Across the lunch table, Gallus pressed the tips of his talons together, his thumbs upright like goalposts. He stuck his big, stupid griffon face between them and smirked.
“You’ve got nuthin’,” he said. “Nuthin’, nuthin’, nuthin’.”
“She’s beating you six-two,” said Sandbar.
“Shush, ref.”
Smolder, in the zone, paid no attention to her friends. There was only the orange scale pinched between her claw and the table. There was only the goal.
Mimicking her opponent’s smirk, she looked him dead in the eyes and flicked the scale right between them.
“Seven-two,” counted Sandbar.
Gallus grumbled, rubbing his forehead, and went to fetch the scale. Smolder reclined in her chair and took a victory swig of her water.
“Does it hurt when a scale falls off?” Sandbar asked her.
Smolder shaped her claws into goalposts. “Not really. Happens all the time.”
“Will it grow back?” Gallus asked. He began lining up his next shot, his tongue stuck outside his beak.
“That one won’t. But the next time—” Smolder paused so Gallus could fire the scale over her shoulder. “The next time I molt, which should be in about six months, they’ll all grow back.” She grabbed the table and leaned back, fumbling for the scale.
“Oh,” Sandbar said. “Say, how do you know so much about dragons?”
Smolder froze, her claws an inch away from the scale. She tried to respond, but her throat tightened, forbidding every answer.
“She’s been a dragon her entire life,” Gallus said, to the rescue. “On the list of dumb Sandbar questions, that’s gotta be top five.”
Sandbar blushed. “Well—! I don’t know! She’s just super knowledgeable, is all. Like a dragon textbook or something.”
Quietly, Smolder grabbed the scale and lined up her next shot. She waited for Gallus to set up the goalposts again, but he was too busy scratching the bottom of his beak.
“You don’t suppose…” he pondered, “she’s a changeling, do you? Studying how to be a dragon so that we don’t discover her true identity and reveal her secret changeling plan?” He looked at Smolder fiercely. “You’re not a changeling. Are you, Smolder?”
Smolder flicked her scale between his eyes again.
“Gah—!”
She winked. “Eight-two.”
“I wasn’t ready!”
“I’ll allow it,” Sandbar decreed.
Smolder felt a tug at her elbow. At first, she thought another scale had fallen off. But when she turned, she saw a lot more than just one scale.
“Hi, Smolder,” Spike said, his claws behind his back. “Can I, um, show you something?” He glanced at Smolder’s friends. “Like… in private?”
Smolder rose from her chair, sighing. “Yeah, I guess.” She stretched noisily. “Hey, Sandbar, sub for me?”
Sandbar pumped his hoof and took her chair. “Your shot,” he told Gallus. He placed his hooves on the table and pressed them closed.
“Aw, c’mon!”
Spike pulled a box the size of a cutlery drawer out from under his bed. He undid the flaps and stepped back, gesturing with his claws at the contents inside.
Smolder blinked. “You brought me up here to show me your comic book collection?”
“Should I be worried?” Spike asked.
“Worried?” Smolder pulled out one of the plastic-wrapped issues. The Power Ponies Vs. The Mare Of Masks!
Spike plucked the comic book from Smolder’s claws and pressed it to his chest. “Careful! That’s an original print.” His shoulders dropped. “It’s bad, isn’t it?” he mumbled.
“Oh, Spike… First hoard?”
“N-not exactly.” Spike looked away. “Last time I collected stuff, I kinda went on a… super-sized rampage.”
Smolder bent over and elbowed him on the shoulder. “Don’t sweat it, kid. All dragons have hoards, it’s how we’re wired. Gold, jewelry, gemstones. Even books. But you gotta make sure you’re hoarding something you actually want. Something special to you. Plus, it helps if you know that nobody else will ever want to take it from you.”
Spike looked up. “So, my comics…”
“Totally safe.”
Spike nodded. “Okay!”
Job done, Smolder turned to leave without saying a word. The dragon goodbye. But Spike, not well-versed in the dragon goodbye, called after her.
“Hey, thanks for always teaching me dragon stuff!”
“Anytime.”
