Fang and Flameby horizonChaptersFangFlameBloodPackFangThe pack stirs to life at dusk, and I awaken from dreams of fire. It is a slow and confusing awakening. The scent of my fellow wolves is distant and muted, even though they are so close I can feel the press of their bodies, and there is heat and light on my face. Then Father lopes out of our cave with the impatient whuff of an early riser, and his shadow passes over me, and I realize that I opened my eyes into the twilight sun. I turn my head and blink the light away, but the world won't come fully into focus. It takes my sleep-addled brain a moment to realize why. Then I fumble around on the cave floor for the thin circlet of silver metal I set aside when I went to sleep — dragging it out from underneath one of Thick-Pelt's sprawling forepaws — and lift it up. It would rest atop my head were I Father’s size, and were I a larger wolf I could at least balance it on my ears, but the circlet slips easily past my forehead and my nose, and slides down my neck until the embedded shard of bloodstone nestles against my throat. Sudden heat warms my chest, and then it is as if flame is burning away the fog over my senses — there's the thick musk of Howls-Off-Key, and the subtler scent of Patient-Leap just behind him, and Sharp-Eye and Harries-The-Herds and Thick-Pelt and Wide-Paws, and the commanding scent of Father drifting in on the breeze from outside. The bright, alarming hues of the forest recede back into their usual comforting muted greys, and the shadows in the cave sharpen and fill in with detail. As I am reorienting to the waking world, Father throws his head back and looses a mighty howl. The stone against my throat pulses. Even though I need no translation, it provides one, whispering words into my core that buzz up my spine into my skull and outward to my ears: Shake off your sleep. We hunt. Howls-Off-Key, as usual, is the first to lope outside and join in — a simple affirmation, adding his voice in a grating duet. (If only he put half as much work into helping the pack as he does into sucking up to Father.) Sharp-Eye and Wide-Paws, as usual, fall in line with him, turning the duet into a ragged chorus, and despite my rough start I scramble out on their tails and add my thin voice to the mix. Thick-Pelt and Harries-The-Herds reluctantly join in with their usual waking sluggishness. Patient-Leap, who was first to follow her older brother outside, waits until last, assessing the harmony — then adds her own howl in at a pitch that joins our sounds together into something greater. It is a role I often take, but the lingering visions of fire have stirred something hot and dangerous up inside me, and tonight I am bristling with ambition. Were my throat as strong as those of my packmates, I could express that with a few choice yaps in my breathing-moments between howls. But I have different strengths. Even though the bloodstone at my neck is not mine, it still listens when I turn my focus inward and push words into it, the way it pushes its translation-whispers into me. Father, I think, let me lead tonight. The bloodstone's call echoes around the pack. I feel the shadowy brush of their minds lurking at the edge of my perception. I can feel my thought penetrate into them with the clench of razor fangs, and feel my desire embed in their hearts and take root, pulsing through their bodies and shifting the timbre of their howls in support — Then a short yap from Father, so sharp I flinch. No! The bloodstone's spell snaps, and feedback blots out my senses for a moment. By the time I recover, the howl has disintegrated into a confused, discordant mess, and Father has wheeled upon me, cuffing me with a forepaw the size of my head. I yelp in shock, rolling over and showing him my belly. He bares his teeth, and my necklace vibrates as his thoughts slam in. You are weak! Leading the hunt is the duty of the biggest and strongest. In moments like this, it does not matter that I am attuned to the bloodstone in a way no other wolf could hope to match. It does not matter that I know the mysteries of its whispers, nor that I can channel its power to turn my spindly, stunted form into a killing machine surpassing any of my packmates. It does not matter, because the bloodstone is Father's, and it responds to his daughter only to the extent that he tolerates it. Yes, father, I desperately think, whining to emphasize the point. He stares down at me, teeth gleaming, a quiet growl filling his throat. The others pace around uncertainly — shaking off the lingering instincts my brief touch awakened inside — then do their duty and gather behind Father in silent support. Still his growling continues, and I begin to wonder if I have crossed a line which deserves harsher punishment than his reprimand. Then he wheels abruptly, loping toward the woods with the pack in tow. I scramble upright, slinking after them. And though there is mockery in Howls' eyes when he glances at me, none comment on my return to the pack. It is a warm evening, and the air tastes dry. Prey will be driven by thirst to the watering-hole — it is the only logical place to hunt. This does not seem to occur to the others, who seem uncertain as to our destination; they are merely content to follow Father's unerring route there. I ache to point out the obvious to them, to prove my skills, but I will not risk a second reprimand so quickly. Father crouches into the brush as we get close, his enormous blue-gray form barely concealed by the bushes which grow far over our heads. We all go silent, creeping up toward the rise over the watering-hole, and survey the animals below for targets. The usual profusion of rabbits; some round raccoons, putting on fat for their overwintering; a small cluster of deer. No fawns at this time of year, but there's an old buck who looks like he was on the losing end of a mating fight. Walks with a limp. One antler cracked, one reduced to a jagged nub. I don't need the bloodstone to know that we have all selected our target. Animals freeze and sniff the air as we stealthily descend the slope toward the watering-hole. Then the first rabbit bolts, and the first deer startles, and soon prey are scattering and we have abandoned our concealment to charge into the maelstrom of motion. The old buck leaps, stumbles, springs away; with every landing his lame leg folds and unbalances him, and though he initially outpaces us it is clear he has not much fight left. We spread out, crashing through shadowed brush in pursuit. We loose howls as we sprint, and the sounds keep us coordinated like a single beast even as my packmates vanish into the forest. I let the song of the bloodstone flow into me as the forest blurs by, and savor its rush of power. Everything begins singing to its pounding rhythm. My heart throbs, my muscles pump, my breathing quickens. I can smell the panic of our prey in the eddies of air kicked up by the hunt's passage, and anticipation stokes the fire already burning inside me. Then there is a series of mighty crashes ahead and to the left, as our prey's leg finally gives out and he tumbles across the ground and straight through some brambles. Sharp-Eye is closest; he charges around the thorns and lunges for our prey, darting in with teeth bared. I gather the bloodstone's power and focus it in my legs, springing over the bushes as Sharp-Eye targets the buck's flank. The buck shrieks and lashes out with a hoof. Sharp-Eye has to abort his charge to avoid it, and the buck is bracing to leap again just as I land on his back. The extra weight staggers him, and as his lame leg gives out, I hear a sickening snap. He falls to his belly, a second leg useless, and thrashes the remaining two madly as I wrap my legs around his barrel and arms around his neck. Sharp-Eye circles, looking for an opening, but his teeth are no longer necessary. The bloodstone's power roars and surges in my veins, and I laugh as I dig my knees into the buck's ribs and squeeze my arm tighter, closing his throat. Unable to dislodge me, unable to breathe, his struggles weaken quickly, and all he can do is roll over onto his back to try to crush me with his greater weight. But with the fire of the bloodstone burning inside me, all that accomplishes is to cost him his remaining leverage. The rest of the pack circles in, teeth bared, staying clear of the buck's still-dangerous hooves as they look for an opening. But this is my kill now. Before the others can intervene, I shift my grip and sharply jerk the buck's head sideways. There is a loud crack, and his body spasms and goes limp. I let the buck roll off me as Father lopes up. He surveys the kill — an animal twice my size, taken down without a single tooth-mark — and turns his muzzle to stare at me. I rise to a crouch, flicking some leaves and dirt off of my skin, saying nothing. I have made my point; there is nothing more to say. Finally, he lets loose a grudging, wordless whuff. Then he clamps his jaws around the buck's shoulder, jerking his head back and tearing loose a huge strip of glistening muscle. The metallic scent of blood fills the air, and the pack descends. Soon teeth are tearing at pelt as my fellow wolves satiate their hunger, and I, too, am digging my fingers into the gouge Father made, clenching my fists around wet bits of meat and ripping them free, stuffing them into my mouth, feeling the stone at my throat exult as blood runs down my chin and drips to spot my flesh. We are walking back to the cave with full bellies, and something on the wind is wrong. My packmates keep scenting the air, then keep glancing around, puzzled. I cannot smell anything. Rather, I can, but whenever I try to focus on it, the bloodstone at my neck goes silent rather than enhancing my senses with its whispers. Even Father seems wary of something beyond our perception, giving us a low rumble deep in his throat. "Stay alert," the necklace would tell me if it were translating, and its silence makes me itchier than anything out in the night. I slow next to some spindly pine trees and gather my focus, pushing deep into the heart of the bloodstone. It wriggles away from my mind's grasp like a river-eel through teeth. It is as if it is already under the thrall of someone else — but Father's will is quiescent, and my packmates wouldn't have the skill to speak to the stone even if I felt them reaching out for it. So I try something different. I reach up to the necklace with a hand, curling fingers around the stone, and relax my arm muscles, feeling the stone gently tug at the surface of my palm. Whatever it's reacting to is downhill somewhere, in the valley toward the rising moon. I let the stone resettle against my throat, holding onto the sensation of that tugging, and suddenly break away from the pack, loping down the slope from the moonlit ridge we're cresting. Father turns his head to watch me go, but says nothing as I leave. The hunt is over. The others plan to rest for the night, I know where home is, and if I injure myself chasing phantoms, it is my own fault. I creep through shadowy woods, meandering around snags and leaping over creeks, letting the restless stone at my throat pull me into the unknown. I soon find myself farther into the valley than I have ever gone. The forest gradually thins out, with endless fields of severed tree stumps telling a story that the land was not always this open. Everywhere is the faint scent of human — the tall, fleshy things which resemble me, but cover themselves in musty second skins and rip the land apart which they claim with their scent. The world around me begins to show signs of their spoor. There are trails which have been trampled so repeatedly that the dirt underfoot is a hard-packed scar across the earth. There are strange, straight, denuded trees smelling of pitch, whose few branches support lines stretching off into the distance that softly squeal at the far edge of my hearing. There are discarded cylinders of rounded, transparent material, inscribed with odd runes, smelling faintly of something sickly-sweet within their depths. Then I reach a wide, river-flat trail of tar and dark stone, yawning like an abyss in the cold moonlight. Two four-legged forms are on the far side, walking along an unnaturally straight white line covering the stone, and the bloodstone at my throat begins tugging wildly. The taller of the two forms — a lithe, small wolf; with fur an ice-blue not dissimilar to my skin, and ears flattened back so far they almost seem to have a downward curl — stops midstride and looks in my direction. I freeze, crouching in the shadow at the edge of the trees, suddenly thankful I had the sense to approach from downwind. It takes the shorter figure a few steps to halt himself. He has the scent of wolf about him, but his fur has an unnatural hue the color of grapes, and puffs of leaf-colored fluff ring his head. His legs are stubby, his nose blunt, his eyes large, and some sort of necklace dangles around his neck, wide and dark with gleams of smooth shiny metal throughout. Everything about him is out of proportion, as if someone had taken a wolf made out of mud and pushed and pulled and prodded it into harmlessness. "Ember?" he says to the wolf at his side. "Are you okay?" (Says. Speaks. He opens his mouth, and a series of impossibly varied tones come out, alternately rough and melodic, clipped and slurred — in a way I have only ever heard from the few humans I've seen in the far distance. And yet when the tones hit my ears, there is meaning in them, the same way that there is meaning in the whispers of the bloodstone. I find that I can understand his mouth-noises as readily as if he were yapping and howling the speech of my kind.) The ice-blue wolf softly growls, deep in her throat, eyes boring into my cloak of shadow. Then she, too, speaks. "There's something out there," she says, the corners of her muzzle peeling back into a scowl. In the thin cover of the bushes alongside the rock-river, I still the trembling in my muscles and hold my breath. These strange wolves and their speech; the unnaturalness of my surroundings; the bizarre behavior of the bloodstone at my neck — it all combines to make me feel very much the prey. But if I flee, they will sense me, so I imitate the terror-halt of the rabbit, waiting to bolt until there is no other choice. The small one freezes too, his enormous eyes flicking around the forest alongside their path. "I can feel it, too," he says, subdued and hesitant. "Magic. Like … some sort of pull. Do you think it's the crown?" "I don't know, Spike," Ember says. "There's something … wrong … about it. Something ..." The ice-blue wolf's eyes dart once more around the darkened woods; she licks her lips, then swallows, looking more and more uncertain. "...Hungry." The two stand in uneasy silence. The bloodstone at my neck, too, remains silent, other than its insistent pull toward these strangers. But I do not need the bloodstone to see fear stiffen their limbs. Spike's nose wrinkles, and he sniffs the air. "Do you smell anything weird?" Ember does, too — a sharp, exaggerated inhalation, followed by a cough as scents overwhelm her. "Just, what's their name, humans. And dogs." "Wolves." When he corrects her, Spike reaches up with a paw to fidget with his necklace. "We're ... definitely not the biggest things in this forest." "I'm not afraid of beasts," Ember snaps, fur puffing out. But after a glance at Spike, she relents: "On the other claw, we're not here to pick fights." "Yeah," Spike says. "I saw a ranch down the road. Let's find some shelter and get a fresh start at dawn." The two begin shuffling forward, then walking, then simultaneously break into a hurried lope that's not quite a full run. The tug of the bloodstone at my neck changes directions as they go, but despite the additional distance, only continues to increase in intensity. I stay frozen until they are dots in the distance, only then allowing myself to breathe out. I creep forward toward the rock-river, doing an antsy little dance at its edge, and force myself to press a finger to its surface. It is smooth and cold. I hustle across it to the dirt on the far side, heart pounding in my chest, then lean back over it and inhale over the bright white line they were walking along, hoping for some greater understanding of why these visitors disturb me so. The thick, tarry scent of the rock-river assaults my nostrils, and the volatile, unnatural scent of the white line coating its surface; but above both of those is the cloying fake-wolf scent of the small one and a deeper musk that is indisputably familiar. It finally clicks: Me. "Ember" smells like me. The bloodstone is tugging me down the rock-river toward these bewildering visitors with such intensity that I have to square my legs off and lean against the pull. I turn my back on the strange canines, and begin loping in the other direction. I don't know who they are. I don't know what they were speaking about. I don't want to meet them and find out why they are driving the bloodstone — my bloodstone — so crazy. But I want … no, need … to know more. So I track their scent toward its source. After some time, the path of the canines' approach veers from the rock-river onto a wide dirt trail. Then from that trail to a much smaller one, zig-zagging up a hillside. Then the trail forks, and the scent leads onto the lesser-used of the two, going back down the hill again. Always, unerringly, they stick to the path, and even though I am again surrounded by trees I am no less uncomfortable than their scent suggests they were. What kind of wolves would stay so consistently out of the shelter of the woods? Finally, finally, their old and faint scent veers off into the wilderness. But I am barely out of sight of the pathway before I hit a dead end. The scent goes through a light smattering of bushes into a large clearing at the base of a cliff, and the scent-trail meanders around the clearing for a while before leaving it on the far end, headed right for the rock wall. I lope over, wondering if my senses have led me astray. The cliff does not smell of the strange canines. The grass underneath it does. But as I get close enough to scent it, the cliff begins to shimmer in the ghostly moonlight. It wavers, distorts, and little sparks of light whirl around the area like short-lived fireflies. And something inside of me sings. This cliff-light feels like the bloodstone when it's whispering to me … and yet not. It has no words, no will, no purpose; it simply is, in a way that none of my senses can pick up save for the part of me which controls the bloodstone. And to that sense, it is comforting, like slipping into the water of a hot spring on a cold day. Fascinated, I reach for the wall of the cliff. My outstretched finger makes contact. And the world around me falls away. FlameI awaken into a dream of fire. I am in a steep-walled, tiny valley — more of a pit — and beyond the cramped ledge on which I rest, the earth itself is liquid fire. It boils and churns, moving like water, and it glows so bright the night is like day. The air is permeated with heat; it dries my throat as I breathe in. And yet my body drinks all that heat in, whispering for more. Some deep lupine instinct is screaming at me that fire is danger. But the scene is so surreal that instinct, for once, is an afterthought. I fumble an arm loose from underneath my crumpled body, bracing a palm against the ground by my muzzle. Claws spread where my fingers should be. I blink and look