Love is what we were born with. Fear is what we learned here.

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Your day at the library was wonderful compared to what you were put through most of the time. Spending time with a princess who gave you the answers you had sought for in frustration, reading about ancient wars, sleeping in a massive puffy bean bag, and the best part was that the princess took off your restraints. She said that she had, "felt your burden", or something to that effect. But she took off the near ton of restraining material, and stopped upholding the suppression field so that you could change your hand to keep the books undamaged. Unfortunately, the information you wanted scared you. You knew you were in love with the guard, there was no denying that, but it scared you. Love, as far as you knew, caused strange patterns in behavior and gave a cause to protect something other than yourself, which, in your personal experience, severely decreases your chance of survival. Early death is something you will not accept. You decide to take the dragon up on its offer. The vocal cords and lungs inside your body start to morph.

"Break me out tomorrow night, take down the wall facing the cliff." You pipe out in a hypersonic frequency that only the dragon can hear.

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The massive purple scaled dragon was lying down in his hoard of gold in the mountain opposite to the Canterlot mountain, and was woken up by the message.

"Break me out tomorrow night night, take down the wall facing the cliff." It sounded extremely high pitched.

"Dully noted." He said to himself, and went back to sleep.

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Raven Heart was having trouble sleeping. It wasn't her contemplating her feelings for Winter that was keeping her awake, but what she was going to do about them. The thing was, she was perfectly awake, not tired whatsoever. All she could think of was making the relationship work. She didn't know how she was going to do it, but she guessed it was best to start small. She would just let him out to take a walk in the garden, with her supervision as always, and find out what he thought about her.

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Celestia's sun hit your face early that morning. Another day of physical testing. Hopefully you would survive today without too many problems. As you wake up the smell of a small bird hidden under the lettuce in your salad reaches you nostrils, and you leap to the tray. You bite down on the tray and the metal crumples while the dead bird slides into your mouth. The funny thing about the variant of changeling that you happen to be, is that you can adapt certain traits from the things you consume. You had eaten birds before, that's how you got the ability to morph wings, but then you ate a lizard, and thats how you got the ability to change your fur into scales, it wasn't that hard to understand, and the physical doctors were always excited when you had something new to show them. You had so many different colors of feathers that you could be a spectacle all by yourself.

"It's 12:30 Winter, time to go." Raven Heart said in her soft voice.

"Okay, what is the restraint load today?" You ask with slight depression.

"None." She said with surprise as she looked at the note on the small notification board next to your room.

"None? That can't be right." You growl with suspicion.

"It says here, By order of princess Cadance, 'Winter Knight is to have no burden of restraint today', and it is signed by the princess herself." She said with even more surprise.

"Well, if she ordered it." You say conclusively.

"Well come on out then, she didn't say anything about supervision though so I am going to stay with you."

"That's fine."

You really wanted to distance yourself from her before you left, it would stop you from convincing yourself to come back. Luckily though, she didn't try to start her usual conversation, she just kept re-reading the note over and over trying to make sense of it. It took a full thirty minutes to walk to the examination room. Raven Heart knocked on the door and you could hear everyone inside the room. Machines being wheeled about, ponies ordering each other around quietly.

"Quick! Someone get the machine that goes beep!" A pony whispered urgently in a royal accent.

The door opened quickly, and you bared your teeth at the pony opening it.

"AHHHH!" The brown coated red maned pony yelled before someone cut him off.

"Winter stop it." Raven admonished with a sigh.

"Fine. What tests are you doing today?" You ask with a mock shudder.

"How long you can keep a steadily increasing pace." The lead doctor said matter-of-factly after calming himself down.

"Easy enough." You say as you walk into the room.

Raven walks in behind you and closes the door. She liked to take part in the exercise tests because she felt the need to keep her already beautiful figure, even though she really didn't. You get on the tread mill, and the doctor turns it on. It was slow enough for walking speed, but that changed quickly. You had done a few of these tests and the doctor kept needing to get faster tread mills. He was confident that this would be the time he beat you. Raven was on a normal tread mill since no pony was able to match the speeds you ran except for the wonderbolts flying.

The speed quickly ramped up to 156 miles per hour, which was where you left off last time. It started to steadily increase after that just like the doctor said. The thing was, you had to change to reach these speeds. Your true form could withstand a speed of 180 miles per hour for thirty seconds, thankfully, it was a tread mill and could only increase speed instead of instantly changing speed giving you time to change your muscle groups. You were running at 230 now, and your legs were like tree trunks, with lungs that took up half of your chest which was now proportional to the size of your legs. You were a hulking beast, but you moved faster than almost anything on this planet without breaking a sweat.

It had taken all day to perform the full test, but here you were, 8:47 at night with Luna's moon high overhead, running at 674 miles per hour. You barely fit on the tread mill and the room shook with each foot fall. Basically it sounded like someone had gotten the best speaker system money could buy and they were playing a bass heavy song. You decided to end the stupid test, and you put all the power you could into the next stomp. The tread mill bent and ground to a halt with a terrible screeching noise.

"Sweet Celestia." Muttered the lead doctor as he saw yet another demonstration of your power.

"Thank you." You bellow with conceit, your lungs still shrinking back to normal size with the rest of you.

"Looks like we're done here, follow me Winter." Raven Heart said with the strange authority that was always present in her soft voice, as she stepped off of her own tread mill.

You walk outside the door, now in your true form again, and you scan the sky. The dragon should be here any minute now. You subconsciously follow Raven as you continue to scan the sky, and when your vision is blocked by the cliff-side wall, you look down and notice that you are in the middle of the royal garden.

"Winter, I want ask you something."

That's when you heard the beat of wings.

"We should probably move away from the wall." You growl quietly. She didn't here you.

"What do you think of me?" She asked seeming almost embarrassed.

"I think you are wonderful." Careful in choosing your words. You knew what she meant.

The sound was getting louder, and you could smell the metallic scent of the dragon's hoard.

"Is that it?" She sounded sad.

Flames lit the sky. Raven shrieked, and you knocked her off of the ground and into a hedge. The wall burst into rubble right in front of you. Raven quieted in shock, and you leapt through the breach. The wind swept past you as you fell, but your wings grew and extended. You glided to the ground at extreme speeds, but took the same form that you were running in moments before. When you hit the ground the trees shook and you bounded of into the forest at near sonic speeds. Trees cracked and splintered all around you as you ran deeper into the everfree, shrinking steadily until you tripped and fell into a small lake. Scales covered your form as you sank and gills sprouted from your sides. After recovering, you swam to the bottom of the lake, curled up, and slept.

Author's Note

All constructive criticism and compliments are accepted.