Smolder heard the little padding of Spike’s feet, coming towards her. She sped up and reached for the door handle, but he beat her there, stepping into her escape route. “Hey, Smolder?” he said.
“…Yeah?”
“What do you hoard?”
The door handle crunched inside Smolder’s claw.
“Nothing,” she said. “Bye, Spike.”
Spike elbowed her in the knees. “C’mon, don’t be like that. I’m your friend! You can tell me.”
“Doesn’t mean I want to.”
Spike tutted, wagging a claw. “Lemme guess. It’s not very dragon-y, is it? Like dresses or something?”
“Yes,” Smolder said. “It’s dresses.”
With a flick of her tail she brushed Spike aside, snaked her way through the door, and marched down the hall.
Smolder rushed inside her dorm room, slammed the door, and all at once her muscles abandoned her. She let her wings hang, her posture crumple, and her arms swing by her side. Her body felt heavy and lopsided—the right shape, but the wrong weight. The right color, but the wrong hardness.
She stared down at her claws. They were dull. Of course they were dull.
With a light step, Smolder went to her bed and pulled out a box from underneath. It was the size of a cutlery drawer. With a throaty sigh, she tipped the box over, and a mountain of paper fell to the floor. Books, articles, maps, pictures, journals, notepads. Lava surfing guidebooks, dragon molting textbooks. Stories about dragons perched on hoards, and the doomed travelers who faced them. All of it annotated, all of it scribbled on.
One by one, Smolder picked up a page, or a book, or a picture, and tossed it across the room, unsatisfied.
She uncovered a stack of poems written by her brother, bound by a paperclip. The top one was one of his firsts, and one of Smolder's favorites.
Stink of Sulfur.
Sharp rocks. Under my claws.
It’s Good. To be home.
Smolder turned the stack of poems over. It was the only thing in the pile she wanted, yet she couldn't part with any of it.
She'd tried.
Atop her pile of information, Smolder sat and hugged her knees. She wondered what it would be like to transform into someone else.
She wondered what it would be like to transform into herself.
Ocellus made her way back from Professor Fluttershy’s class feeling like she was on top of the world. She didn’t canter so much as bounce down the halls. Everycreature who passed her by received an eager smile, and when there was nocreature passing by, she hummed to herself.
She looked down at the three-page essay in her hoof.
On Comforting a Friend
By: Ocellus
A++! Great work!
How many times had Ocellus written and rewritten this essay? It didn’t matter. That grade made it all worth it. Fluttershy had to invent the ‘A++’ just for Ocellus, so the professor had said, which would have been pretty special if Ocellus hadn’t overheard her saying the same thing to the next pony in line. She really needed to stop marking so easy, thought Ocellus.
Ocellus flipped through the pages, trying to find that killer line, or that killer paragraph, that had gotten her that grade. But other than on the cover page, there were no red marks to be found.
So maybe the whole thing was a killer.
As she rounded the hall of the dorm rooms, she opened her senses and watched the love. It was everywhere, of course. The School of Friendship had love coming out of the walls. It flowed like colored water through the hall, bounced between friends walking together, and, out the windows, Ocellus could see the colorful mist travelling far away, towards creatures not around. In the current, Ocellus felt like a fish in a stream, swimming like the water wasn’t even there. She didn’t turn on her senses that much anymore, especially now that they grew weaker every day. There was no need to sense love if you didn’t need it to survive.
In a manner of speaking.
Breathing in the fresh, loving air, Ocellus reached the door to her room, and she froze. No color flowed from inside. No stream. Only a blurry, sepia-toned image of her door stood in front of her, looking like it might collapse into a pile of sand.
On the other side of the door, Ocellus sensed the hole. Where love normally felt like swimming with nothing to hold her back, whatever was inside felt like falling with nothing to catch her. She wondered, if she stepped in, how far would she fall?
“…Smolder?” she said, and the sand pulsed and grew a little more brown.
Ocellus closed off her senses, and everything looked normal again. Clutching her essay to her chest, Ocellus gulped, exhaled, and entered the dragon’s lair.