again. I am not me. Rather: I am not what I was. Gone is the pale, fleshy, blunted mess that could not keep up with her pack without the power of the bloodstone. In its place is a lithe, reptilian body, honed to perfection. All over my body are fine, ice-blue scales, supple yet thick, and though I am within a furnace my core is not even warm. My fingers come to jagged points capable of casually ripping through skin and muscle. I run a long, skinny tongue around the inside of my elongated muzzle, and my teeth are equally sharp. I push myself upright, and a tail uncoils to keep my body steady and centered. Back muscles flex on instinct, and I become aware of another addition as batlike wings shift and resettle. The world is more vivid than I've ever felt. I take a deep breath, and I do not need the bloodstone's power to scent the searing wind. I can hear every burp, every murmur of the song of the bubbling earth. My vision is bloodstone-sharp, but with all the brightness of color I see without it. I am the me of my dreams. I am perfect. The me I was meant to be. I leap up onto the wall of the fire-pit, scrambling up toward its rim. My body responds with precision and power, claws gouging into rock and catching as I ascend. Once, I misjudge a claw-hold, and my wings beat on reflex as I start to skid back toward the flowing earth, cancelling the drag of gravity while I readjust my grip. In moments I have zigzagged my way out of the pit to survey this new world of fire and power. The fire-pit stands atop a towering mountain, and this new world stretches out to the horizon in all directions. The moon is dipping toward the ground and the sky opposite it is beginning to lighten, and in that liminal illumination I can see a blasted wasteland of jagged rock. Confusion takes me for a moment. Where are the forests? What sort of prey could live in such desolation? I reflexively reach to my throat to touch the bloodstone, hoping it will whisper to me of the prey I cannot smell — and panic rises in me. It is not there. The panic, fortunately, is brief. As I whip my head back to survey the ledge I arrived on, I can feel an unexpected weight atop it. I reach up, and my claws whack a curling white horn jutting from the side of my temple. The jolt shifts something on my forehead, and I realize that the circlet is sitting atop my head. It is smaller than usual — fitting snugly, as if it were meant to be there. And it is throbbing with power — but passively, in perfect silence. It, too, has changed. The bloodstone reacts without hesitation or reservation to my thoughts. It does not release its power in controlled bursts as if afraid to overstep Father's approval; I call upon the bloodstone, and before I even understand the change, an impossible strength is surging through my body. I think to wonder whether I am simply beyond Father's call, but no: there are voices in the distance beyond my senses, whispering in the darkness of my thoughts, and among them is a massive slumbering presence that I know is him. I reach my mind out and press at his, and it is pliable to my touch just as my packmates always were. Somehow, Father is here, yet the bloodstone is mine. A thrill runs through me. If the bloodstone is mine … then so is the pack. I drop to all fours to begin sprinting in the direction of those distant reptilian murmurs, but even with the bloodstone's power surging through me, this body feels unnatural that way; I settle for an upright lope, then accelerate into huge bounds as my instincts and my form begin to work in concert. Soon I am launching myself into the sky with each leap, feeling the wings on my back catch air and propel me forward into a diving glide down the mountainside, and the landscape rushes by with impossible speed as I hurtle toward the rising sun. In the whispers of the bloodstone, I can feel the familiar presences toward which I travel draw nearer and nearer. Then, without warning, the slope underneath me drops sharply away, and I find myself soaring over a broad, flat valley with countless caves dotting the cliffsides. I rocket toward the ground, tucking my wings for the sheer joy of the impact, and land with a boom that reverberates across the rocky plain. The weight of my impact deforms the stone, my muscles singing with such power that even breaking the earth takes but a thought. I reach into my bloodstone crown, and see the scales on my muzzle gleam with reflected red light as I draw out even more power, sending it outward, amplifying its call across my pack: Shake off your sleep. Then I feel the stirring of my people in response, and I realize how inadequate the word "pack" is. I have been focusing on the few familiar presences in my mental landscape. Father. Howls-Off-Key and his lackeys. Thick-Pelt and Wide-Paws. Patient-Leap — though her presence is so distant I have no words for it. The rest of them are here, but they are quickly overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of the reptilian forms which begin slithering and stomping and stalking out of their cliffside retreats. Every last cave contains a beast. (A dragon, the bloodstone whispers. I am a dragon. Lord of the dragons, by the bloodstone's power.) And every single dragon reacts to my summons. My enthusiasm for a hunt wavers. The size of my pack is overwhelming my instincts. All I can do is scamper up onto a nearby rock pillar as dragons of every hue and size and description converge. I glance around the crowd, trying to make sense of it. That doesn't help. I fall back to picking occasional faces out of the swarm which feel familiar. That red one, for instance: thick, grumpy, a head over my height. The feel of his mind is that of Howls-Off-Key, ambitious yet craven. The skinny ones constantly behind him, white and black of scale, deferential to his power so long as there is no greater command: Sharp-Eye and Harries-The-Herds. Thick-Pelt, sitting near the back with a vacant stare: a subdued green with an awkward gait and straying eyes and lolling tongue. But I repeatedly lose sight of them as the crowds shift, so great are my people's numbers. If I were to take my pack, and each of those wolves were themselves a pack, and each wolf in that pack were a pack, those wolves would still be dwarfed by the number of faces staring up at me in confused obeisance. "It's too early, Ember," one whines from the front, a lumpy grass-green one with stubby wings. "What'd you call us here for?" That only confuses me further. Wanting to delay the hunt is understandable, if contemptible. But not understanding the one thing which brings the pack together? Is this one a cub that needs to be taught? Is he feigning ignorance as a challenge? I am trying to figure out what to do when the earth trembles, and I turn to see Father stalking up behind me. My focus evaporates in shock. He is no dragon, but a mountain. The entirety of my body is the size of one of his claws. His body casts the valley in shadow. However, he approaches the pillar — lesser dragons scrambling out of his way, lest they be flattened by a careless clawfall — and lowers his head in respect. Then his eyes lock in on my crown as I am remembering to breathe. "Ember!" he booms. "I see your mission to retrieve the Bloodstone Crown from the other world was a success!" A murmur ripples through the crowd. Father's head jerks away from me, and a snarl curls onto his muzzle. "When my daughter the Dragon Lord succeeds," he roars at the gathered dragons, "you cheer!" The dragons behind me erupt in whoops and hollers. The sound is near-deafening. I whip around, crouching low to the pillar, baring my teeth. But I let my hackles subside as I feel the emotions of my dragons through the bloodstone: the cacophony of birdlike shrieks is a sign of support. A voice rises above the madness as the cheering dies away. "Yeah, yeah, some success," Howls-Off-Key says with a dramatic roll of the eyes. "Now she can dress up with a fashion accessory that matches her scepter." I feel a growl rumble low in my chest. Howls is always like this. Testing the line — seeing how much he can get away with. Father had no tolerance for it, but Father is no longer in charge, and now this challenge is mine to suppress. "Well, at least she did one thing right," Howls says as his lackeys snicker, poorly hiding their muzzles behind claws. "Got rid of that pony-loving shrimp." He bares his fangs at me and lifts his eyeridges, in a gesture which looks threatening but which the bloodstone's whispers tell me is some sort of mating display. "You want some red scales to go with that trinket?" Behind him, Sharp-Eye glances up at my expression. His smirk instantly vanishes, and he pokes Howls' shoulder. "Garble," he whispers, but that's as far as he gets. Howls-Off-Key — no, Garble — is a head larger than me and far more muscular. I am not confident enough in my new body to take him in a toe-to-toe dominance battle. But I have power resting on my forehead beyond anything he can imagine. So I reach into the bloodstone, and through it, into him. My many moons of experimentation with the whispers of the bloodstone circlet have given me a good idea of the limits of its power. When it reaches into others, it does not connect to the part which makes them think and act. It reaches deep into their core, their instinct. So when I want one of my packmates to do something, I do not command them — instead, I make them need it, make their blood rise and breath quicken at the thought. Or, when necessary, I do the opposite. I stare into Garble's eyes, and make him feel like prey. I feel, more than see, his body stiffen. I crouch into a ready stance, slowly flexing one claw, and savor the terror I have unleashed into his veins at the sight of me. I have, however, also learned that fear is a dangerous tool; the cornered prey sometimes can lash out, and he is certainly the type to. So I also channel the adrenaline surging inside of him, shifting his hunger from the sexual to the literal, making him need the hunt. Then I throw back my head and howl, and make him need to join my pack. Garble is simple, as Howls was, and once his blood is up he is mine. He joins in with no hesitation, with no thought to the befuddled stares on the faces of his fellows. My voice is thin and high, but firm and melodic in a way my old body's never was; his is cracked and grating, but the urgency in it makes up for the finesse he lacks. It is a bizarre duet, lonely and lopsided, but the meaning of it is clear: he submits. I hear the murmuring of the others stir up. They understand my lesson, but they do not understand what he feels. So I send a surge of power out from the stone, and call out to all their instincts the same way I did at sunrise: Howl. And one by one, as a wave of need ripples outward from my pillar and staggers my dragons, they blink and twitch and feel the flames of desire ignite. And they throw back their heads, adding their voices to the chorus, and my pack-of-packs-of-packs sings as one. Then the wind shifts, and there is a new scent on it. Something besides my packmates and the fire-blasted landscape — something utterly foreign to my senses, but alive. I silence my dragons with a thought and turn toward the wind blowing down off the mountain, and a sea of heads swivels with mine. Hovering above the cliff in the distance is a small equine form, its night-blue mane and tail whipping in the backdraft as its sky-blue wings pump to keep it in position. Like the humans of my home, it wears a covering of second skin, though I have never on a mammal seen skin of shiny yellow and blue. There is also something covering its eyes, but the pony pushes the pair of dark circles up to its forehead with a hoof as it stares back at us. It — no, he — clears his throat. "Ah, Princess Ember?" the winged stallion says, voice hitching high. "I'm, uh, Soarin, and I was sent to bring an urgent message through the portal for you and Spike, but, umm, if this is a bad time …" I can smell the pony's fear on the wind. I bare glistening fangs, my tail lashing in anticipation of a meal. My dragons, on the other paw, seem suddenly less certain; the belly-hunger I stir through the bloodstone is meeting a confused resistance. But when I subtly shift to the thrill of chase and catch, the hesitation vanishes. Even if they have all fed recently enough to not need another meal, the hunt is life — and my hunger to lead one is hunger enough for us all. "I, uhh …" The stallion is openly sweating now, as his head swivels around the valley full of attentive predators. "You know, I'm just gonna go." A snaky, wiry dragon who has been silently slithering up the cliff suddenly leaps at him, jaws snapping shut just shy of the stallion's hooves. He yelps and bolts. It is like a spark on dry grass. My dragons sense prey, and surge forward in a massive wave. Behind them, I fill my lungs, loosing another howl as I leap from the stone pillar. I surge forward through — and over — the slower members of the crowd, leaping off their backs with mighty bloodstone-propelled kicks. The howl echoes back from the far edges of my pack, and then I am carried away in the sound as I join the chase, countless voices united in a single exaltation: We hunt. BloodI fear my first hunt will be a grand build-up to a quick, ignominious kill. I have a perfected body, an obeisant bloodstone, and a pack enormous beyond counting, all focused upon a single terrified beast. I needn't have worried. The winged pony darts away like a bolt of lightning, and by the time I have crested the valley, he is already far in the distance. It is enough to make me hesitate; there are some prey which one must take by surprise before they flee out of reach, and perhaps I have chosen our target poorly. However, my pack is no longer wolf, but dragon — and once the bloodstone's hunt-lust has them on the scent, they rise to the challenge. Long, thin serpents rise from my ranks, beating enormous wings that jet them forward with startling speed, and charge toward the stallion. They close the gap quickly, then as one, dart out to one side, overtaking him and driving him sideways. He adjusts his course, and again they spread out and overshoot, forcing a tighter turn. He glances back at the greater mass of slower dragons toward which he is being herded, and curses, and suddenly plunges into the midst of his harriers. That is when we find out our prey is also a fighter. He twists through the air as a group of wing-snakes dive at him, lashing out with a hoof to send one reeling and dropping from the fight. He expertly weaves between two others, baiting them into colliding in midair. A fourth lunges for his outstretched wing, only to be buffeted by an errant flap. The rest begin circling, darting in occasionally when they think they see an opening. The wing-snakes are light, frail things, capable of little more than this sort of harassment. None are lucky enough to do damage — but regardless, every clash slows the stallion down and gives the rest of us time to close in. He breaks through the cloud of wing-snakes toward open air; they regroup and use their faster speed to overtake him again. He veers away; they let him, and stay on the far side of him from the larger pack, so that the best the stallion can do is circle us without gaining distance. And all the while, he tires. The vanguard of my larger fliers is almost within striking distance when the stallion changes strategy. Abruptly, he plunges into a steep dive, hurtling into gravity's embrace with such momentum that not even the wing-snakes can keep up. I am not far from his impact point, in my position near the front of the ground-runners pacing the stallion's harried flight, and my pulse quickens as I veer toward him — only for adrenaline to flare as I realize his true intention. Suddenly, I am upon the lip of a narrow, jagged canyon snaking its way through the shattered landscape. The stallion dives past me and plunges in, heedless of the unforgiving walls a claw's width from his wingtips. My only option to avoid an ugly crash is to leap, putting as much of my weight on my left leg as I can to angle my jump. I land heavily on the far lip of the chasm, tuck my wings, and somersault through my momentum, leaping out of the shoulder roll back to my claws. Nearly without breaking stride, I resume my sprint, curving back toward the gash in the earth. The bravest of the wingsnakes plunge into the canyon after the stallion — only to collide with the walls en masse, their greater wingspans snagging the rock. A few of the scrawnier fliers take their place, lithe enough to maneuver, but the leather of their wings doesn't give them the stallion's precision, and they quickly begin falling behind as they struggle for a safe flight path. Two enterprising dragons change tactics, putting on a burst of speed and diving into the canyon in front of the stallion — and the rest veer sharply away when the stallion body-checks them straight into solid stone. The interceptors tumble flailing down to the canyon floor, shrieking until impact and then lying there whimpering. Soon, the majority of my hunters are circling uselessly in midair, doing little more than waiting for the pony to flee his cover. On the ground, we fare little better: only I and a few of my fastest runners are keeping up with him, sprinting along the canyon lip and bounding from side to side in giant wing-assisted leaps whenever the canyon swerves too sharply. Then our prey pulls one last trick from his reserve. When the canyon straightens out for a moment, and he can focus on something besides maneuvering, he lifts a forehoof and then sharply jabs his elbow into his side. And the canyon behind him erupts into fluorescent, foul-smelling smoke. None of us are close enough behind him to catch a mouthful of it; the most it accomplishes is forcing the runners and I to veer cautiously away from the canyon's lip. But then the stallion flares his wings, kick-flips during a momentary stall, and doubles back. Immediately, he dives, vanishing further into the chasm — leaving nothing but a long, roiling cloud of overwhelming scent to mask the canyon's opening. My dragons screech in outrage, pulling back. I silence them with a glare. Listen! I think through the bloodstone, and they are flooded with the anticipation of outwaiting a rabbit thinking himself safe in a bolt-hole. A hush settles over my pack, and I set my ears to straining for clues within the smoke. The stallion is too winded to make it a challenge. His heavy gasps comes from near the center of the cloud — and several body-lengths below it. As I am building a mental picture of the canyon from the subtle echoes of his motions, I hear a few pebbles dislodge amid the tap of hooves on stone; he has found a tiny ledge to brace himself on, and is resting to regather the energy for another sprint. (That's less prudent than it is necessary; were it not for the bloodstone singing within me, I, too, would have been pushing myself to my limit in our chase. Even my dragons are settling in to the rock, tongues lolling out; the ones still in flight are wheeling wide, lazy glide-circles on thermals.) But as his labored breathing finally begins to slow, it silences for a moment, and a voice rings up through the mist. "Ember!" the stallion shouts. "You don't have to do this." Hisses of amusement ripple through my pack. Now that the fire is in their blood, they recognize his words for the absurdity they are. There is nothing but the hunt. It is as much a part of