Outside, among the bare trees reaching towards the cold Autumn sky, a snowflake drifted. Twirling in gentle, chilled currents, it swept up and down, matching the trees curve for curve as it twinkled through the woods. The blanket of dead leaves insulating the forest floor, usually so vocal when strode upon, made not a peep when the tiny flake finally set down to rest.
Many more soon followed.
=========================<><><>=========================
“Offal, are you even listening!?”
The distracted changeling mare sitting before her superior startled at the sudden outburst echoing off the small cave's rocky walls. She tore her eyes away from the oval locket laying on her decrepit desk leaning against the cave wall and dropped the pencil suspended in her magic, but didn't speak.
“You weren't listening. Terrific. Did you catch anything I just said? Anything at all?”
Offal nodded too quickly to be convincing and the other mare narrowed her eyes.
“Let me see your journal then.”
Offal shamefully stared at the rocky floor, thin ears folding back. She hadn't even turned the little book halfway around before her superior growled.
“Well, that was a waste of time. I should have left half an hour ago, but no, I'm stuck on Offal duty. Chrysalis alive, here's the short version: it's going to be really cold soon, the border guards are on high alert because that idiot Sleuth got himself caught, your replacement pendant is on the table, your replacement reporting stationery is there too, and your assignment here has been extended for another six months while the higher ups figure out what to do with you.”
Offal quickly glanced up at the peeved mare but again diverted her eyes when all she got was a set of hazy blue irises full of hazy blue fire.
“How does anyling even get such a pointless assignment? And for so long? Oh, that's right, the one changeling so bad at everything that they threw her out into the most tactically useless part of Equestria to watch a bunch of border guards do nothing all year! They forgot this base even existed until they had to find somewhere to dump you! You weren't called back for the invasion, not that you would've made a difference, and you can't even blend in as one of these guards!”
She paused to catch her breath before continuing.
“Where's your report, I just want to get out of here.”
A thirty page set of hoofwritten parchments on the desk beside the two mares began glowing green with Offal's magic, then floated over to the angrier changeling. She flinched when her supervisor snatched them into her own green glow and flipped through, stopping on the last page.
“Did you seriously spill ink on this?”
Offal sank a little lower where she sat.
“Whatever,” she muttered, before tucking the papers into her saddlebags. “Awful Offal strikes again, I guess.”
The quiet changeling shut her eyes and wilted at her infamous nickname.
“I'll be back in three months,” her superior muttered while turning for the cave's crude steps to the surface, “Try not to die, or get captured, or fall down the stairs, or whatever. Or do! It's not like anyling will care!”
Offal listened to the mare's hoofsteps clopping up to the cave's trapdoor entrance, its slam as it dropped shut, and the muted crunching of leaves as her superior disappeared into the autumn forest. Only once silence filled the cave did Offal raise her chitinous head.
Awful Offal. That's a name she hadn't heard in a while.
She shifted her gaze to the desk. Next to the fresh parchments, quills, ink bottle, thick candle, and a cracked brass spyglass lay a new silver locket. Offal levitated the journal and pencil over onto the desk, then the square and chain towards herself. She clicked the little door open to reveal a glowing pink diamond, sharply cut, polished to a mirror shine, and set snugly into the silver. Offal sat still for a few minutes, taking the time to absorb a hearty amount from the crystal's stored nourishment. She peeked over to the desk again, this time looking at the other locket, at the pink oval she broke several days ago. That one was prettier, Offal thought, but it cracked when she tripped down the cave's stairs.
Feeling full, Offal closed her new portable love source and floated it back onto the desk as a silent yawn crept up into her mouth. She hated Slink's seasonal visits. They always sapped her spirit and left her exhausted. Offal looked across her spartan cave and over to her beckoning green bedroll and gray blanket. She sighed and slunk over to what passed for her bed, wrapped herself tightly in the rough wool, and sank down to sleep.
=========================<><><>=========================
Resurfacing in the waking world nine and a half hours later, Offal cracked her eyes open to the view of minuscule points of light poking through the cave trapdoor and dotting the cold rock walls. Her green magic lit up a small notebook and pencil tucked under the edge of her bedroll and tugged it out. Still snuggled under the blanket she groggily opened it up and flipped through a few pages to reach yesterday's entry.
7 AM: One guard seen exiting the cabin and walking off into the distance.
7:07 AM: Another guard seen exiting the cabin and walking off in opposite direction (south?).
7:30 AM: No activity.
8:00 AM: No activity.
A sketch of a birch leaf cut the page in half.
9 AM: No activity, there was also no activity at 8:30.
9:14 AM: Large guard seen chopping wood for their fire tonight.
10 AM: First guard return, a fourth guard exits and goes off where the first guard came from.
Offal skipped a few lines to the good part.