The door bumped into an empty wooden box, turned on its side. Ocellus recognized it as the box from under Smolder’s bed. She’d always wondered what it held, and what it held was all over the floor. Books and papers and diagrams and piles upon piles of notes in Smolder’s writing—Ocellus would recognize that wild scratching anywhere. The pictures stood out to her—drawings of dragons. They stood tall, they breathed fire, they sneered and laughed and roared.
Smolder sat on her pile of paper, her knees pulled in, her head tucked inside her arms. Her tail swished back and forth, and the claws on her feet struggled against each other, fighting to be on top.
Ocellus suddenly felt, then, that she was in danger.
“Please stop staring at me,” Smolder said. Her voice sounded like it came from the bottom of a hole a mile deep.
“Okay,” Ocellus squeaked. She turned deliberately away from the pile and hoisted herself up on her bed. She curled up against the wall, folded her essay and pushed it under her pillow, letting the A++ peek out from underneath.
“So…” she started, “what are the notes for?”
“For me.”
Smolder suddenly broke away from herself. She picked up a piece of paper and fiddled with the edges.
“It doesn’t matter.” She shrugged. “I’m throwing it all away, anyways.”
“Are you sure?”
Smolder didn’t reply. She made to tear the page in half, but she stopped a centimeter in. She crumpled it up, nearly threw it, then flattened it back out and read it.
“I’m not very good at being a dragon,” she said.
Ocellus didn’t understand. Here was Smolder, hunched over her treasures—her papers and drawings and books and notes—her blue eyes glowing like will-’o-wisps trapped in ice, and her breathing low, like a growl. And she said she wasn’t a very good dragon.
“I didn’t know there was only one way to be a dragon,” Ocellus suggested.
Smolder only sighed.
“In fact… I seem to remember a certain dragon telling me she likes cute, silly stuff. And I thought that made her pretty unique, but I didn’t—”
“Shut up, Ocellus.”
Ocellus obeyed.
“It’s not about that.” Smolder dropped the page to the floor. She picked up a drawing, prepared to rip it, and failed again. “I don’t care about that.”
“Then…?”
Smolder growled and pushed her claws against her eyes. “It’s one thing to like stuff that other dragons don’t. It’s another to hate everything they do.”
“Oh.”
Smolder scratched at her elbows and rocked a bit. “I study a lot. You know. To fit in.” She smiled. “I’m good at it.”
“Smolder, you shouldn’t have to—”
“Yeah, I know I shouldn’t. But I do.”
Ocellus opened her mouth—she paused—and then shut it. She thought she’d be good at this. At the very least, she didn’t think she’d be this useless.
“What’s it like?” Smolder asked.
“What’s what like?”
“I mean, like… Everyone looks at me, and they see a dragon, right? And then, boom, they know who I am, how I’m supposed to act, everything. But what if that’s not who I am?” She fumbled with her claws, as if testing their sharpness. “I wouldn’t mind changing into someone else, you know? Just to try it out.”
Ocellus frowned. “I can’t change into someone else.”
“But—”
“I can look like someone else. But I can’t change into them.”
Smolder pushed air out of her nose. “I guess I have that over you.”
Ocellus wanted nothing more than to put the conversation on pause. Just one second, she would say, before pulling out her essay to study. I’ll be right with you.
But she wrote it, for Celestia’s sake. She desperately tried to remember her points. Listen, that had been such a strong opener, but it had gone nowhere. Rationalize and use logic, what a clever middle. Fat load of good that did in practice.
There was only one point left. Be relatable, if at all possible. When she’d written that point, she meant for someone else to use it. Not her.
She curled up on her bed and sighed. Her chest contracted, as if clutched by an energy trying to stop her from speaking. She fought it off.
“Do you remember the second week of school?” she whispered.
Smolder pulled her head up and frowned. “Yeah,” she said. “You weren’t here. You went back home without telling us.”
“I was here.”
“…I didn’t see you.”
“That’s because I didn’t look like me. I looked like a pegasus. And then a skinny horse. Then I was an alicorn, hiding her wings under her sweater. And then I was—”
“The changeling.”
The room went suddenly cold. Ocellus sniffed.