life as the breath he wastes. "Princess Twilight worried something like this might happen," Soarin shouts. "The crown's instinct magic taking someone over once in dragon claws." I flex my hindclaws, drawing them up to prevent them clicking on the rock, and pad forward to the cliff-lip in silence. "But we can fix it. If you're still in there, if you can hear me … take the crown off." I leap. I burst through the smoke directly above him, claws extended. He yelps and flinches, and the motion causes his hoof to slip. His wings jerk open to compensate, and his body lurches off to the side. It saves him, if barely. We collide, roughly bouncing off the rock and then plunging down the canyon in a flailing, spinning mass which not even instinct can control. I lash out with fang and claw. He flails hooves. My wings flex, his beat, they tangle. And then a flailing elbow jars my head for a moment, and my back slams into a rock outcropping, and I tumble down toward the earth as the stallion's wings catch and flare. I manage to open my wings enough to slow my descent, then lash out and stab my claws into the cliff wall, leaving long gouges as the rock screeches in protest. Far above, the stallion struggles to a hover, staring wide-eyed as I halt my descent. I snarl at him, tearing giant hunks of power from my bloodstone as if it were a fresh kill, then gather energy in my legs and spring out from my wall-perch. I careen toward the opposite wall, leaping again, zig-zagging up toward the stallion with a burst of speed that shocks even me. He curses, flapping heavily to dart up into the smoke, and that is where I catch up to him again. This time, the collision is purposeful, and I am ready. My sequence of leaps has given me the momentum of an upward-falling tree, and I tuck my wings and slam straight in. I hit the stallion off-center, plowing into his flanks and upending him as we burst out of the cloud. He bucks, but all that does is send us whirling apart; meanwhile, I spread my claws and rake, and carve a huge gouge out of his left wing as I spin up toward the top of my trajectory. He flaps to right himself, finds one wing catching no air, and spirals to a hard, bouncing landing on the ground nearby. I, too, land hard — but directly on my hindclaws, sending all the impact into the earth, a shockwave of new fractures spreading out as I spring back out again. The stallion struggles to his hooves and glances up halfway through my leap. All he can do is rear, throwing the sharp edge of his forehooves in my path. I howl and whip my arm down — battering his legs out of line — then ram him, bearing us both down to the stony soil. He wedges a leg in the crook of my neck and heaves, rolling us over to reverse my pin. I grip his shoulder — he winces as the claws dig in — and slam him into the ground alongside me, sending up an explosion of dust. He shrieks as something breaks, and I take the opening and lunge with razor teeth. It's only his desperate flail of legs which makes my teeth snap shut shy of his neck. He tries to roll away, but he is pinned by my claw, and I push down with much weight as I can bring to bear, drawing my other arm back for a killing blow. The power of my bloodstone surges, howling and laughing within me, and I feel it replenishing at the wide-eyed terror which is the last thing the stallion will ever feel. But then his pupils shift, and his eyes widen even further as he looks up over my shoulder. Even through the haze of my crown's glorious bloodlust, something deep inside me screams a warning. I whip my head back, and as such, I get a momentary glimpse of myself hurtling straight toward me before my world explodes. For a moment, everything is a blurred, tumbling mess. The sky and ground are flipping somersaults around me, and my body is being buffeted by enormous impacts from every angle. Then there is an especially potent collision, a weight lifts from my back, and I see an ice-blue form tumble away along the horizon. Gradually, the world's spinning slows, and then gravity reasserts itself with a lurch. The horizon snaps back into place, and I am skidding along the ground, leaving a billowing trail of dust behind. Finally, I come to a full stop, ears ringing and body screaming in protest. Gingerly, I sit up. My skid-trail leads back toward a small pile of rock, and beyond that are a series of impact-scars and craters, and finally a wide-eyed, wounded pegasus. In the corner of my vision, another me sits up as well, her own skid-trail leading back at a crazy angle to the shattered boulder we both plowed through as we were bouncing across the landscape. And surrounding all of us is a horde of wide-eyed, confused dragons. The other me — Ember — staggers to her claws, brushing dust from her shoulders and glaring at me. "You invade my world," she snarls, "you steal my people, you try to murder a pony. You dog." Her voice rises in rage. "Do you have anything to say for yourself before I bring you to heel?" Fury at this duplicate boils in my blood — swooping in to steal my kill and then having the gall to be angry at me for leading the hunt. But even more, fury rises at my packmates lolling around in shock. They are better than this! They are mine! I felt their needs burn with mine, felt the bloodstone's song quicken their pulse, heard our voices unite in the howl. And I'm not about to let anyone — not even myself — take that away from me now. I have been in Father's shadow long enough. Kill, I project, reaching into the bloodstone and sending a wave of desire exploding outward. Nothing happens. I realize, belatedly, my head feels lighter than it should. "Ember!" Soarin shouts, pointing to some spot in the dissipating dust between us. "The crown! Don't let anydragon touch it!" The other me glances at the stallion, and I am already in motion. She glances at the outstretched hoof to orient herself; I follow the whisper of my crown. My head start is insurmountable. But then I hear a grunt, and a boulder twice my size streaks toward me from my double's direction, and I realize racing me might not be her plan. I fling myself sideways out of the path of the rock just in time to see a second hurtle my way. I leap it, then roll under a third that was aimed higher than the other two. There is a brief lull as Ember sprints toward more ammunition, and I dig my claws into the earth and accelerate toward my bloodstone — only to see lame-winged Soarin galloping at it, too. Even without the burst of extra energy from my crown, I am a step ahead of him. I lunge inward, and my claws close around the metal. But Soarin is charging at me, not the circlet, and this time he is the one weaponizing momentum. All the breath goes out of me as he plows into me shoulder first, and the circlet ricochets away as I find the world spinning again. This time, though, I have the presence of mind to repeat my canyon trick — lashing out a claw and dragging it through the stone like an anchor. My arm jerks taut and my tumble immediately stops, turning my recovery into an all-fours skid. At least until a boulder clobbers me from the side. The world spins again, and I tumble, and I come to rest with a great weight atop me. More irritated than injured, I heave — and the stone rolls away, and I spring back up. (It is amazing how much harm dragons can shrug off, some part of me marvels.) I am turning back toward Ember when suddenly the world washes out, slowing to a crawl — and every fiber of my being lights up with a single message: Someone has touched my crown. It is a sensation I am familiar with, but from the other side. Never have I felt it when in control, and it is an exotic and exhilarating rush. I know without looking that it is the stallion who picked the bloodstone up, dipping his head to the dirt and clamping lips around the metal. (Out of the corner of my eye, in fact, I can see just that as part of the frozen battlefield tableau.) And despite the pony being prey rather than pack, I can feel his core. For the first time, the emotions of prey are mine to dissect and digest. He is afraid. Of death, yes, as all creatures are; but also of something greater than death. He is afraid of what I will do next. He is afraid for his herd. I probe the fear, magnifying it, and my jaw waters at the thought: ponies so far beyond counting that my valley of dragons is like a drop in the river. Endless hills and plains of ponies, weak and lacking vigil. He fears my dragons swarming his herd like insects on carrion, gorging ourselves until they are stripped down to clean bone. It is a beautiful fear. It is a beautiful dream. The hunt will be endless. Hello? his panicked voice echoes through my head. Anypony? Where am I? What's going on? The mewls of prey have never concerned me. However, the rush of exploring this new sensation prods me into reaching back out. Fear, I think — and take my iron grip around my crown, smothering him in it, seeing if I can choke the life out of him through sheer weight of emotion. He notices me, then — and though a battering hailstorm of emotion is blasting away huge chunks of him with every passing second, he still struggles to form words. Stop! Please! I hesitate — now as if playing with a wounded mouse, unable to escape but perhaps capable of providing amusement. Why? I ask, mentally prodding at the exposed bits of him I have stripped away. His pain flares up, and the tinge of desperation in his words grows. This isn't you. It is the me I should have always been, I counter. The bloodstone's gift. The bloodstone is bad, he says. I try to wrap my head around that for a moment. Then I ask again, bemused: Why? His response is not immediate — as if he is trying to puzzle out what he feels from me, and poke a claw into my core in the same way I'm probing his. But he finally says: Because it makes you hurt your friends. I don't recognize the word. But a sensation comes along with it — one that feels like packmate, but foreign and nebulous. This confuses me. The hunt is for the good of the pack. How would the bloodstone hurt them? … Is this one trying to say he is part of the pack? He looks nothing like the dragons. On the other claw, back at home, I looked nothing like Father, yet the pack taught me to hunt, and brought me to meat before I learned to catch bugs and mice for myself. And with that memory, my decision is made: I will take this horse and make a hunter of him. I stop stirring his prey-fear — and, with swirls of gratitude and caution, his resistance collapses all at once. Then he seems to read my shift in intention, and I feel a surge of new panic spike. Undirected feelings, unformed words, surge my way. I brush them off. You will learn the howl, friend, I say. And then my energy floods into him and his needs are mine. The world snaps back into focus. My packmate Soarin's head jerks upright, the crown in his lips. His muscles are twitching at odd intervals, and his eyes are unfocused and tinged with red. I can feel the magic of the crown seething within him — far more than I've ever put into anyone before. Perhaps I overdid it. "Soarin!" Ember shouts from the distance, jabbing her claws into a boulder half again her size and hoisting it overhead. "Get outta here! I'll cover you!" Soarin stumbles over to me — craving my hunt even more than he craves the breath of life — and obediently spits my crown out into a waiting claw. And deep inside Ember, I watch a spark of hope die. Then rage flares out, rage and fear. She screams, flinging her boulder away and charging me. But rage and fear are my domain. I taste this dragon's hungers, taste the struggles that led her to this moment, see her flailing against the loss of all she has built as the jaws of fate close around her throat. So I simply push those feelings harder. Rage drains the coordination from her movements, urges her to commit everything to each strike, telegraphs her motions; fear locks her into her path. I easily sidestep a wild swing, and then Soarin is leaping at the other me, burning with desire to protect his pack from this interloper. I watch, tail lashing in amusement, as they begin battering at each other in blind rage and blind obeisance. But I find their battle taking a surprising amount of my focus. Some part of Ember is resisting — in a way I have not felt since Father's repudiation of my control, but also wholly unlike the way his hard-honed instinct overpowered mine. All I know is that Ember is not wholly mine. It is as if there is another whisper stirring up opposing desires within her…? But no, not actively; and no, not an instinct-whisper, I can say with certainty. My control over instinct is comprehensive, and regardless, there is a part of her which is … protected. I tune out the fight and the surrounding dragons, feeling instinctively that something here is important. It is maddening. That feeling of opposition is growing, sharpening. It is right at the edge of my senses — And then my concentration is shattered by a wave of power which staggers me. Bloodstone power. Another bloodstone's power. "Stop!" a high, male voice thunders from midair, and every being within sight halts as if paralyzed. I whirl around, hissing, and reflexively reach for the core of this new interloper — only to find that grasp wholly ineffective. If my control over Ember was muted, then here it is as if I am reaching into a hole and groping blindly at air. I blink and refocus my eyes. The new dragon is a purple whelp with huge green spikes and tiny wings, holding an ashen staff twice his size. The staff explains everything. The bloodstone mounted at the top of it is enormous, and the surrounding air is boiling with the overflow of its power. It's not just his bloodstone, either. Now my own crown is beginning to resonate with unimaginable potential. And I know — without knowing how — that this is the crown's twin, the other half of a pair never meant to be separated. Their powers are surging now that they are once again in proximity, enough so that I barely need to think to tug at the cores of every dragon within sight. That apparently works both ways; I can feel that this whelp's claim on the scepter is tenuous at best, the reward for a challenge long past, yet even that was enough to let him stagger my pack. It is magnificent. If I possessed them both, my power would be absolute. With a passing thought, my pack is filled with need. Their every instinct is telling them I can bring them an eternal hunt; all I require is the scepter. And as one, every head within sight swivels to the purple whelp. (Spike, I suddenly realize: he is the one who accompanied the ice-blue wolf when he and my other foe invaded my forest.) Spike swallows nervously. But he holds the staff up, and his voice thunders again, magnified by its power: "Lie down!" And the dragons bracing themselves to crouch and leap suddenly drop boneless to the ground. We hunt! I think, and my quiescent dragons immediately stir — their needs drawing on something far more fundamental within them than the decision to go prone. "Uh," Spike stammers, sweat spotting his forehead scales, and shakes the staff as if that increases its power. "Dance!" The area erupts into motion, as dragons begin shuffling, wriggling, and spinning to no particular rhythm. Rage begins to simmer within me as I blast apart the frivolity in my pack's cores and replace it, again, with hunger. This whelp is losing the power battle, and we both know it — but with just a word, he can dissipate my pack's instincts for a crucial moment, and I can no more affect him with my bloodstone than he can command me with his. I will have to bait him to the ground, perhaps even formally challenge him for the pack, find some way to bring him within reach — And that's when Ember grabs my tail. It takes me a moment to realize it, because at first all I feel is a hard jerk on my hips, and then the world is somersaulting backwards. There's a thunderous boom as I arc into the ground head-first. Dust erupts everywhere, and then I'm jerked from the cloud and slammed down again. They are the sort of blows that should cripple me, or at least stun me. But with the bloodstone singing at such intensity, I merely sit back up. Ember blinks, unbelieving. For a moment, as I reorient, we simply stare at each other. Then she screeches in wordless frustration and lunges for the crown. I spring as she charges. We collide, and the fight turns ugly. My teeth sink into her shoulder, leaving dents in the scales. She wraps her hands around my throat and squeezes. I slash with four limbs' worth of claws — which does little until a flailing arm gets within an inch of an eye, making her flinch and jerk her arms back. I release my jaw-grip, dropping below a clumsy grab attempt and headbutting her stomach with my horns. When she doubles over onto my back I wrap my arms around her leg and push the wrong way. She stiffens and brings an elbow down hard on my back; I howl as stars burst into my vision. I put my full strength into the leg hold, and she screams as her knee pops out of joint. That moment of pain gives me all the distraction I need. I dart between her legs, leap up to her back, and lock my legs around her waist. She reflexively buffets me with her wings — which flexes them to right where I need them. I grab a wing-joint with one claw, driving the other deep into the leathery membrane, and there is a sick ripping sound. "Separate the Embers!" Spike shouts from behind me, and a sea of claws grabs for me before I can reach past the useless wing to choke the life out of my duplicate. Neutralizing Spike's interference is the work of a moment, but it's a moment of stolen focus which allows Ember to thrash free. She kicks me in the chest as she goes, which staggers me long enough for her to whirl around and face me. I am back on her in an instant, regardless, and this time I do go for the throat, gaping my jaws and diving down at her. Without hesitation, Ember jams an arm into my mouth — wincing as I clamp down and fangs dig into her elbow. I shoot both my arms toward her throat instead, squeezing until I feel scales start to give. She makes a little gagging wheeze, and I dig a knee into her stomach to drive the air out faster. Spike shouts something in the background. Not this time — not when I am so close! Still locked in the struggle, I snatch for the bluntest emotion I can, my burning desire to dominate, and hurtle it outward. It does not accomplish anything — the surrounding dragons merely jerk and twist as the opposing bloodstones buffet them with withering waves of power — but right now, neutralizing them works to my favor. Ember's eyes gradually widen as she realizes that her whelp's interference will not save her this time. With a burst of desperate strength, she works her non-bitten arm free of our tangle of limbs — swinging at the inside of my elbow with all the leverage she can muster. It loosens my grip only long enough for a gasp of air, but it's enough — because as I start closing her throat again, there is a click from the back of her mouth, and I am consumed by a blast of fire. I shriek and fling myself backward, deep instincts screaming. And by the time I realize I am unhurt — cannot be hurt by such a cheap trick, not as a dragon — Ember has rolled far beyond my grip and staggered back upright again, gasping for breath. Desire wars with fear inside me. I need to finish her, need to prove myself and head off any possible dissent within my pack … but at the same time, my lupine instincts are absolutely refusing to leap