3-ish PM (forgot to wind watch): the guard that left around 10 came running back, shouting that he saw a changeling. There's noling else stationed here but me. Guards all seem scared, all four retreated into the cabin but look out the windows frequently.
3:40-ish?: One guard seen poking his head outside, looking around quickly, and levitating the ax around from the side of the cabin and in with them.
4ish?: No activity, have to stop here because Slink is visiting soon to collect the reports.
The memory of yesterday afternoon came back into view and Offal inwardly sighed. Hopefully, the guards wouldn't be as on-edge as they were yesterday, but she didn't think they'd be able to calm down so fast. Stories of changeling hunts in Equestria's rural towns filtered back every now and then, so Offal knew that once spooked, ponies typically stayed that way for a while after. Still, as long as she kept out of their way there wouldn't be any problems.
Raising her head while keeping the journal afloat, Offal rolled out from beneath the blanket and walked over to her desk. The gentle tink of an inkwell opening, followed by the faint scritching of a quill on parchment, echoed down past a wall of haphazard wooden planks and supports blocking the blacker depths of the cave. Offal jotted down the parts of her journal that Slink cared about, making sure to leave out the parts where she fell asleep or forgot to wind the watch. She made sure to note that she left early to meet Slink; she'd rather avoid dreading a one-sided argument for three months. Offal then slipped the page beneath the stack to keep it safe in case she spilled the inkwell again.
Offal clicked the new amulet's dainty chain around her neck after a refreshing soak in its compacted love. Her watch's chain followed close behind, then she floated her journal, spyglass, and pencil into a small battered saddlebag that she dropped across her back. Finally, she clopped up the stairs to the hatch above.
Brown and curling leaves crunched beneath Offal's hooves as she navigated the bare trees and bushes, the two necklaces swaying in tune. By stepping a bit long over roots, stepping a bit short to dodge thorns, and hopping over whichever dead branches and rocks got in her way, Offal made the daily trip to the guards' cabin and the clearing it occupied. A chilly breeze swept through the forest and Offal shivered, suddenly wishing she'd brought her blanket with her this time. She really needed a second blanket, thinking about it now, one for the bedroll and another that was okay to dirty outside. In lieu, she made sure to pass through the sunrays to siphon what little warmth her black chitin could.
Glancing up, Offal noticed light gray clouds lumped beyond the branches and covering the sky. Small black shapes – Slink said they were 'geese' – flew just below the clouds in the same formation they always did. Offal paused to watch them vanish above the stark treeline, her ragged tail swishing in excitement, a little smile crossing her face as their honking faded into the distance.
=========================<><><>=========================
With the sun and twigs' shadows throwing a blurry cheetah's pattern across her shell, Offal surveyed the grassy field before her by poking the spyglass through her shield of skeletal bushes and, well, spying. Seeing no sign of activity from the guard cabin in its center, she slithered low around the tree trunk beside her and into a small burrow formed beneath where this tree and two others grew and twisted into each other. The bushes, even without their leaves, worked with her coal-gray chitin to make her figure indistinguishable from the darkness in her hiding spot.
Once settled in and as cozy as she could be in a cubby made of dirt and trees, Offal pulled her spyglass open again and peered through. Rotating it about thirty degrees got the crack in the lens mostly out of the way and the cabin became clear.
Still no activity yet.
Offal slipped the spyglass closed again and put it to her side, pressing it into the dirt a bit so it couldn't roll away, then clicked open her watch. She stared at its stoic secondhand for three before realizing that she'd still forgotten to wind it and had no idea what time it was.
Eyes narrowed at her tiny reflection in the silent timepiece's flat glass, Offal sighed through her nose and resigned to wait for the first guard to leave the cabin to set the watch. Based on her observations thus far the guards kept a fairly regular schedule and she should be able to set it accurately as such.
Hazy blue eyes glancing up at the cabin, she scratched down the lack of activity in her journal and picked up the spyglass again.
No signs of movement beyond the cabin's darkened windows.
Offal sighed again, this time at the boredom creeping into her mind like it did every day here.
Glancing around at the front of her hiding spot, she spotted a fresh target and darted a chitinous hoof out to grab the dead leaf. Holding up in the light, its spiky green body in the shape of an acorn's silhouette failed to register as any other leaves she'd seen before.
She flipped her notebook open, passing previous notes and other leaf sketches on her way to a blank page, and grandly titled it 'unknown'. Using as little magic as possible, Offal put pencil to paper and began rendering the leaf in lead.
=========================<><><>=========================
A thump shook the tree roots when Offal bonked her head against her hovel's low roof, drowsiness still fogging her vision. She winced at the impact and raised her hoof to the bruise before waking to the fact that she'd fallen asleep.
