  Between you and me, I think she is just sad that she never got an adventure.  My arrival was absolutely nothing of interest.  A gutted guard found in the badlands?  What was he even doing there?  What a fool...

Slowly I healed.  Organs reappeared, seemingly from nothing.  That was when the media took interest in me.  The badlands makes you invincible?  Flesh re-grew, bones re-shaped, and re-attached.  I am told that my condition during then was completely depressed.  I had nothing to say to the newspapers.  I just did nothing all day, how could I be anything but depressed?  Eventually, they all gave up.  I don't even remember my last interview, and I am certain that nopony ever even went into the badlands for justice.  My last visitor was Ajustice, the friends from the guard who found me.  I was unresponsive...during that day.

But the night... oh, the night.  Back then, Luna hadn't been banished yet.  The moon was at full power, and I could feel it.  The power within me, turned me into some kind of large black dog.  The changes were horrifying at first, and I was disgusted with myself.  What kind of adventure could a large black dog possibly go on?

I am lying through my teeth.  From the very first change, I loved it!  It was everything I ever wanted, in the form of fur and smelly slobber.  I thoroughly enjoyed stalking the hospital as a beast, stealing raw meat and scaring the daylights out of the interns.  I gave them all the drama they could ever want!  All good things come to an end.  I went too far, once.  Rumors of the demon dog were getting around, even though Doctor Desperato vehemently denied them.  I don't even remember what his station was, but I do remember that he was the oldest and most accomplished doctor there.  So, one night he stayed late to check on a terminally ill patient, and I crept up behind him, baring my teeth, waiting for him to turn around...

I tore him apart.  Flesh and bone alike became my toys as I ripped and chewed on his organs, the whole time that terminally ill pony just watched in horror.  I think I actually swallowed one or two of his organs.  I felt that strangest something too, almost like I liked to rip apart old doctors.  All good things come to an end.  Somepony heard the screaming and I fled as soon as she entered the room.  Never figured out what became of that old terminal pony.  I still remember his eyes to this day, looking down on me in horror and disgust as the doctor seized and a pair of jaws came clean through the good doctor.  Never again will I be looked down upon, i vowed.

After easily shaking my pursuers, I rummaged through trash cans in an alley.  Then I heard it.  Voices in the sky, bright lights, I thought that I had eaten too much of the raw meat.  I hadn't.  Celestia and Luna clashed in, until Celestia crashed back down into the palace.  It was a lovely display, to see that matriarch get put in her place, by another alicorn, no less.  That was when I realized my destiny lie in the power of the dog, the changes ever since I had been recovered.  Luna was banished to the moon in a flash of rainbow light, her face appearing on the moon to this very day.  Instantly, I shifted back into my broken, beaten, and scarred self.  I don't even know how long it's been.  I decided to leave then.  Only fog greets as I roll into town.  I am always bouncing between Equestria's largest settlements, in waves of about thirty years, never stopping in Ponyville except for the night.  I only once returned to Canterlot, for my mother's funeral.  It was a wretched affair.  Only a few turned up.  My father, and a few friends and neighbors.  My father didn't look at me once, nor I him.  I don't think any pony else knew who I was.  That sure was foolish of me, because a legion of guards took me into custody.

I was questioned, so I told the truth.  You should have seen the look on Ajustice's face.  He was captain of the guard by that point.  He had taken over my investigation, the poor thing.  Just one adventure after another.  It was clear to them I had developed brain fever, a common (that is, the only) mental disease that they knew about back then.  The old man with a stupid name simply let me go, perhaps out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness.  I never saw him alive again.  He had an open casket funeral, i read in a paper.  I was just starting to figure out that I wasn't aging, and was using it to my full advantage.  I was wandering full time by this point.  I read his obituary in the paper.

Every so often, I like to pretend i'm the dog again.  I'll tear some pony apart, every fifty years or so.  That way, no pony gets suspicious.  When I do, i can almost swear that I have padded feet again, and those fangs.  Those eyes.  I gathered from my time in the hospital that they were purple.

So here I am, walking along the path to Ponyville.  I read somewhere that the summer sun celebration is today.  Its supposed to be the longest day of a thousand years.  Not that I cared.  I just want Luna back.  No.  I need her back, so that I can again feel the tear of flesh against my claws and my teeth.  Its been so long now that I cant even...

Wait.

Did everything just get a little lower?

Where did Luna's face in the moon go?

Hm.  Nothing happening.

Yes.

YEA!

I CAN FEEL IT!  TRANSFORMATION!

I think I yelled that last part out loud, but there's nopony here to hear it.  Then my stomach gives a kick.  My heart stops, then starts again.  I give a kick and a yelp.  I snort, dripping mucus burning its way back inside my nose, then even further.  I look around, around at the singed trees and the eyes looking at me from the darkness.

"The time has come," says my father.  He starts to change too.  He buckles and falls to two knees as I do the same.  My confused thoughts are banished as i give myself over to that pain, and welcome the changes it brings.  My fur grows and turns black.  Did you know that in all this time, all the jobs I held, all the mares I made swoon, I never developed a cutie mark?  Neither did my father, apparently.