forward toward this fire-lizard. Which is ridiculous. Dragon instincts yearn for fire, and those are singing inside me with equal urgency. I know which ones to listen to — but the bloodstone's power is to augment instincts, not suppress them, and I am drowning in my own power as I try to cage the wolf who fears. My body goes rigid as I struggle with whispers turned screams. Ember, as desperate as her own position is, seems to sense my weakness. She clenches her fangs against her body's pain and lunges forward for the crown. But I wrestle control of my body back for long enough to snap my eyes open, dropping into a crouch and hissing. She flinches back, and we retreat to an uneasy stalemate. As silence descends, instinct tells me to circle her — pace out the edges of our battleground while we look for weaknesses in each other. Given how much I'm throwing into neutralizing the wolf-fear, yielding to this urge seems like a good safety valve. So I let my body step into the spiral dance, and take the moment of relative calm to reassess. It's obvious that Ember has gotten the worst of our exchange. I have been thrown around like a bug in a hurricane, and been used to smash open half the boulders of this chasm-wracked stonescape, and yet the overflowing fountain of the Bloodstone Crown has faded every bruise and straightened every dent. Meanwhile, one of Ember's legs is angled wrong at the knee, one wing is useless tatters, and several parts of her body are discolored almost to purple. I need no cunning here, no weaknesses to exploit: simply keep fighting, and push her past her breaking point. Ember locks eyes with me, doing her best to match my circling in a shuffling one-legged dance. It is obvious she is performing a similar assessment — but then she opens her bloody muzzle and removes all doubt. "You're draining your bloodstone's power," she growls. "I can't hurt you like this." I say nothing, continuing to circle while I finally begin to curb my fire-fear. Better that I bide my time until her guard drops. "Distract her," Spike says from the air in the distance. "Maybe I can grab the crown —" "No," Ember says sharply. "You're the only reason we're not being attacked by every dragon here." "But Ember!" he protests. "You can't keep this up! She'll tear you apart, with that crown boosting her fighting instincts!" (I take a step inward to emphasize the point. Ember takes a cautious half-shuffle back, maintaining her distance. A murmur of excitement runs through my pack, ready with the slightest jostle to explode out into the electric thrill of the fight.) We are silent for a moment as my opponent digests this. Then her eyes widen. She whips a claw out to one side, her eyes never leaving mine. "Spike," she says with disconcerting calmness, "throw me the scepter." Spike — who I can finally see out of the corner of my eye as our circles progress — blinks. "But you just said —" "Spike," Ember says, and the urgency in her voice says all that needs to be said. Spike swallows, glances at the scepter, and flings it forward. Energy surges without limit as the bloodstones draw closer together — but I am still wrapped up in wrestling with the fire-fear, and it takes me a moment to comprehend that this signals a shift in our fight. The scepter is already in midair by the time I jolt out of my inner struggle and begin drawing from the crown. It is almost to her outstretched claw by the time I send that endless power surging through my body, turning me into something only describable as the perfect predator. I am in motion before conscious thought can even parse my leap, but my claws have only barely left the ground when the scepter touches her outstretched hand — — and the world wavers and freezes, its color draining back into the grey unfocus of the bloodstone. But this time, there is a tension, two crystals each trying to point their own spotlight, and I can feel my body and Ember's both frozen with the rest. Everything fuzzes. Then even the grey blurs away, and I stir to consciousness alone in a familiar cave. "Okay, I'm pretty sure this isn't real," Ember says from next to me, and I nearly jump out of my skin. There's my foe, inches from me, sitting casually against the wall of my home. She is exactly the dragon I was leaping at seconds ago — no, perhaps a little younger, a little thinner, with less focus to the determined edge I saw in our fight. I sit up. I am a wolf. Not the wolf I was before my dream of fire — but a four-legged predator, ice-blue of fur, wiry and hungry. Get out of my home, I say. I try to put malice into the thought, but I cannot feel any. My cave is a place of sanctuary, and my inner fire is, for the moment, distant. "Funny you should say that," Ember says dispassionately. And a discomforting thought flits through the back of my mind: this strange meeting is in my home, but the fight outside is in hers. No wonder she fights me so desperately. As I am processing that thought, her head flinches to the side. She avoids my gaze for a silent moment. What? I ask. "I didn't realize Dad was still leader where you came from," she says. Her voice wavers, and a strand of gentle thought whispers into my heart. Sympathy? The comprehension of everything she stands to lose presses relentlessly into my head; and I, too, am suddenly, similarly uncertain. So I try to give her an out. Do not be the fool who would rather die than lose, I think. I felt the trust of your whelp as he gave you his bloodstone. Flee this challenge, and you could take him and go establish another pack elsewhere. Her mouth twitches. "Okay," she says softly, "I was about to say, maybe I could help you with your dad … but no. This is not your world. Not your dragons. So you take your consolation prize and stuff it." I do not need another to challenge Father for me, I shoot back, fighting to reclaim the irritation I should be feeling. I need a pack. This is one I can take. So it is mine. Our impasse sinks in. The cave around us grows darker. Wind stirs in the night outside. With it, I can finally feel the churn of emotions — distantly, like an approaching weather front. "What are we even doing here?" Ember asks, finally seeming to take notice of her surroundings. I do not mean to respond. But I am stirring up my heart to reach for the power outside, drawn to the comforting familiarity of passion and instinct, and my thoughts form into something shared: Bloodstone. She is briefly silent. Then she responds, "I've seen enough weird pony stuff that I think I get this. The stones want us to be friends." We are not pack, I snap back. "No, not friends," Ember says, and it takes me a moment to realize she is not agreeing but correcting herself. "Okay. The bloodstones got all super-powered because they thought they were working for the same person. But we're not. And we're fighting. I think we're here because they don't want to blow each other up." I snort. What a stone wants is no concern of mine. "Yeah," she says after a moment of thought. "Same. Your crown needs to be destroyed." You do not have the strength, I state, feeling the power of the approaching storm build. You cannot even fully embrace your own bloodstone. Die or submit. Her muzzle curls into a sneer, and the wind outside howls all the louder. It is the sound of my inevitable victory … and I know she senses it, too. Her drive to conquer, her instinct to survive — those things come from my crown's domain. In the very act of fighting back, she adds to the power that perfects me. But then an odd glint reaches her eyes. And the corners of her mouth begin to curl upward. "You know," she says with an incongruous casualness, "I don't think I will." Outside, thunder rolls. The stone around us shifts and rumbles. And then, with an impossible roar, the storm at the core of all living beings blasts apart our sanctuary. The cave begins to dissolve as I drink in the flood. I devour it, become it, casting away everything it is not. Ember flinches at the wind, but braces herself and faces me. I can only laugh helplessly. What do you think this defiance gains you? You are crippled. My body is unstoppable. When we return from this place it will already be too late to avoid my leap. "Yeah, sure," she says. "And your fangs can cut the world in half or whatever. But you've got the bloodstone that controls instinct. And I've got the bloodstone that controls intellect. You know what that gives me?" What? I challenge. She smirks. "Tools," she says, "bitch." The world swirls back into grey, then into frozen color. Half a second has passed. I am hanging in midair, a body length from Ember. And in that half-second, she, too, has moved — her arms also accelerated by the near-limitless energy of the dueling bloodstones. Her body is twisted, muscles rippling, caught in a moment of consummate form. Her reflexes are not honed to my level — cannot be, by the nature of our powers — but they are sufficient. Because in her outstretched grasp, the scepter — artificially extending her reach well past mine — is arcing toward my head. Searing, crackling, writhing with such energy that even within the infinitesimal crawl of this moment its outflow cannot be contained. Time restarts. And the last thing that I see is the business end of the scepter unleashing its built-up energy in a brilliant explosion of light. PackI awaken, with a throbbing headache, from dreams of fire. The first thing I notice is that my face is cold. This is remarkable because the rest of me isn't. I whimper, murmur, and paw at my muzzle — and my fingers pass through empty air. I crack my eyes open. No longer is there a ridge of sky-blue scales in front of them, only the stubby silhouette of a nose. I bring my hand to my face, and it is blunt and fleshy. I scramble upright, adrenaline rising — and an enveloping shroud of fabric moves with me. I thrash my way free of the warm, thick fabric square, and find myself in a wide clearing in a familiar, sun-dappled forest. I am home. How? The last thing I remember is the world of fire — and the power of Ember's bloodstone blasting my apotheosis away. My hands shoot to my head. No horns. No crown! I jerk my hands down to my neck, groping for it there. Still nothing. No. No! A wail begins to burble from my throat. I have lost everything. "Gosh," a human voice murmurs from some distance behind me. "She looks pretty traumatized, Ember. Are you sure she'll be okay?" I bolt, like prey, not caring where. I crash into the bushes, then once within their comforting cover, whirl around and bare my teeth. On the far opposite side of the glade — making no move — are two humans: one clad in gentle gauzy greens and pink hair over sun-yellow skin, and one with fiery hair wearing thick black-stained animal skins. Then I see the smaller figures at their sides: an all-too-familiar wolf with ice-blue fur, and her misshapen purple companion. The gentle yellow human turns to the one who spoke first. "Sunset!" she chides. "Of course she's going to be traumatized if you startle her like that!" Sunset meekly apologizes. The wolf, however, bites back a growl — and I realize to my shock that I can still feel her, a subdued echo of the whispers the crown once murmured into my throat. Not enough to reach into her with, but enough that when she locks eyes with me, the murky churn of her emotions still whisper into my heart. I can sense, too, that she feels my fear and grief. She wears no crown, either. But it seems that she, like me, was left changed by that frozen moment with the bloodstones. I WANT to say that, after what she did, she can rot, Ember's voice echoes inside my head. (She is no longer speaking with her muzzle, and yet all the others react to her words. I am beginning to realize how deep the mark is which the combined bloodstones left on us.) Then I feel her frustration soften, and she lets out a breath, and pity churns in her gut. But I can't hate her, seeing her like this. She's just a me I might have been. And more lost than I ever was. Sunset nods. "I understand. Fluttershy and I will keep an eye on her. We're old hands at dealing with weird consequences of Equestrian magic." She glances back and forth between me and the wolf at her side and chuckles half-heartedly. "Though this is maybe a little weirder than usual." "Speaking of which," Spike's high voice injects, "is this weirding anyone else out? You're just letting this ... human kid ... run off into the woods and hoping everything will work out?" "Not into the woods," Fluttershy says, staring toward me with a sad smile. "Back to her home. Her life is out there. Her pack. Her friends. I'm going to make sure she knows we're here for her too, but she'll have to make the decision to trust us. If we had just locked her in a room somewhere to rehabilitate her, we would have scarred her forever." Well, she won't trust me any time ever, Ember says understatedly. She limps over to Spike, her spine stiff, still favoring one hindleg. But at least the Bloodstone Crown is gone for good. My face twists up, in the way that has never quite made up for my lack of ears to lay flat. I need no further reminders of my failure. I back away until brush obscures my tormentors, then wheel and flee. Halfway through the long, humiliating walk back to the cave, emotion overtakes me. I stagger over to a tree, sink against it, and throw my head back in a thin, weak, mournful howl. There is no reply. I ball up, wrapping my legs to my chest, feeling liquid streak down my cheeks and pool up on my knees. And I sit there, rocking back and forth, until my tears are cried out and my mind has nothing to do but race in circles around my defeat. I unwrap an arm, staring at it and flexing my frail, clawless fingers. Despite some tiny lingering touch of the lost crown inside me — barely enough to sense that my pack exists out there in the distance — I am weaker than I've ever been. Never mind what I did as a dragon; I don't even have the necklace any more which once made me a powerful wolf. There is no way I could ever lead a hunt now. If only I had strength like Ember's, I think desperately. If only I could do the things she did. I stew in that self-pity for several minutes. I close my eyes, and an even more relentless thought stabs in: that ice-blue wolf staring at me in pity. And that, finally, stirs up something besides grief. How dare she be more of a wolf than me here, after taunting me about her advantages over pure instinct? Then my thoughts finally slow as that churning uncovers the gleam of an idea. I look back down. I flex my fingers again, more thoughtfully. I glance around the forest floor until my sight settles on a fist-sized stone. Normally they are just obstacles on a hunt, hazards for scampering paws, but the memory of her hurtled boulders is all too vivid. I do not have a dragon's strength, nor its claws … and yet my form, with all its weaknesses, can do things no other wolf's can. Not even Ember's. I close my fingers around the rock, hefting it in my hand, and marvel for a moment at how perfectly these spindly, fleshy fingers curl around it. My first throw goes wide of the tree I aimed at, but as I scamper to retrieve the stone the thrill of the hunt is beginning to stir, and by the time the shadows have shifted I am hitting the tree more often than I am missing. Later, when a lucky shot sends a stunned bird crashing down to the ground from its perch, I let out a yip of triumph and tear into its flesh with my teeth. Never mind my instant regret as I spit out feathers — I feel ambition blazing within me again, like a fire rekindled. I hesitate for a moment at that thought. And ideas begin to whisper inside my brain. Father bolts to his paws as I finally approach the cave entrance several days later. There is alarm in his scent; his hackles are raised and fangs bared. However, his confusion is equally evident from the way he withholds his growl. He retreats, sidestepping back and forth as light dances around the cave from angles far at odds with the shadows outside. Finally, he barks sharply. Daughter — an inner whisper translates, as I allow some echo of the bloodstone's power within me to respond to his fumbling attempts to connect — what is the meaning of this? I square my feet off, and lower the burning tip of the branch I'm holding to the floor of the cave, causing its shadows to dance even more madly. My packmates back away in silence, ears flat. Hello again, father, I think. (Even though I can no longer insert whispers of need into my packmates, I can still reach out to the surface of their feelings and make certain my message carries to them all.) Tonight you should allow me to lead the hunt. No request, that. No demand. No challenge. A calm statement of fact. At that, he does allow a growl to stir up, and circles the fire warily. Do you think threatening the pack with fire changes anything? Leading the hunt is for — — the biggest and strongest, I interrupt. I bounce the tip of the burning branch to punctuate, watching the shadows lurch and half my packmates scramble back from the light. This is no threat, I say. It is a demonstration of my strength. I am both wolf and more than wolf, Father. I am flame without fire. I am fangs without a muzzle. I am bloodstone without bloodstone. And I am the hunt without the hunt. Let me lead, and this magic will be the pack's. Then I straighten up, standing to my full height and spreading my other arm. Were Father fully upright, my head would reach barely to his shoulder, but cowed as my packmates are, I tower over even his crouching form. And as far as size — I believe I am tall enough to qualify. I emphasize this by thrusting my arm upward, whipping the branch in a sudden arc from side to side. The rush of wind extinguishes the thin fire at the end, illuminating the air with a short-lived shower of sparks and leaving the cave in comfortable darkness. I take the stick, now tipped by a gently glowing ember, and plunge its base into the soft ground just inside the cave, watching thick smoke coil up from the tip and chase a motley cloud of insects outside. Then I turn around without explanation and walk downwind. When Patient-Leap trots after me, ears perked in curiosity, Father begrudgingly follows, the others at his shoulders. And it is not long before they scent the fresh meat my own blunted nose can no longer directly discern. In the clearing by the sunning-stone, I have taken two of my sharpened sticks and thrust them tip-first into the earth, stringing between them one of the vines I gathered from the thickets by the river. Hanging on the vine are the eight still-moist fish I speared from the water shortly before my return, and at the base of my makeshift pantry are the birds and squirrels I killed earlier that afternoon with the increasingly steady aim of my rocks. Here is tonight's hunt, I say, feeling the hunger rise in my packmates. A gift from my magic. I crouch — for the first time since returning — deferentially to Father. Tell me to lead the hunt tomorrow, and you will find out what I can do when we run. His shock quickly dissipates, to be replaced by an all too rare sensation swelling within him. Pride. Then he howls for Hunt Leader Ember, and my pack adds their voices. I join in last, adding the final pitch, the one that joins our sounds together into something greater. And I close my eyes and bask in the sound, all the fire I will ever need burning within me. Author's Note The story of the Embers and their bloodstones continues in the sequel, the full-length novel Even Changelings Get The Blues!