Adrenaline flooded her veins and lightning struck her heart as she realized that she'd been at the mercy of anyone who might have passed by, or any animals interested in her burrow or any and all manner of dangerous other things. What had she missed? Roughly rubbing her eyes and blinking madly, Offal shivered at the shockingly cold air seeping through what felt like her very soul and glanced out beneath eyelids that weren't quite open to the same degree.
But just as before, there was no activity.
No signs of any of the guards passing by.
No signs of any animals snooping around.
Offal, despite her complete lapse of responsibility, remained totally undisturbed.
She exhaled painfully at the stress she'd put herself through while her heart came back down from orbit and noted the time she woke up along with the three-hour span she'd been asleep.
Wrangling her own breathing and shivering all the while, Offal poked her head out of the burrow and looked up at the sky
A darker shade of gray permeated the clouds, and the trees swayed in the approaching winds, cricking and cracking above her head – the signs of an approaching storm. Fortunately whoever built her little cave bunker made the door strong to stop unaware beings from falling through and so it could resist whatever these northern storms threw at it. It did not, however, keep out the wind's howling. Offal had mixed feelings about this – on one hoof, big storms were loud and exciting and something she didn't have back at the hive. But on the other hoof, they were loud and scary and routinely woke her up at night.
Lamely checking the spyglass again, Offal still saw no activity at the cabin. Perhaps there had been some, and perhaps there hadn't been; there was no way to know.
One more sigh escaped her. She did not look forward to Slink reading this particular day's report come Spring. What a way to start this season.
Offal grumbled and levitated her things back into her bag. No point in sticking around much longer – the wind and dropping temperature made her teeth chatter and she doubted the guards intended to stay out during the storm.
She was just out of her little burrow and around the tree when something small landed in her eye. Offal winced sharply at the sudden sting and blinked madly, the bothered eye watering fast. The pain faded quickly and rubbing her hoof around her eye produced no dirt or other foreign objects, just a wet feeling. Standing there in chilly confusion, Offal looked up above her again.
At first she saw nothing, but with some patience, she caught sight of little white pellets of some sort gently drifted along the cold air currents.
Renewed concern crept into Offal's heart.
Were these ashes?
Is there a fire?
Offal glanced at the guard cabin, but saw no hint of smoke rising from their wilting chimney.
Was the forest on fire?!
Shutting her eyes Offal quickly sniffed the air, taking in a great big breath for a great big sample, but smelled nothing except the damp wetness of the storm's increasingly humid air.
Beneath furrowed brow, the confused changeling looked back up at the floating little anomalies and wracked her mind. Had Slink mentioned anything about this? Had the hive weather classes covered storms that rained flakes?
A distant bell rang inside her head as a faded memory glinted from beneath the thick mud of forgotten knowledge. She tugged at its corner, slowly but surely dredging it up.
Flakes... flakes... she remembered a weather class that mentioned flakes in a storm. Flake storm? Storm flakes? No... wait... yes? No... no... that's... no... sss... no... sssnow... snow... flakes? Snow flakes! A storm of snow flakes!
A snow storm!
Offal's face lit up like the sun as the realization struck her.
A snow storm!
She trotted ecstatically in place, her hooves stomping little divots into the cold ground. She'd heard stories of whole landscapes of pure white blankets of snow covering everything the eye could see, of the deafening silence caused by the noise-dampening properties of thick snow, of how wondrous it was to trot out into a virgin expanse of fragile perfection and to just exist in that moment of sublime solitude.
Offal was very excited.
A wide smile plastered her face as she began the canter back to her cave. The cold wind dropped the temperature and her deep breaths puffed out like the fog of the ponies' trains. Leaves crunched underhoof as her hole-riddled legs propelled her through the woods.
=========================<><><>=========================
This was a race to beat the cold. The clouds above never fell behind – if anything, they floated even faster and the cold winds grew ever colder. Offal's nose went numb and she scrunched her face at the sensation, but quickly returned her focus to dodging trees, roots, and bushes.
Hundreds of snowflakes sailed past Offal in the blowing and whistling wind and forced the freezing changeling to squint. Shivers and shudders wracked her body and she hunched down for any warmth she could spare while slowing to a trot in front of the net of leaves camouflaging her home's trapdoor. Offal grabbed the door's exterior handle in her magic, wrenched it open without stopping, and darted in. Her shaky legs nearly dropped her down the stairs when she entered the dark hole; she let the door slam down behind her, not bothering to telekinetically straighten the net outside. That could wait. That would wait.
Offal discarded her saddlebag like a farmer discards a bag of bad apples and dove straight into her bedroll, panting from the run home. The blanket covered her entire being in moments, and only once she was impenetrable did she open her locket and bask in the radiant heat of love.