My hooves grow and harden, becoming long black claws.  I vomit blood all over the dirt in front of me.  My father squeezes his eyes shut.  Then he starts growing.  I do the same, picking myself up from the dirt and the blood as my front hooves become hands and my back hooves become talon feet.  My tail even grows longer as my snout fills with long, dagger teeth.  My eyes glow that faint purple.  My father has red eyes, I notice, interested.  I stop growing at almost eight feet, and give a huge howl.  Rocks and leaves jump and rumble, trying to escape me.

I rush towards my still growing father, running on four feet.  The days of stealth are over.  Running and hiding are for the new or for the weak, the adventure-less.  I run now for the power.  I want to make my father bleed.

Still my father grows.  Titanic fangs hang from titanic lips, dripping with green poison.  The beast before me is at least twenty feet tall, and I couldn't care less.  I leap straight for his eyes, claws arching through the air, my body a perfect bullet.  My father simply opens his mouth and a torrent of black spill forward from it, blasting full over my entire body, sweeping me in a mess of pain and then an explosion when I hit the ground with the force of a train.  I'm not even slightly fazed, though something grows in me.  Like an acrobat I flip away from a hand as big as me swipes at the space i was just in.  I swipe forward, completely out of control now, burrowing into the back of my father's hand.  He roars in pain, louder than a dragon, but already I climb my way up to his eyes, and leap forward, over his mouth this time, teeth bared for his left eye.  He leans back and breaths that energy back at me.

I defy gravity as I flip over the beam.  It destroys a tree behind me and I fall on top of my father's head, burying my claws into his ear and into his eye.  He howls again, rolling onto his back in a wrestling move, trying to smash me onto the ground.  I fly off, land rolling on the ground, and lunge for his exposed neck and he thrashes on the ground.  A fist catches me full in the side and pain explodes through my side and stomach, blood leaking from my mouth.  I managed to grab hold of the fist and bury all my claws in there, but the tough skin is more scratched than anything else.  I bite down, eliciting a cry of pain from my father, as he claps his hands together, crushing me between them.  This time I whimper.  For a moment, he crushes his hands together, trying to asphyxiate me, but I stick a claw foot through the mark I made with my teeth, penetrating the soft flesh.  Father roars again and I stick my foot into the gaping hole, nearly crawling inside of it.  Father throws me into the side of a cliff, then rushes at me on all fours, each step seeming to cause an earthquake.

Just before he gets to me, he leaps into the air, one set of claws forward.  Four of them stab into the cliff around me, the last one perfectly pushes through me, right in the chest.  My father smiles with glee.  I can no longer make a sound.  My entire torso is now a bloody sinkhole, my intestines hanging out the sides of the my torso, around my father's claw.

"Meat!"  My father screeches.  His head leans down to me as he nips my shoulder with one lance of a fang.  He puts the fang up against my cheek and i recoil from the touch, blood leaking from my mouth again.  With the smaller teeth on the back of his muzzle, he tears into the skin on my arm and peels it off.  There is a sickening pull, horrid pain, and the sound of a fish being peeled.  I realize that that sound is indeed my arm.  I make a small sound, and father laughs again, rolls of skin and muscle dropping from his snout.  He leans in close again, and whispers in my ear.

"I'm back!"  He says.  "I have been here, developing my link with the forest as you wandered from place to place, looming for your precious adventure!"  His empty red eyes narrowed, and I struggled against the spear stuck in my gut.  "Your mother died of a broken heart, you bastard.  Now that the lycanthropy is back with the return of Luna, I'm far stronger than you ever were.  Wasting your power in a hospital, pulling pranks and stealing food...  I am in tune with the wolf, you are a lost little pup."

I manage a small sound.  Then my father pulls back, sniffing the wind.

"Something is wrong..."  He murmurs.  "Nightmare Moon has failed.  She never did have what it took...unless..."  He thought for a moment, withdrawing his claws from the stone and from me as he sat down on the blood stained grass.  I instantly collapse to the ground.

He looked back at me.  "Listen well, pup."  I whimpered again.

"The elements are back, though from where I couldn't tell.  If you get hit with them, your adventure is over.  Forever.  Luna will find us, she will take our powers, and she will keep them for herself.  Our powers are connected to dreams and to the moon.  The mistress of the night commands both.  But all is not lost.  We will adapt, you and I.  I was prepared for this.  So here's the deal:  Instead of wolves, bats.  Instead of flesh, blood.  Instead of fur, skin.  Instead of claws, wings.  Instead of life, death.  Instead of forest, city.  Instead of muscle, magic.  It is a simple trade.  Deal?"  I feel a bony weight on my chin.  His claw lifts my head to look at him.  It is very dark and cold all of a sudden.  I vomit blood onto his claw, and he goes serious.

"Good enough!"  He laughs.  His eyes crack and glow, suddenly green.  He spits a beating heart at me.  "Eat that.  The heart of justice!"  He giggles like a filly at some joke only he got.  The beating heart landed just a hair from my snout.  With great difficulty, i lean forward an snap it up.  The change is instant.  I shrink back down to a pony.  I grow bat's wings and fangs grow from my muzzle.  My normally brown mane turns pitch black as my coat turns from its normal green to pitch white.  My strength returns to my limbs and as i look down, my wounds are healed.  Rotten, but healed.  I stand up and face my father.  Smells of all kinds play across my nose as I sniff, bemused at the sudden change.

"What are you?"  I ask with wonder.

My father looks down at me.  "A demon."