FangThe pack stirs to life at dusk, and I awaken from dreams of fire. It is a slow and confusing awakening. The scent of my fellow wolves is distant and muted, even though they are so close I can feel the press of their bodies, and there is heat and light on my face. Then Father lopes out of our cave with the impatient whuff of an early riser, and his shadow passes over me, and I realize that I opened my eyes into the twilight sun. I turn my head and blink the light away, but the world won't come fully into focus. It takes my sleep-addled brain a moment to realize why. Then I fumble around on the cave floor for the thin circlet of silver metal I set aside when I went to sleep — dragging it out from underneath one of Thick-Pelt's sprawling forepaws — and lift it up. It would rest atop my head were I Father’s size, and were I a larger wolf I could at least balance it on my ears, but the circlet slips easily past my forehead and my nose, and slides down my neck until the embedded shard of bloodstone nestles against my throat. Sudden heat warms my chest, and then it is as if flame is burning away the fog over my senses — there's the thick musk of Howls-Off-Key, and the subtler scent of Patient-Leap just behind him, and Sharp-Eye and Harries-The-Herds and Thick-Pelt and Wide-Paws, and the commanding scent of Father drifting in on the breeze from outside. The bright, alarming hues of the forest recede back into their usual comforting muted greys, and the shadows in the cave sharpen and fill in with detail. As I am reorienting to the waking world, Father throws his head back and looses a mighty howl. The stone against my throat pulses. Even though I need no translation, it provides one, whispering words into my core that buzz up my spine into my skull and outward to my ears: Shake off your sleep. We hunt. Howls-Off-Key, as usual, is the first to lope outside and join in — a simple affirmation, adding his voice in a grating duet. (If only he put half as much work into helping the pack as he does into sucking up to Father.) Sharp-Eye and Wide-Paws, as usual, fall in line with him, turning the duet into a ragged chorus, and despite my rough start I scramble out on their tails and add my thin voice to the mix. Thick-Pelt and Harries-The-Herds reluctantly join in with their usual waking sluggishness. Patient-Leap, who was first to follow her older brother outside, waits until last, assessing the harmony — then adds her own howl in at a pitch that joins our sounds together into something greater. It is a role I often take, but the lingering visions of fire have stirred something hot and dangerous up inside me, and tonight I am bristling with ambition. Were my throat as strong as those of my packmates, I could express that with a few choice yaps in my breathing-moments between howls. But I have different strengths. Even though the bloodstone at my neck is not mine, it still listens when I turn my focus inward and push words into it, the way it pushes its translation-whispers into me. Father, I think, let me lead tonight. The bloodstone's call echoes around the pack. I feel the shadowy brush of their minds lurking at the edge of my perception. I can feel my thought penetrate into them with the clench of razor fangs, and feel my desire embed in their hearts and take root, pulsing through their bodies and shifting the timbre of their howls in support — Then a short yap from Father, so sharp I flinch. No! The bloodstone's spell snaps, and feedback blots out my senses for a moment. By the time I recover, the howl has disintegrated into a confused, discordant mess, and Father has wheeled upon me, cuffing me with a forepaw the size of my head. I yelp in shock, rolling over and showing him my belly. He bares his teeth, and my necklace vibrates as his thoughts slam in. You are weak! Leading the hunt is the duty of the biggest and strongest. In moments like this, it does not matter that I am attuned to the bloodstone in a way no other wolf could hope to match. It does not matter that I know the mysteries of its whispers, nor that I can channel its power to turn my spindly, stunted form into a killing machine surpassing any of my packmates. It does not matter, because the bloodstone is Father's, and it responds to his daughter only to the extent that he tolerates it. Yes, father, I desperately think, whining to emphasize the point. He stares down at me, teeth gleaming, a quiet growl filling his throat. The others pace around uncertainly — shaking off the lingering instincts my brief touch awakened inside — then do their duty and gather behind Father in silent support. Still his growling continues, and I begin to wonder if I have crossed a line which deserves harsher punishment than his reprimand. Then he wheels abruptly, loping toward the woods with the pack in tow. I scramble upright, slinking after them. And though there is mockery in Howls' eyes when he glances at me, none comment on my return to the pack. It is a warm evening, and the air tastes dry. Prey will be driven by thirst to the watering-hole — it is the only logical place to hunt. This does not seem to occur to the others, who seem uncertain as to our destination; they are merely content to follow Father's unerring route there. I ache to point out the obvious to them, to prove my skills, but I will not risk a second reprimand so quickly. Father crouches into the brush as we get close, his enormous blue-gray form barely concealed by the bushes which grow far over our heads. We all go silent, creeping up toward the rise over the watering-hole, and survey the animals below for targets. The usual profusion of rabbits; some round raccoons, putting on fat for their overwintering; a small cluster of deer. No fawns at this time of year, but there's an old buck who looks like he was on the losing end of a mating fight. Walks with a limp. One antler cracked, one reduced to a jagged nub. I don't need the bloodstone to know that we have all selected our target. Animals freeze and sniff the air as we stealthily descend the slope toward the watering-hole. Then the first rabbit bolts, and the first deer startles, and soon prey are scattering and we have abandoned our concealment to charge into the maelstrom of motion. The old buck leaps, stumbles, springs away; with every landing his lame leg folds and unbalances him, and though he initially outpaces us it is clear he has not much fight left. We spread out, crashing through shadowed brush in pursuit. We loose howls as we sprint, and the sounds keep us coordinated like a single beast even as my packmates vanish into the forest. I let the song of the bloodstone flow into me as the forest blurs by, and savor its rush of power. Everything begins singing to its pounding rhythm. My heart throbs, my muscles pump, my breathing quickens. I can smell the panic of our prey in the eddies of air kicked up by the hunt's passage, and anticipation stokes the fire already burning inside me. Then there is a series of mighty crashes ahead and to the left, as our prey's leg finally gives out and he tumbles across the ground and straight through some brambles. Sharp-Eye is closest; he charges around the thorns and lunges for our prey, darting in with teeth bared. I gather the bloodstone's power and focus it in my legs, springing over the bushes as Sharp-Eye targets the buck's flank. The buck shrieks and lashes out with a hoof. Sharp-Eye has to abort his charge to avoid it, and the buck is bracing to leap again just as I land on his back. The extra weight staggers him, and as his lame leg gives out, I hear a sickening snap. He falls to his belly, a second leg useless, and thrashes the remaining two madly as I wrap my legs around his barrel and arms around his neck. Sharp-Eye circles, looking for an opening, but his teeth are no longer necessary. The bloodstone's power roars and surges in my veins, and I laugh as I dig my knees into the buck's ribs and squeeze my arm tighter, closing his throat. Unable to dislodge me, unable to breathe, his struggles weaken quickly, and all he can do is roll over onto his back to try to crush me with his greater weight. But with the fire of the bloodstone burning inside me, all that accomplishes is to cost him his remaining leverage. The rest of the pack circles in, teeth bared, staying clear of the buck's still-dangerous hooves as they look for an opening. But this is my kill now. Before the others can intervene, I shift my grip and sharply jerk the buck's head sideways. There is a loud crack, and his body spasms and goes limp. I let the buck roll off me as Father lopes up. He surveys the kill — an animal twice my size, taken down without a single tooth-mark — and turns his muzzle to stare at me. I rise to a crouch, flicking some leaves and dirt off of my skin, saying nothing. I have made my point; there is nothing more to say. Finally, he lets loose a grudging, wordless whuff. Then he clamps his jaws around the buck's shoulder, jerking his head back and tearing loose a huge strip of glistening muscle. The metallic scent of blood fills the air, and the pack descends. Soon teeth are tearing at pelt as my fellow wolves satiate their hunger, and I, too, am digging my fingers into the gouge Father made, clenching my fists around wet bits of meat and ripping them free, stuffing them into my mouth, feeling the stone at my throat exult as blood runs down my chin and drips to spot my flesh. We are walking back to the cave with full bellies, and something on the wind is wrong. My packmates keep scenting the air, then keep glancing around, puzzled. I cannot smell anything. Rather, I can, but whenever I try to focus on it, the bloodstone at my neck goes silent rather than enhancing my senses with its whispers. Even Father seems wary of something beyond our perception, giving us a low rumble deep in his throat. "Stay alert," the necklace would tell me if it were translating, and its silence makes me itchier than anything out in the night. I slow next to some spindly pine trees and gather my focus, pushing deep into the heart of the bloodstone. It wriggles away from my mind's grasp like a river-eel through teeth. It is as if it is already under the thrall of someone else — but Father's will is quiescent, and my packmates wouldn't have the skill to speak to the stone even if I felt them reaching out for it. So I try something different. I reach up to the necklace with a hand, curling fingers around the stone, and relax my arm muscles, feeling the stone gently tug at the surface of my palm. Whatever it's reacting to is downhill somewhere, in the valley toward the rising moon. I let the stone resettle against my throat, holding onto the sensation of that tugging, and suddenly break away from the pack, loping down the slope from the moonlit ridge we're cresting. Father turns his head to watch me go, but says nothing as I leave. The hunt is over. The others plan to rest for the night, I know where home is, and if I injure myself chasing phantoms, it is my own fault. I creep through shadowy woods, meandering around snags and leaping over creeks, letting the restless stone at my throat pull me into the unknown. I soon find myself farther into the valley than I have ever gone. The forest gradually thins out, with endless fields of severed tree stumps telling a story that the land was not always this open. Everywhere is the faint scent of human — the tall, fleshy things which resemble me, but cover themselves in musty second skins and rip the land apart which they claim with their scent. The world around me begins to show signs of their spoor. There are trails which have been trampled so repeatedly that the dirt underfoot is a hard-packed scar across the earth. There are strange, straight, denuded trees smelling of pitch, whose few branches support lines stretching off into the distance that softly squeal at the far edge of my hearing. There are discarded cylinders of rounded, transparent material, inscribed with odd runes, smelling faintly of something sickly-sweet within their depths. Then I reach a wide, river-flat trail of tar and dark stone, yawning like an abyss in the cold moonlight. Two four-legged forms are on the far side, walking along an unnaturally straight white line covering the stone, and the bloodstone at my throat begins tugging wildly. The taller of the two forms — a lithe, small wolf; with fur an ice-blue not dissimilar to my skin, and ears flattened back so far they almost seem to have a downward curl — stops midstride and looks in my direction. I freeze, crouching in the shadow at the edge of the trees, suddenly thankful I had the sense to approach from downwind. It takes the shorter figure a few steps to halt himself. He has the scent of wolf about him, but his fur has an unnatural hue the color of grapes, and puffs of leaf-colored fluff ring his head. His legs are stubby, his nose blunt, his eyes large, and some sort of necklace dangles around his neck, wide and dark with gleams of smooth shiny metal throughout. Everything about him is out of proportion, as if someone had taken a wolf made out of mud and pushed and pulled and prodded it into harmlessness. "Ember?" he says to the wolf at his side. "Are you okay?" (Says. Speaks. He opens his mouth, and a series of impossibly varied tones come out, alternately rough and melodic, clipped and slurred — in a way I have only ever heard from the few humans I've seen in the far distance. And yet when the tones hit my ears, there is meaning in them, the same way that there is meaning in the whispers of the bloodstone. I find that I can understand his mouth-noises as readily as if he were yapping and howling the speech of my kind.) The ice-blue wolf softly growls, deep in her throat, eyes boring into my cloak of shadow. Then she, too, speaks. "There's something out there," she says, the corners of her muzzle peeling back into a scowl. In the thin cover of the bushes alongside the rock-river, I still the trembling in my muscles and hold my breath. These strange wolves and their speech; the unnaturalness of my surroundings; the bizarre behavior of the bloodstone at my neck — it all combines to make me feel very much the prey. But if I flee, they will sense me, so I imitate the terror-halt of the rabbit, waiting to bolt until there is no other choice. The small one freezes too, his enormous eyes flicking around the forest alongside their path. "I can feel it, too," he says, subdued and hesitant. "Magic. Like … some sort of pull. Do you think it's the crown?" "I don't know, Spike," Ember says. "There's something … wrong … about it. Something ..." The ice-blue wolf's eyes dart once more around the darkened woods; she licks her lips, then swallows, looking more and more uncertain. "...Hungry." The two stand in uneasy silence. The bloodstone at my neck, too, remains silent, other than its insistent pull toward these strangers. But I do not need the bloodstone to see fear stiffen their limbs. Spike's nose wrinkles, and he sniffs the air. "Do you smell anything weird?" Ember does, too — a sharp, exaggerated inhalation, followed by a cough as scents overwhelm her. "Just, what's their name, humans. And dogs." "Wolves." When he corrects her, Spike reaches up with a paw to fidget with his necklace. "We're ... definitely not the biggest things in this forest." "I'm not afraid of beasts," Ember snaps, fur puffing out. But after a glance at Spike, she relents: "On the other claw, we're not here to pick fights." "Yeah," Spike says. "I saw a ranch down the road. Let's find some shelter and get a fresh start at dawn." The two begin shuffling forward, then walking, then simultaneously break into a hurried lope that's not quite a full run. The tug of the bloodstone at my neck changes directions as they go, but despite the additional distance, only continues to increase in intensity. I stay frozen until they are dots in the distance, only then allowing myself to breathe out. I creep forward toward the rock-river, doing an antsy little dance at its edge, and force myself to press a finger to its surface. It is smooth and cold. I hustle across it to the dirt on the far side, heart pounding in my chest, then lean back over it and inhale over the bright white line they were walking along, hoping for some greater understanding of why these visitors disturb me so. The thick, tarry scent of the rock-river assaults my nostrils, and the volatile, unnatural scent of the white line coating its surface; but above both of those is the cloying fake-wolf scent of the small one and a deeper musk that is indisputably familiar. It finally clicks: Me. "Ember" smells like me. The bloodstone is tugging me down the rock-river toward these bewildering visitors with such intensity that I have to square my legs off and lean against the pull. I turn my back on the strange canines, and begin loping in the other direction. I don't know who they are. I don't know what they were speaking about. I don't want to meet them and find out why they are driving the bloodstone — my bloodstone — so crazy. But I want … no, need … to know more. So I track their scent toward its source. After some time, the path of the canines' approach veers from the rock-river onto a wide dirt trail. Then from that trail to a much smaller one, zig-zagging up a hillside. Then the trail forks, and the scent leads onto the lesser-used of the two, going back down the hill again. Always, unerringly, they stick to the path, and even though I am again surrounded by trees I am no less uncomfortable than their scent suggests they were. What kind of wolves would stay so consistently out of the shelter of the woods? Finally, finally, their old and faint scent veers off into the wilderness. But I am barely out of sight of the pathway before I hit a dead end. The scent goes through a light smattering of bushes into a large clearing at the base of a cliff, and the scent-trail meanders around the clearing for a while before leaving it on the far end, headed right for the rock wall. I lope over, wondering if my senses have led me astray. The cliff does not smell of the strange canines. The grass underneath it does. But as I get close enough to scent it, the cliff begins to shimmer in the ghostly moonlight. It wavers, distorts, and little sparks of light whirl around the area like short-lived fireflies. And something inside of me sings. This cliff-light feels like the bloodstone when it's whispering to me … and yet not. It has no words, no will, no purpose; it simply is, in a way that none of my senses can pick up save for the part of me which controls the bloodstone. And to that sense, it is comforting, like slipping into the water of a hot spring on a cold day. Fascinated, I reach for the wall of the cliff. My outstretched finger makes contact. And the world around me falls away.