“I remember,” Smolder said. “That blue changeling. I saw you in class, and I… I told you I was looking for my friend. I asked you if you knew who Ocellus was.” Smolder leaned back on her claws. “I’m such… an idiot.”
“It was a good question. I didn’t know myself.”
“Were you hiding from us?”
Ocellus shook her head. “At first. It was so overwhelming, you know, meeting all of you, and the professors, and—and I know it’s hard to explain, but there was so much… love… everywhere. I hadn’t really adjusted to not craving it yet. And it was especially hard being around you guys.”
“…Sorry,” Smolder grumbled.
Ocellus laughed. “It’s fine. I just had to take a break. Be in the background for a bit. But then I couldn’t figure out how to change back.”
Smolder withdrew again, picking at a loose scale on her arm.
“I would stand in front of the mirror, and I would change. Then I would do it again. And again. I got farther and farther from what I was supposed to be. I would go to sleep a unicorn, wake up an earth pony.”
“What did you do?”
“I went home. To Thorax. I thought he wouldn’t talk to me. I didn’t even know what I looked like when I got there. But he just smiled at me, and he said, ‘Hi, Ocellus.’ He said, ‘How’s school going?’ ”
As Ocellus paused, Smolder looked down at her pile. She pulled out a note and pretended to read it.
Ocellus continued: “He told me it happens to the best of us. Even when we were drones, in disguise for so long, sometimes you just… forget how to change back. Thorax took me to the, uh… th-the feelings forum.” She blushed at the name.
“Feelings forum,” Smolder repeated. She turned the words over in her mouth. “Sounds… silly.”
“The group leader there—Lady Tymbal, they call her—she saw me right away. She could tell what was wrong. She pulled me to the center of the circle, in front of the whole group, and asked me to introduce myself to every changeling. I thought they would gawp, but they just smiled. Paid attention. And you know what Lady Tymbal told me?”
Smolder narrowed her eyes, staring angrily at the floor. “Let me guess,” she mumbled. “’Be yourself?’ ”
Ocellus managed to laugh. “I said the exact same thing. Just as curt, too.”
“And what did she say?”
“That being yourself is a paradox.”
Ocellus had needed those few seconds to process those words back at the hive, so she paid it forward.
Then she said, “She told me not to be anything. She told me to stop being things.”
“…And?”
Ocellus swept her forelegs over herself. “Voilà.”
Smolder smiled. She nodded. “That’s good,” she said. “I’m happy for you.” Then her smile disappeared. “But that’s not the same thing.”
“Maybe not exactly.”
Smolder shook her head. “Or at all. Ocellus, if I just start being myself, or stop being things, then everyone will look at me funny, and nodragon will like me anymore. They might say they would, and yeah, maybe they’ll accept me, but… I wouldn’t get to hang out with them anymore. We have nothing in common.”
“…Spike gets along just fine—”
“Yeah, and I don’t know how he does it. But I’m not Spike, okay?”
Ocellus hung her head. Something horrible grabbed her heart, and she felt like sprinting to Professor Fluttershy’s class and demanding her grade be changed to an F minus minus.
Then she realized something. Smolder’s eyes had stopped glowing. They looked less like ice, and more like the sky.
Ocellus opened her senses again, and to her relief, nothing changed. Ocellus felt a little love flowing out of herself, unsure if it should get too close to Smolder, but Smolder herself was her regular color. No love flowed out of her, but still. The brown was gone.
The hole was gone.
“Can you come sit with me?” Smolder whispered.
Ocellus almost leapt off the bed. But, calmly, and with just the right amount of trepidation, she approached the sitting dragon. Her survival instinct screamed at her to run, but she silenced it, sat down, and waited. Smolder sighed and inched closer, and Ocellus wrapped her hooves around her. She probably should have asked first, but she had never seen anycreature in such desperate need of a hug.
Moments passed, and just when Ocellus thought the hug was too much, she felt Smolder’s claw grab one of her hooves, and she closed her eyes in relief.
“Hey, Ocellus?”
“Yeah?”
“I had an idea. Mind if I run it by you?”
“Sure.”
“Can I… come to one of those feelings forums someday?”
Ocellus opened her eyes, and she’d never seen so much color.