FlameI awaken into a dream of fire. I am in a steep-walled, tiny valley — more of a pit — and beyond the cramped ledge on which I rest, the earth itself is liquid fire. It boils and churns, moving like water, and it glows so bright the night is like day. The air is permeated with heat; it dries my throat as I breathe in. And yet my body drinks all that heat in, whispering for more. Some deep lupine instinct is screaming at me that fire is danger. But the scene is so surreal that instinct, for once, is an afterthought. I fumble an arm loose from underneath my crumpled body, bracing a palm against the ground by my muzzle. Claws spread where my fingers should be. I blink and look again. I am not me. Rather: I am not what I was. Gone is the pale, fleshy, blunted mess that could not keep up with her pack without the power of the bloodstone. In its place is a lithe, reptilian body, honed to perfection. All over my body are fine, ice-blue scales, supple yet thick, and though I am within a furnace my core is not even warm. My fingers come to jagged points capable of casually ripping through skin and muscle. I run a long, skinny tongue around the inside of my elongated muzzle, and my teeth are equally sharp. I push myself upright, and a tail uncoils to keep my body steady and centered. Back muscles flex on instinct, and I become aware of another addition as batlike wings shift and resettle. The world is more vivid than I've ever felt. I take a deep breath, and I do not need the bloodstone's power to scent the searing wind. I can hear every burp, every murmur of the song of the bubbling earth. My vision is bloodstone-sharp, but with all the brightness of color I see without it. I am the me of my dreams. I am perfect. The me I was meant to be. I leap up onto the wall of the fire-pit, scrambling up toward its rim. My body responds with precision and power, claws gouging into rock and catching as I ascend. Once, I misjudge a claw-hold, and my wings beat on reflex as I start to skid back toward the flowing earth, cancelling the drag of gravity while I readjust my grip. In moments I have zigzagged my way out of the pit to survey this new world of fire and power. The fire-pit stands atop a towering mountain, and this new world stretches out to the horizon in all directions. The moon is dipping toward the ground and the sky opposite it is beginning to lighten, and in that liminal illumination I can see a blasted wasteland of jagged rock. Confusion takes me for a moment. Where are the forests? What sort of prey could live in such desolation? I reflexively reach to my throat to touch the bloodstone, hoping it will whisper to me of the prey I cannot smell — and panic rises in me. It is not there. The panic, fortunately, is brief. As I whip my head back to survey the ledge I arrived on, I can feel an unexpected weight atop it. I reach up, and my claws whack a curling white horn jutting from the side of my temple. The jolt shifts something on my forehead, and I realize that the circlet is sitting atop my head. It is smaller than usual — fitting snugly, as if it were meant to be there. And it is throbbing with power — but passively, in perfect silence. It, too, has changed. The bloodstone reacts without hesitation or reservation to my thoughts. It does not release its power in controlled bursts as if afraid to overstep Father's approval; I call upon the bloodstone, and before I even understand the change, an impossible strength is surging through my body. I think to wonder whether I am simply beyond Father's call, but no: there are voices in the distance beyond my senses, whispering in the darkness of my thoughts, and among them is a massive slumbering presence that I know is him. I reach my mind out and press at his, and it is pliable to my touch just as my packmates always were. Somehow, Father is here, yet the bloodstone is mine. A thrill runs through me. If the bloodstone is mine … then so is the pack. I drop to all fours to begin sprinting in the direction of those distant reptilian murmurs, but even with the bloodstone's power surging through me, this body feels unnatural that way; I settle for an upright lope, then accelerate into huge bounds as my instincts and my form begin to work in concert. Soon I am launching myself into the sky with each leap, feeling the wings on my back catch air and propel me forward into a diving glide down the mountainside, and the landscape rushes by with impossible speed as I hurtle toward the rising sun. In the whispers of the bloodstone, I can feel the familiar presences toward which I travel draw nearer and nearer. Then, without warning, the slope underneath me drops sharply away, and I find myself soaring over a broad, flat valley with countless caves dotting the cliffsides. I rocket toward the ground, tucking my wings for the sheer joy of the impact, and land with a boom that reverberates across the rocky plain. The weight of my impact deforms the stone, my muscles singing with such power that even breaking the earth takes but a thought. I reach into my bloodstone crown, and see the scales on my muzzle gleam with reflected red light as I draw out even more power, sending it outward, amplifying its call across my pack: Shake off your sleep. Then I feel the stirring of my people in response, and I realize how inadequate the word "pack" is. I have been focusing on the few familiar presences in my mental landscape. Father. Howls-Off-Key and his lackeys. Thick-Pelt and Wide-Paws. Patient-Leap — though her presence is so distant I have no words for it. The rest of them are here, but they are quickly overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of the reptilian forms which begin slithering and stomping and stalking out of their cliffside retreats. Every last cave contains a beast. (A dragon, the bloodstone whispers. I am a dragon. Lord of the dragons, by the bloodstone's power.) And every single dragon reacts to my summons. My enthusiasm for a hunt wavers. The size of my pack is overwhelming my instincts. All I can do is scamper up onto a nearby rock pillar as dragons of every hue and size and description converge. I glance around the crowd, trying to make sense of it. That doesn't help. I fall back to picking occasional faces out of the swarm which feel familiar. That red one, for instance: thick, grumpy, a head over my height. The feel of his mind is that of Howls-Off-Key, ambitious yet craven. The skinny ones constantly behind him, white and black of scale, deferential to his power so long as there is no greater command: Sharp-Eye and Harries-The-Herds. Thick-Pelt, sitting near the back with a vacant stare: a subdued green with an awkward gait and straying eyes and lolling tongue. But I repeatedly lose sight of them as the crowds shift, so great are my people's numbers. If I were to take my pack, and each of those wolves were themselves a pack, and each wolf in that pack were a pack, those wolves would still be dwarfed by the number of faces staring up at me in confused obeisance. "It's too early, Ember," one whines from the front, a lumpy grass-green one with stubby wings. "What'd you call us here for?" That only confuses me further. Wanting to delay the hunt is understandable, if contemptible. But not understanding the one thing which brings the pack together? Is this one a cub that needs to be taught? Is he feigning ignorance as a challenge? I am trying to figure out what to do when the earth trembles, and I turn to see Father stalking up behind me. My focus evaporates in shock. He is no dragon, but a mountain. The entirety of my body is the size of one of his claws. His body casts the valley in shadow. However, he approaches the pillar — lesser dragons scrambling out of his way, lest they be flattened by a careless clawfall — and lowers his head in respect. Then his eyes lock in on my crown as I am remembering to breathe. "Ember!" he booms. "I see your mission to retrieve the Bloodstone Crown from the other world was a success!" A murmur ripples through the crowd. Father's head jerks away from me, and a snarl curls onto his muzzle. "When my daughter the Dragon Lord succeeds," he roars at the gathered dragons, "you cheer!" The dragons behind me erupt in whoops and hollers. The sound is near-deafening. I whip around, crouching low to the pillar, baring my teeth. But I let my hackles subside as I feel the emotions of my dragons through the bloodstone: the cacophony of birdlike shrieks is a sign of support. A voice rises above the madness as the cheering dies away. "Yeah, yeah, some success," Howls-Off-Key says with a dramatic roll of the eyes. "Now she can dress up with a fashion accessory that matches her scepter." I feel a growl rumble low in my chest. Howls is always like this. Testing the line — seeing how much he can get away with. Father had no tolerance for it, but Father is no longer in charge, and now this challenge is mine to suppress. "Well, at least she did one thing right," Howls says as his lackeys snicker, poorly hiding their muzzles behind claws. "Got rid of that pony-loving shrimp." He bares his fangs at me and lifts his eyeridges, in a gesture which looks threatening but which the bloodstone's whispers tell me is some sort of mating display. "You want some red scales to go with that trinket?" Behind him, Sharp-Eye glances up at my expression. His smirk instantly vanishes, and he pokes Howls' shoulder. "Garble," he whispers, but that's as far as he gets. Howls-Off-Key — no, Garble — is a head larger than me and far more muscular. I am not confident enough in my new body to take him in a toe-to-toe dominance battle. But I have power resting on my forehead beyond anything he can imagine. So I reach into the bloodstone, and through it, into him. My many moons of experimentation with the whispers of the bloodstone circlet have given me a good idea of the limits of its power. When it reaches into others, it does not connect to the part which makes them think and act. It reaches deep into their core, their instinct. So when I want one of my packmates to do something, I do not command them — instead, I make them need it, make their blood rise and breath quicken at the thought. Or, when necessary, I do the opposite. I stare into Garble's eyes, and make him feel like prey. I feel, more than see, his body stiffen. I crouch into a ready stance, slowly flexing one claw, and savor the terror I have unleashed into his veins at the sight of me. I have, however, also learned that fear is a dangerous tool; the cornered prey sometimes can lash out, and he is certainly the type to. So I also channel the adrenaline surging inside of him, shifting his hunger from the sexual to the literal, making him need the hunt. Then I throw back my head and howl, and make him need to join my pack. Garble is simple, as Howls was, and once his blood is up he is mine. He joins in with no hesitation, with no thought to the befuddled stares on the faces of his fellows. My voice is thin and high, but firm and melodic in a way my old body's never was; his is cracked and grating, but the urgency in it makes up for the finesse he lacks. It is a bizarre duet, lonely and lopsided, but the meaning of it is clear: he submits. I hear the murmuring of the others stir up. They understand my lesson, but they do not understand what he feels. So I send a surge of power out from the stone, and call out to all their instincts the same way I did at sunrise: Howl. And one by one, as a wave of need ripples outward from my pillar and staggers my dragons, they blink and twitch and feel the flames of desire ignite. And they throw back their heads, adding their voices to the chorus, and my pack-of-packs-of-packs sings as one. Then the wind shifts, and there is a new scent on it. Something besides my packmates and the fire-blasted landscape — something utterly foreign to my senses, but alive. I silence my dragons with a thought and turn toward the wind blowing down off the mountain, and a sea of heads swivels with mine. Hovering above the cliff in the distance is a small equine form, its night-blue mane and tail whipping in the backdraft as its sky-blue wings pump to keep it in position. Like the humans of my home, it wears a covering of second skin, though I have never on a mammal seen skin of shiny yellow and blue. There is also something covering its eyes, but the pony pushes the pair of dark circles up to its forehead with a hoof as it stares back at us. It — no, he — clears his throat. "Ah, Princess Ember?" the winged stallion says, voice hitching high. "I'm, uh, Soarin, and I was sent to bring an urgent message through the portal for you and Spike, but, umm, if this is a bad time …" I can smell the pony's fear on the wind. I bare glistening fangs, my tail lashing in anticipation of a meal. My dragons, on the other paw, seem suddenly less certain; the belly-hunger I stir through the bloodstone is meeting a confused resistance. But when I subtly shift to the thrill of chase and catch, the hesitation vanishes. Even if they have all fed recently enough to not need another meal, the hunt is life — and my hunger to lead one is hunger enough for us all. "I, uhh …" The stallion is openly sweating now, as his head swivels around the valley full of attentive predators. "You know, I'm just gonna go." A snaky, wiry dragon who has been silently slithering up the cliff suddenly leaps at him, jaws snapping shut just shy of the stallion's hooves. He yelps and bolts. It is like a spark on dry grass. My dragons sense prey, and surge forward in a massive wave. Behind them, I fill my lungs, loosing another howl as I leap from the stone pillar. I surge forward through — and over — the slower members of the crowd, leaping off their backs with mighty bloodstone-propelled kicks. The howl echoes back from the far edges of my pack, and then I am carried away in the sound as I join the chase, countless voices united in a single exaltation: We hunt.
BloodI fear my first hunt will be a grand build-up to a quick, ignominious kill. I have a perfected body, an obeisant bloodstone, and a pack enormous beyond counting, all focused upon a single terrified beast. I needn't have worried. The winged pony darts away like a bolt of lightning, and by the time I have crested the valley, he is already far in the distance. It is enough to make me hesitate; there are some prey which one must take by surprise before they flee out of reach, and perhaps I have chosen our target poorly. However, my pack is no longer wolf, but dragon — and once the bloodstone's hunt-lust has them on the scent, they rise to the challenge. Long, thin serpents rise from my ranks, beating enormous wings that jet them forward with startling speed, and charge toward the stallion. They close the gap quickly, then as one, dart out to one side, overtaking him and driving him sideways. He adjusts his course, and again they spread out and overshoot, forcing a tighter turn. He glances back at the greater mass of slower dragons toward which he is being herded, and curses, and suddenly plunges into the midst of his harriers. That is when we find out our prey is also a fighter. He twists through the air as a group of wing-snakes dive at him, lashing out with a hoof to send one reeling and dropping from the fight. He expertly weaves between two others, baiting them into colliding in midair. A fourth lunges for his outstretched wing, only to be buffeted by an errant flap. The rest begin circling, darting in occasionally when they think they see an opening. The wing-snakes are light, frail things, capable of little more than this sort of harassment. None are lucky enough to do damage — but regardless, every clash slows the stallion down and gives the rest of us time to close in. He breaks through the cloud of wing-snakes toward open air; they regroup and use their faster speed to overtake him again. He veers away; they let him, and stay on the far side of him from the larger pack, so that the best the stallion can do is circle us without gaining distance. And all the while, he tires. The vanguard of my larger fliers is almost within striking distance when the stallion changes strategy. Abruptly, he plunges into a steep dive, hurtling into gravity's embrace with such momentum that not even the wing-snakes can keep up. I am not far from his impact point, in my position near the front of the ground-runners pacing the stallion's harried flight, and my pulse quickens as I veer toward him — only for adrenaline to flare as I realize his true intention. Suddenly, I am upon the lip of a narrow, jagged canyon snaking its way through the shattered landscape. The stallion dives past me and plunges in, heedless of the unforgiving walls a claw's width from his wingtips. My only option to avoid an ugly crash is to leap, putting as much of my weight on my left leg as I can to angle my jump. I land heavily on the far lip of the chasm, tuck my wings, and somersault through my momentum, leaping out of the shoulder roll back to my claws. Nearly without breaking stride, I resume my sprint, curving back toward the gash in the earth. The bravest of the wingsnakes plunge into the canyon after the stallion — only to collide with the walls en masse, their greater wingspans snagging the rock. A few of the scrawnier fliers take their place, lithe enough to maneuver, but the leather of their wings doesn't give them the stallion's precision, and they quickly begin falling behind as they struggle for a safe flight path. Two enterprising dragons change tactics, putting on a burst of speed and diving into the canyon in front of the stallion — and the rest veer sharply away when the stallion body-checks them straight into solid stone. The interceptors tumble flailing down to the canyon floor, shrieking until impact and then lying there whimpering. Soon, the majority of my hunters are circling uselessly in midair, doing little more than waiting for the pony to flee his cover. On the ground, we fare little better: only I and a few of my fastest runners are keeping up with him, sprinting along the canyon lip and bounding from side to side in giant wing-assisted leaps whenever the canyon swerves too sharply. Then our prey pulls one last trick from his reserve. When the canyon straightens out for a moment, and he can focus on something besides maneuvering, he lifts a forehoof and then sharply jabs his elbow into his side. And the canyon behind him erupts into fluorescent, foul-smelling smoke. None of us are close enough behind him to catch a mouthful of it; the most it accomplishes is forcing the runners and I to veer cautiously away from the canyon's lip. But then the stallion flares his wings, kick-flips during a momentary stall, and doubles back. Immediately, he dives, vanishing further into the chasm — leaving nothing but a long, roiling cloud of overwhelming scent to mask the canyon's opening. My dragons screech in outrage, pulling back. I silence them with a glare. Listen! I think through the bloodstone, and they are flooded with the anticipation of outwaiting a rabbit thinking himself safe in a bolt-hole. A hush settles over my pack, and I set my ears to straining for clues within the smoke. The stallion is too winded to make it a challenge. His heavy gasps comes from near the center of the cloud — and several body-lengths below it. As I am building a mental picture of the canyon from the subtle echoes of his motions, I hear a few pebbles dislodge amid the tap of hooves on stone; he has found a tiny ledge to brace himself on, and is resting to regather the energy for another sprint. (That's less prudent than it is necessary; were it not for the bloodstone singing within me, I, too, would have been pushing myself to my limit in our chase. Even my dragons are settling in to the rock, tongues lolling out; the ones still in flight are wheeling wide, lazy glide-circles on thermals.) But as his labored breathing finally begins to slow, it silences for a moment, and a voice rings up through the mist. "Ember!" the stallion shouts. "You don't have to do this." Hisses of amusement ripple through my pack. Now that the fire is in their blood, they recognize his words for the absurdity they are. There is nothing but the hunt. It is as much a part of life as the breath he wastes. "Princess Twilight worried something like this might happen," Soarin shouts. "The crown's instinct magic taking someone over once in dragon claws." I flex my hindclaws, drawing them up to prevent them clicking on the rock, and pad forward to the cliff-lip in silence. "But we can fix it. If you're still in there, if you can hear me … take the crown off." I leap. I burst through the smoke directly above him, claws extended. He yelps and flinches, and the motion causes his hoof to slip. His wings jerk open to compensate, and his body lurches off to the side. It saves him, if barely. We collide, roughly bouncing off the rock and then plunging down the canyon in a flailing, spinning mass which not even instinct can control. I lash out with fang and claw. He flails hooves. My wings flex, his beat, they tangle. And then a flailing elbow jars my head for a moment, and my back slams into a rock outcropping, and I tumble down toward the earth as the stallion's wings catch and flare. I manage to open my wings enough to slow my descent, then lash out and stab my claws into the cliff wall, leaving long gouges as the rock screeches in protest. Far above, the stallion struggles to a hover, staring wide-eyed as I halt my descent. I snarl at him, tearing giant hunks of power from my bloodstone as if it were a fresh kill, then gather energy in my legs and spring out from my wall-perch. I careen toward the opposite wall, leaping again, zig-zagging up toward the stallion with a burst of speed that shocks even me. He curses, flapping heavily to dart up into the smoke, and that is where I catch up to him again. This time, the collision is purposeful, and I am ready. My sequence of leaps has given me the momentum of an upward-falling tree, and I tuck my wings and slam straight in. I hit the stallion off-center, plowing into his flanks and upending him as we burst out of the cloud. He bucks, but all that does is send us whirling apart; meanwhile, I spread my claws and rake, and carve a huge gouge out of his left wing as I spin up toward the top of my trajectory. He flaps to right himself, finds one wing catching no air, and spirals to a hard, bouncing landing on the ground nearby. I, too, land hard — but directly on my hindclaws, sending all the impact into the earth, a shockwave of new fractures spreading out as I spring back out again. The stallion struggles to his hooves and glances up halfway through my leap. All he can do is rear, throwing the sharp edge of his forehooves in my path. I howl and whip my arm down — battering his legs out of line — then ram him, bearing us both down to the stony soil. He wedges a leg in the crook of my neck and heaves, rolling us over to reverse my pin. I grip his shoulder — he winces as the claws dig in — and slam him into the ground alongside me, sending up an explosion of dust. He shrieks as something breaks, and I take the opening and lunge with razor teeth. It's only his desperate flail of legs which makes my teeth snap shut shy of his neck. He tries to roll away, but he is pinned by my claw, and I push down with much weight as I can bring to bear, drawing my other arm back for a killing blow. The power of my bloodstone surges, howling and laughing within me, and I feel it replenishing at the wide-eyed terror which is the last thing the stallion will ever feel. But then his pupils shift, and his eyes widen even further as he looks up over my shoulder. Even through the haze of my crown's glorious bloodlust, something deep inside me screams a warning. I whip my head back, and as such, I get a momentary glimpse of myself hurtling straight toward me before my world explodes. For a moment, everything is a blurred, tumbling mess. The sky and ground are flipping somersaults around me, and my body is being buffeted by enormous impacts from every angle. Then there is an especially potent collision, a weight lifts from my back, and I see an ice-blue form tumble away along the horizon. Gradually, the world's spinning slows, and then gravity reasserts itself with a lurch. The horizon snaps back into place, and I am skidding along the ground, leaving a billowing trail of dust behind. Finally, I come to a full stop, ears ringing and body screaming in protest. Gingerly, I sit up. My skid-trail leads back toward a small pile of rock, and beyond that are a series of impact-scars and craters, and finally a wide-eyed, wounded pegasus. In the corner of my vision, another me sits up as well, her own skid-trail leading back at a crazy angle to the shattered boulder we both plowed through as we were bouncing across the landscape. And surrounding all of us is a horde of wide-eyed, confused dragons. The other me — Ember — staggers to her claws, brushing dust from her shoulders and glaring at me. "You invade my world," she snarls, "you steal my people, you try to murder a pony. You dog." Her voice rises in rage. "Do you have anything to say for yourself before I bring you to heel?" Fury at this duplicate boils in my blood — swooping in to steal my kill and then having the gall to be angry at me for leading the hunt. But even more, fury rises at my packmates lolling around in shock. They are better than this! They are mine! I felt their needs burn with mine, felt the bloodstone's song quicken their pulse, heard our voices unite in the howl. And I'm not about to let anyone — not even myself — take that away from me now. I have been in Father's shadow long enough. Kill, I project, reaching into the bloodstone and sending a wave of desire exploding outward. Nothing happens. I realize, belatedly, my head feels lighter than it should. "Ember!" Soarin shouts, pointing to some spot in the dissipating dust between us. "The crown! Don't let anydragon touch it!" The other me glances at the stallion, and I am already in motion. She glances at the outstretched hoof to orient herself; I follow the whisper of my crown. My head start is insurmountable. But then I hear a grunt, and a boulder twice my size streaks toward me from my double's direction, and I realize racing me might not be her plan. I fling myself sideways out of the path of the rock just in time to see a second hurtle my way. I leap it, then roll under a third that was aimed higher than the other two. There is a brief lull as Ember sprints toward more ammunition, and I dig my claws into the earth and accelerate toward my bloodstone — only to see lame-winged Soarin galloping at it, too. Even without the burst of extra energy from my crown, I am a step ahead of him. I lunge inward, and my claws close around the metal. But Soarin is charging at me, not the circlet, and this time he is the one weaponizing momentum. All the breath goes out of me as he plows into me shoulder first, and the circlet ricochets away as I find the world spinning again. This time, though, I have the presence of mind to repeat my canyon trick — lashing out a claw and dragging it through the stone like an anchor. My arm jerks taut and my tumble immediately stops, turning my recovery into an all-fours skid. At least until a boulder clobbers me from the side. The world spins again, and I tumble, and I come to rest with a great weight atop me. More irritated than injured, I heave — and the stone rolls away, and I spring back up. (It is amazing how much harm dragons can shrug off, some part of me marvels.) I am turning back toward Ember when suddenly the world washes out, slowing to a crawl — and every fiber of my being lights up with a single message: Someone has touched my crown. It is a sensation I am familiar with, but from the other side. Never have I felt it when in control, and it is an exotic and exhilarating rush. I know without looking that it is the stallion who picked the bloodstone up, dipping his head to the dirt and clamping lips around the metal. (Out of the corner of my eye, in fact, I can see just that as part of the frozen battlefield tableau.) And despite the pony being prey rather than pack, I can feel his core. For the first time, the emotions of prey are mine to dissect and digest. He is afraid. Of death, yes, as all creatures are; but also of something greater than death. He is afraid of what I will do next. He is afraid for his herd. I probe the fear, magnifying it, and my jaw waters at the thought: ponies so far beyond counting that my valley of dragons is like a drop in the river. Endless hills and plains of ponies, weak and lacking vigil. He fears my dragons swarming his herd like insects on carrion, gorging ourselves until they are stripped down to clean bone. It is a beautiful fear. It is a beautiful dream. The hunt will be endless. Hello? his panicked voice echoes through my head. Anypony? Where am I? What's going on? The mewls of prey have never concerned me. However, the rush of exploring this new sensation prods me into reaching back out. Fear, I think — and take my iron grip around my crown, smothering him in it, seeing if I can choke the life out of him through sheer weight of emotion. He notices me, then — and though a battering hailstorm of emotion is blasting away huge chunks of him with every passing second, he still struggles to form words. Stop! Please! I hesitate — now as if playing with a wounded mouse, unable to escape but perhaps capable of providing amusement. Why? I ask, mentally prodding at the exposed bits of him I have stripped away. His pain flares up, and the tinge of desperation in his words grows. This isn't you. It is the me I should have always been, I counter. The bloodstone's gift. The bloodstone is bad, he says. I try to wrap my head around that for a moment. Then I ask again, bemused: Why? His response is not immediate — as if he is trying to puzzle out what he feels from me, and poke a claw into my core in the same way I'm probing his. But he finally says: Because it makes you hurt your friends. I don't recognize the word. But a sensation comes along with it — one that feels like packmate, but foreign and nebulous. This confuses me. The hunt is for the good of the pack. How would the bloodstone hurt them? … Is this one trying to say he is part of the pack? He looks nothing like the dragons. On the other claw, back at home, I looked nothing like Father, yet the pack taught me to hunt, and brought me to meat before I learned to catch bugs and mice for myself. And with that memory, my decision is made: I will take this horse and make a hunter of him. I stop stirring his prey-fear — and, with swirls of gratitude and caution, his resistance collapses all at once. Then he seems to read my shift in intention, and I feel a surge of new panic spike. Undirected feelings, unformed words, surge my way. I brush them off. You will learn the howl, friend, I say. And then my energy floods into him and his needs are mine. The world snaps back into focus. My packmate Soarin's head jerks upright, the crown in his lips. His muscles are twitching at odd intervals, and his eyes are unfocused and tinged with red. I can feel the magic of the crown seething within him — far more than I've ever put into anyone before. Perhaps I overdid it. "Soarin!" Ember shouts from the distance, jabbing her claws into a boulder half again her size and hoisting it overhead. "Get outta here! I'll cover you!" Soarin stumbles over to me — craving my hunt even more than he craves the breath of life — and obediently spits my crown out into a waiting claw. And deep inside Ember, I watch a spark of hope die. Then rage flares out, rage and fear. She screams, flinging her boulder away and charging me. But rage and fear are my domain. I taste this dragon's hungers, taste the struggles that led her to this moment, see her flailing against the loss of all she has built as the jaws of fate close around her throat. So I simply push those feelings harder. Rage drains the coordination from her movements, urges her to commit everything to each strike, telegraphs her motions; fear locks her into her path. I easily sidestep a wild swing, and then Soarin is leaping at the other me, burning with desire to protect his pack from this interloper. I watch, tail lashing in amusement, as they begin battering at each other in blind rage and blind obeisance. But I find their battle taking a surprising amount of my focus. Some part of Ember is resisting — in a way I have not felt since Father's repudiation of my control, but also wholly unlike the way his hard-honed instinct overpowered mine. All I know is that Ember is not wholly mine. It is as if there is another whisper stirring up opposing desires within her…? But no, not actively; and no, not an instinct-whisper, I can say with certainty. My control over instinct is comprehensive, and regardless, there is a part of her which is … protected. I tune out the fight and the surrounding dragons, feeling instinctively that something here is important. It is maddening. That feeling of opposition is growing, sharpening. It is right at the edge of my senses — And then my concentration is shattered by a wave of power which staggers me. Bloodstone power. Another bloodstone's power. "Stop!" a high, male voice thunders from midair, and every being within sight halts as if paralyzed. I whirl around, hissing, and reflexively reach for the core of this new interloper — only to find that grasp wholly ineffective. If my control over Ember was muted, then here it is as if I am reaching into a hole and groping blindly at air. I blink and refocus my eyes. The new dragon is a purple whelp with huge green spikes and tiny wings, holding an ashen staff twice his size. The staff explains everything. The bloodstone mounted at the top of it is enormous, and the surrounding air is boiling with the overflow of its power. It's not just his bloodstone, either. Now my own crown is beginning to resonate with unimaginable potential. And I know — without knowing how — that this is the crown's twin, the other half of a pair never meant to be separated. Their powers are surging now that they are once again in proximity, enough so that I barely need to think to tug at the cores of every dragon within sight. That apparently works both ways; I can feel that this whelp's claim on the scepter is tenuous at best, the reward for a challenge long past, yet even that was enough to let him stagger my pack. It is magnificent. If I possessed them both, my power would be absolute. With a passing thought, my pack is filled with need. Their every instinct is telling them I can bring them an eternal hunt; all I require is the scepter. And as one, every head within sight swivels to the purple whelp. (Spike, I suddenly realize: he is the one who accompanied the ice-blue wolf when he and my other foe invaded my forest.) Spike swallows nervously. But he holds the staff up, and his voice thunders again, magnified by its power: "Lie down!" And the dragons bracing themselves to crouch and leap suddenly drop boneless to the ground. We hunt! I think, and my quiescent dragons immediately stir — their needs drawing on something far more fundamental within them than the decision to go prone. "Uh," Spike stammers, sweat spotting his forehead scales, and shakes the staff as if that increases its power. "Dance!" The area erupts into motion, as dragons begin shuffling, wriggling, and spinning to no particular rhythm. Rage begins to simmer within me as I blast apart the frivolity in my pack's cores and replace it, again, with hunger. This whelp is losing the power battle, and we both know it — but with just a word, he can dissipate my pack's instincts for a crucial moment, and I can no more affect him with my bloodstone than he can command me with his. I will have to bait him to the ground, perhaps even formally challenge him for the pack, find some way to bring him within reach — And that's when Ember grabs my tail. It takes me a moment to realize it, because at first all I feel is a hard jerk on my hips, and then the world is somersaulting backwards. There's a thunderous boom as I arc into the ground head-first. Dust erupts everywhere, and then I'm jerked from the cloud and slammed down again. They are the sort of blows that should cripple me, or at least stun me. But with the bloodstone singing at such intensity, I merely sit back up. Ember blinks, unbelieving. For a moment, as I reorient, we simply stare at each other. Then she screeches in wordless frustration and lunges for the crown. I spring as she charges. We collide, and the fight turns ugly. My teeth sink into her shoulder, leaving dents in the scales. She wraps her hands around my throat and squeezes. I slash with four limbs' worth of claws — which does little until a flailing arm gets within an inch of an eye, making her flinch and jerk her arms back. I release my jaw-grip, dropping below a clumsy grab attempt and headbutting her stomach with my horns. When she doubles over onto my back I wrap my arms around her leg and push the wrong way. She stiffens and brings an elbow down hard on my back; I howl as stars burst into my vision. I put my full strength into the leg hold, and she screams as her knee pops out of joint. That moment of pain gives me all the distraction I need. I dart between her legs, leap up to her back, and lock my legs around her waist. She reflexively buffets me with her wings — which flexes them to right where I need them. I grab a wing-joint with one claw, driving the other deep into the leathery membrane, and there is a sick ripping sound. "Separate the Embers!" Spike shouts from behind me, and a sea of claws grabs for me before I can reach past the useless wing to choke the life out of my duplicate. Neutralizing Spike's interference is the work of a moment, but it's a moment of stolen focus which allows Ember to thrash free. She kicks me in the chest as she goes, which staggers me long enough for her to whirl around and face me. I am back on her in an instant, regardless, and this time I do go for the throat, gaping my jaws and diving down at her. Without hesitation, Ember jams an arm into my mouth — wincing as I clamp down and fangs dig into her elbow. I shoot both my arms toward her throat instead, squeezing until I feel scales start to give. She makes a little gagging wheeze, and I dig a knee into her stomach to drive the air out faster. Spike shouts something in the background. Not this time — not when I am so close! Still locked in the struggle, I snatch for the bluntest emotion I can, my burning desire to dominate, and hurtle it outward. It does not accomplish anything — the surrounding dragons merely jerk and twist as the opposing bloodstones buffet them with withering waves of power — but right now, neutralizing them works to my favor. Ember's eyes gradually widen as she realizes that her whelp's interference will not save her this time. With a burst of desperate strength, she works her non-bitten arm free of our tangle of limbs — swinging at the inside of my elbow with all the leverage she can muster. It loosens my grip only long enough for a gasp of air, but it's enough — because as I start closing her throat again, there is a click from the back of her mouth, and I am consumed by a blast of fire. I shriek and fling myself backward, deep instincts screaming. And by the time I realize I am unhurt — cannot be hurt by such a cheap trick, not as a dragon — Ember has rolled far beyond my grip and staggered back upright again, gasping for breath. Desire wars with fear inside me. I need to finish her, need to prove myself and head off any possible dissent within my pack … but at the same time, my lupine instincts are absolutely refusing to leap forward toward this fire-lizard. Which is ridiculous. Dragon instincts yearn for fire, and those are singing inside me with equal urgency. I know which ones to listen to — but the bloodstone's power is to augment instincts, not suppress them, and I am drowning in my own power as I try to cage the wolf who fears. My body goes rigid as I struggle with whispers turned screams. Ember, as desperate as her own position is, seems to sense my weakness. She clenches her fangs against her body's pain and lunges forward for the crown. But I wrestle control of my body back for long enough to snap my eyes open, dropping into a crouch and hissing. She flinches back, and we retreat to an uneasy stalemate. As silence descends, instinct tells me to circle her — pace out the edges of our battleground while we look for weaknesses in each other. Given how much I'm throwing into neutralizing the wolf-fear, yielding to this urge seems like a good safety valve. So I let my body step into the spiral dance, and take the moment of relative calm to reassess. It's obvious that Ember has gotten the worst of our exchange. I have been thrown around like a bug in a hurricane, and been used to smash open half the boulders of this chasm-wracked stonescape, and yet the overflowing fountain of the Bloodstone Crown has faded every bruise and straightened every dent. Meanwhile, one of Ember's legs is angled wrong at the knee, one wing is useless tatters, and several parts of her body are discolored almost to purple. I need no cunning here, no weaknesses to exploit: simply keep fighting, and push her past her breaking point. Ember locks eyes with me, doing her best to match my circling in a shuffling one-legged dance. It is obvious she is performing a similar assessment — but then she opens her bloody muzzle and removes all doubt. "You're draining your bloodstone's power," she growls. "I can't hurt you like this." I say nothing, continuing to circle while I finally begin to curb my fire-fear. Better that I bide my time until her guard drops. "Distract her," Spike says from the air in the distance. "Maybe I can grab the crown —" "No," Ember says sharply. "You're the only reason we're not being attacked by every dragon here." "But Ember!" he protests. "You can't keep this up! She'll tear you apart, with that crown boosting her fighting instincts!" (I take a step inward to emphasize the point. Ember takes a cautious half-shuffle back, maintaining her distance. A murmur of excitement runs through my pack, ready with the slightest jostle to explode out into the electric thrill of the fight.) We are silent for a moment as my opponent digests this. Then her eyes widen. She whips a claw out to one side, her eyes never leaving mine. "Spike," she says with disconcerting calmness, "throw me the scepter." Spike — who I can finally see out of the corner of my eye as our circles progress — blinks. "But you just said —" "Spike," Ember says, and the urgency in her voice says all that needs to be said. Spike swallows, glances at the scepter, and flings it forward. Energy surges without limit as the bloodstones draw closer together — but I am still wrapped up in wrestling with the fire-fear, and it takes me a moment to comprehend that this signals a shift in our fight. The scepter is already in midair by the time I jolt out of my inner struggle and begin drawing from the crown. It is almost to her outstretched claw by the time I send that endless power surging through my body, turning me into something only describable as the perfect predator. I am in motion before conscious thought can even parse my leap, but my claws have only barely left the ground when the scepter touches her outstretched hand — — and the world wavers and freezes, its color draining back into the grey unfocus of the bloodstone. But this time, there is a tension, two crystals each trying to point their own spotlight, and I can feel my body and Ember's both frozen with the rest. Everything fuzzes. Then even the grey blurs away, and I stir to consciousness alone in a familiar cave. "Okay, I'm pretty sure this isn't real," Ember says from next to me, and I nearly jump out of my skin. There's my foe, inches from me, sitting casually against the wall of my home. She is exactly the dragon I was leaping at seconds ago — no, perhaps a little younger, a little thinner, with less focus to the determined edge I saw in our fight. I sit up. I am a wolf. Not the wolf I was before my dream of fire — but a four-legged predator, ice-blue of fur, wiry and hungry. Get out of my home, I say. I try to put malice into the thought, but I cannot feel any. My cave is a place of sanctuary, and my inner fire is, for the moment, distant. "Funny you should say that," Ember says dispassionately. And a discomforting thought flits through the back of my mind: this strange meeting is in my home, but the fight outside is in hers. No wonder she fights me so desperately. As I am processing that thought, her head flinches to the side. She avoids my gaze for a silent moment. What? I ask. "I didn't realize Dad was still leader where you came from," she says. Her voice wavers, and a strand of gentle thought whispers into my heart. Sympathy? The comprehension of everything she stands to lose presses relentlessly into my head; and I, too, am suddenly, similarly uncertain. So I try to give her an out. Do not be the fool who would rather die than lose, I think. I felt the trust of your whelp as he gave you his bloodstone. Flee this challenge, and you could take him and go establish another pack elsewhere. Her mouth twitches. "Okay," she says softly, "I was about to say, maybe I could help you with your dad … but no. This is not your world. Not your dragons. So you take your consolation prize and stuff it." I do not need another to challenge Father for me, I shoot back, fighting to reclaim the irritation I should be feeling. I need a pack. This is one I can take. So it is mine. Our impasse sinks in. The cave around us grows darker. Wind stirs in the night outside. With it, I can finally feel the churn of emotions — distantly, like an approaching weather front. "What are we even doing here?" Ember asks, finally seeming to take notice of her surroundings. I do not mean to respond. But I am stirring up my heart to reach for the power outside, drawn to the comforting familiarity of passion and instinct, and my thoughts form into something shared: Bloodstone. She is briefly silent. Then she responds, "I've seen enough weird pony stuff that I think I get this. The stones want us to be friends." We are not pack, I snap back. "No, not friends," Ember says, and it takes me a moment to realize she is not agreeing but correcting herself. "Okay. The bloodstones got all super-powered because they thought they were working for the same person. But we're not. And we're fighting. I think we're here because they don't want to blow each other up." I snort. What a stone wants is no concern of mine. "Yeah," she says after a moment of thought. "Same. Your crown needs to be destroyed." You do not have the strength, I state, feeling the power of the approaching storm build. You cannot even fully embrace your own bloodstone. Die or submit. Her muzzle curls into a sneer, and the wind outside howls all the louder. It is the sound of my inevitable victory … and I know she senses it, too. Her drive to conquer, her instinct to survive — those things come from my crown's domain. In the very act of fighting back, she adds to the power that perfects me. But then an odd glint reaches her eyes. And the corners of her mouth begin to curl upward. "You know," she says with an incongruous casualness, "I don't think I will." Outside, thunder rolls. The stone around us shifts and rumbles. And then, with an impossible roar, the storm at the core of all living beings blasts apart our sanctuary. The cave begins to dissolve as I drink in the flood. I devour it, become it, casting away everything it is not. Ember flinches at the wind, but braces herself and faces me. I can only laugh helplessly. What do you think this defiance gains you? You are crippled. My body is unstoppable. When we return from this place it will already be too late to avoid my leap. "Yeah, sure," she says. "And your fangs can cut the world in half or whatever. But you've got the bloodstone that controls instinct. And I've got the bloodstone that controls intellect. You know what that gives me?" What? I challenge. She smirks. "Tools," she says, "bitch." The world swirls back into grey, then into frozen color. Half a second has passed. I am hanging in midair, a body length from Ember. And in that half-second, she, too, has moved — her arms also accelerated by the near-limitless energy of the dueling bloodstones. Her body is twisted, muscles rippling, caught in a moment of consummate form. Her reflexes are not honed to my level — cannot be, by the nature of our powers — but they are sufficient. Because in her outstretched grasp, the scepter — artificially extending her reach well past mine — is arcing toward my head. Searing, crackling, writhing with such energy that even within the infinitesimal crawl of this moment its outflow cannot be contained. Time restarts. And the last thing that I see is the business end of the scepter unleashing its built-up energy in a brilliant explosion of light.
PackI awaken, with a throbbing headache, from dreams of fire. The first thing I notice is that my face is cold. This is remarkable because the rest of me isn't. I whimper, murmur, and paw at my muzzle — and my fingers pass through empty air. I crack my eyes open. No longer is there a ridge of sky-blue scales in front of them, only the stubby silhouette of a nose. I bring my hand to my face, and it is blunt and fleshy. I scramble upright, adrenaline rising — and an enveloping shroud of fabric moves with me. I thrash my way free of the warm, thick fabric square, and find myself in a wide clearing in a familiar, sun-dappled forest. I am home. How? The last thing I remember is the world of fire — and the power of Ember's bloodstone blasting my apotheosis away. My hands shoot to my head. No horns. No crown! I jerk my hands down to my neck, groping for it there. Still nothing. No. No! A wail begins to burble from my throat. I have lost everything. "Gosh," a human voice murmurs from some distance behind me. "She looks pretty traumatized, Ember. Are you sure she'll be okay?" I bolt, like prey, not caring where. I crash into the bushes, then once within their comforting cover, whirl around and bare my teeth. On the far opposite side of the glade — making no move — are two humans: one clad in gentle gauzy greens and pink hair over sun-yellow skin, and one with fiery hair wearing thick black-stained animal skins. Then I see the smaller figures at their sides: an all-too-familiar wolf with ice-blue fur, and her misshapen purple companion. The gentle yellow human turns to the one who spoke first. "Sunset!" she chides. "Of course she's going to be traumatized if you startle her like that!" Sunset meekly apologizes. The wolf, however, bites back a growl — and I realize to my shock that I can still feel her, a subdued echo of the whispers the crown once murmured into my throat. Not enough to reach into her with, but enough that when she locks eyes with me, the murky churn of her emotions still whisper into my heart. I can sense, too, that she feels my fear and grief. She wears no crown, either. But it seems that she, like me, was left changed by that frozen moment with the bloodstones. I WANT to say that, after what she did, she can rot, Ember's voice echoes inside my head. (She is no longer speaking with her muzzle, and yet all the others react to her words. I am beginning to realize how deep the mark is which the combined bloodstones left on us.) Then I feel her frustration soften, and she lets out a breath, and pity churns in her gut. But I can't hate her, seeing her like this. She's just a me I might have been. And more lost than I ever was. Sunset nods. "I understand. Fluttershy and I will keep an eye on her. We're old hands at dealing with weird consequences of Equestrian magic." She glances back and forth between me and the wolf at her side and chuckles half-heartedly. "Though this is maybe a little weirder than usual." "Speaking of which," Spike's high voice injects, "is this weirding anyone else out? You're just letting this ... human kid ... run off into the woods and hoping everything will work out?" "Not into the woods," Fluttershy says, staring toward me with a sad smile. "Back to her home. Her life is out there. Her pack. Her friends. I'm going to make sure she knows we're here for her too, but she'll have to make the decision to trust us. If we had just locked her in a room somewhere to rehabilitate her, we would have scarred her forever." Well, she won't trust me any time ever, Ember says understatedly. She limps over to Spike, her spine stiff, still favoring one hindleg. But at least the Bloodstone Crown is gone for good. My face twists up, in the way that has never quite made up for my lack of ears to lay flat. I need no further reminders of my failure. I back away until brush obscures my tormentors, then wheel and flee. Halfway through the long, humiliating walk back to the cave, emotion overtakes me. I stagger over to a tree, sink against it, and throw my head back in a thin, weak, mournful howl. There is no reply. I ball up, wrapping my legs to my chest, feeling liquid streak down my cheeks and pool up on my knees. And I sit there, rocking back and forth, until my tears are cried out and my mind has nothing to do but race in circles around my defeat. I unwrap an arm, staring at it and flexing my frail, clawless fingers. Despite some tiny lingering touch of the lost crown inside me — barely enough to sense that my pack exists out there in the distance — I am weaker than I've ever been. Never mind what I did as a dragon; I don't even have the necklace any more which once made me a powerful wolf. There is no way I could ever lead a hunt now. If only I had strength like Ember's, I think desperately. If only I could do the things she did. I stew in that self-pity for several minutes. I close my eyes, and an even more relentless thought stabs in: that ice-blue wolf staring at me in pity. And that, finally, stirs up something besides grief. How dare she be more of a wolf than me here, after taunting me about her advantages over pure instinct? Then my thoughts finally slow as that churning uncovers the gleam of an idea. I look back down. I flex my fingers again, more thoughtfully. I glance around the forest floor until my sight settles on a fist-sized stone. Normally they are just obstacles on a hunt, hazards for scampering paws, but the memory of her hurtled boulders is all too vivid. I do not have a dragon's strength, nor its claws … and yet my form, with all its weaknesses, can do things no other wolf's can. Not even Ember's. I close my fingers around the rock, hefting it in my hand, and marvel for a moment at how perfectly these spindly, fleshy fingers curl around it. My first throw goes wide of the tree I aimed at, but as I scamper to retrieve the stone the thrill of the hunt is beginning to stir, and by the time the shadows have shifted I am hitting the tree more often than I am missing. Later, when a lucky shot sends a stunned bird crashing down to the ground from its perch, I let out a yip of triumph and tear into its flesh with my teeth. Never mind my instant regret as I spit out feathers — I feel ambition blazing within me again, like a fire rekindled. I hesitate for a moment at that thought. And ideas begin to whisper inside my brain. Father bolts to his paws as I finally approach the cave entrance several days later. There is alarm in his scent; his hackles are raised and fangs bared. However, his confusion is equally evident from the way he withholds his growl. He retreats, sidestepping back and forth as light dances around the cave from angles far at odds with the shadows outside. Finally, he barks sharply. Daughter — an inner whisper translates, as I allow some echo of the bloodstone's power within me to respond to his fumbling attempts to connect — what is the meaning of this? I square my feet off, and lower the burning tip of the branch I'm holding to the floor of the cave, causing its shadows to dance even more madly. My packmates back away in silence, ears flat. Hello again, father, I think. (Even though I can no longer insert whispers of need into my packmates, I can still reach out to the surface of their feelings and make certain my message carries to them all.) Tonight you should allow me to lead the hunt. No request, that. No demand. No challenge. A calm statement of fact. At that, he does allow a growl to stir up, and circles the fire warily. Do you think threatening the pack with fire changes anything? Leading the hunt is for — — the biggest and strongest, I interrupt. I bounce the tip of the burning branch to punctuate, watching the shadows lurch and half my packmates scramble back from the light. This is no threat, I say. It is a demonstration of my strength. I am both wolf and more than wolf, Father. I am flame without fire. I am fangs without a muzzle. I am bloodstone without bloodstone. And I am the hunt without the hunt. Let me lead, and this magic will be the pack's. Then I straighten up, standing to my full height and spreading my other arm. Were Father fully upright, my head would reach barely to his shoulder, but cowed as my packmates are, I tower over even his crouching form. And as far as size — I believe I am tall enough to qualify. I emphasize this by thrusting my arm upward, whipping the branch in a sudden arc from side to side. The rush of wind extinguishes the thin fire at the end, illuminating the air with a short-lived shower of sparks and leaving the cave in comfortable darkness. I take the stick, now tipped by a gently glowing ember, and plunge its base into the soft ground just inside the cave, watching thick smoke coil up from the tip and chase a motley cloud of insects outside. Then I turn around without explanation and walk downwind. When Patient-Leap trots after me, ears perked in curiosity, Father begrudgingly follows, the others at his shoulders. And it is not long before they scent the fresh meat my own blunted nose can no longer directly discern. In the clearing by the sunning-stone, I have taken two of my sharpened sticks and thrust them tip-first into the earth, stringing between them one of the vines I gathered from the thickets by the river. Hanging on the vine are the eight still-moist fish I speared from the water shortly before my return, and at the base of my makeshift pantry are the birds and squirrels I killed earlier that afternoon with the increasingly steady aim of my rocks. Here is tonight's hunt, I say, feeling the hunger rise in my packmates. A gift from my magic. I crouch — for the first time since returning — deferentially to Father. Tell me to lead the hunt tomorrow, and you will find out what I can do when we run. His shock quickly dissipates, to be replaced by an all too rare sensation swelling within him. Pride. Then he howls for Hunt Leader Ember, and my pack adds their voices. I join in last, adding the final pitch, the one that joins our sounds together into something greater. And I close my eyes and bask in the sound, all the fire I will ever need burning within me. Author's Note The story of the Embers and their bloodstones continues in the sequel, the full-length novel Even Changelings Get The Blues!