Several minutes passed and she closed the locket, and then several more passed while she regained her motor skills.
And then another several more, just for good measure.
Only once she could feel her nose again did she peek out from her woolen cocoon to spark her magic to light the candle on her desk. The dim flame flickered to life, the tiny beacon throwing black shadows around the cave. Offal floated the candle nearer and set it down on the jagged floor next to the bedroll, then floated her journal and its pencil out from beneath herself. By the low light of the candle and the green glimmer of her own horn, Offal scribbled down the end of today's entry.
She yawned under the blanket while dotting the entry's last period, a cute squeaky noise ill befitting the scourge of ponykind.
Offal's eyelids drooped. Exhaustion caught right up with her and oh boy was it time for bed. The trapdoor reduced the howling wind outside to a muffled whistle, but Offal knew exactly what kind of force approached.
This time her magic gently suffocated the candle's flame until it was but a thin wisp of smoke, which plunged the cozy mare into darkness again. Offal floated the candle back onto the desk, sealed herself in the blanket, and snuggled up to sleep.
A snow storm!
The thought echoed all around her mind and stopped sleep's advance. From the wind battering the trapdoor, Offal knew this would be a real storm, and if snow was anything like rain, then there should be a lot of it. She tried to imagine the scene: bare trees, crunchy leaves all over the ground, cold air, and then...?
Offal's brow creased as realized she didn't know how snow worked. Was it like the sand of the badlands surrounding the hive? She remembered hearing her elder comrades describe snowfall as “blanketing”, but sand doesn't blanket things. It sifts across floors and down steps and through holes sort of like a reluctant form of water. Piles form, sure, but it doesn't build up, so to speak.
But it was the closest thing she had; Offal tried to imagine the forest outside covered in sand. She imagined the trees covered in sand, but it just ran off into little tan piles around the roots. She imagined wet sand burying the forest floor and clumped up on the trees, but that just looked kind of gross and unpleasant to trot across. Certainly not light and fluffy and pretty like as her comrades described.
Imagining dirt with those characteristics was equally uninspiring, as was clay. Pepper seemed like it might have similar properties, but just the thought of the land outside covered in tons of pepper made her nose itch and she fought back a sneeze. Guess she'd just have to see it for herself.
With that, Offal curled up to sleep, shutting out the muted howling of the weather outside.
=========================<><><>=========================
Several bangs like gunshots followed by a thunderous boom echoed through the forest when hundreds of pounds of wood collided with the ground and turned a peacefully sleeping Offal into a flurry of perforated limbs and kicking black hooves.
She ripped the blanket from over her head while a shot of adrenaline threw her wings straight up and darted her groggy eyes all around the cold, pitch-black cave. Moments later her horn lit up and turned her immediate surroundings a dim green. Her desk candle ignited right afterwards and threw orange across the room.
Offal heard nothing but her scared breathing and saw nothing different about the cave from when she left it for the dreamworld earlier. Her bag still lay on the floor, her stationery sat on her desk, and the wooden boards still blocked the deeper cave. What on Equus was that?
Swallowing hard, she kicked the blanket all the way off and shivered at the chilled cave air. Floating the candle over to herself, she kept it close while approaching the trapdoor. Quickly she noticed that the wind from before was gone, replaced by silence. At the bottom of the stairs she looked up, seeing the rough wooden panels that kept her rough embassy secure from the rest of Equestria.
Swallowing again, Offal climbed the steps and tried in vain to slow her rapid heartbeat.
There could be anything waiting for her on the other side of this door.
She hesitated halfway.
What if there was a wild animal outside? What if the guards from before did actually see her and waited until she was asleep and defenseless to attack? What could have possibly made such an enormous noise?
Excruciatingly slowly, Offal's green magic began forming around the inside handle of the trapdoor. Taking one last deep breath and setting the candle down on the steps, Offal pushed the door up.
Or tried to, anyway – it didn't budge.
Confused, Offal eyed the wooden panel, its framework, and the stone around it; they looked the same as always.
Offal redoubled her efforts and forced more magic into the aura, but still the door still refused to budge.
Her nerves frayed just a little bit more. Is the door blocked by something? Did a tree fall onto the door? She scanned the wood again, not seeing any signs of splintering or bending, no obvious indication of any outside forces holding it down. A third, halfhearted shove produced the same lack of results.
Is it stuck without damage?
Is it frozen?
Is she trapped down here?
That thought injected more adrenaline into her heart – Slink wasn't due back for another three months and Offal was too far away from anywhere for her telepathy spell to reach any other changelings. Her amulet would keep her alive until then, but staying in this musty cave for that entire time?
Madness lurked in the back of her mind.
Offal shuddered, pushing the fear away. No way could she stay down here and it was too early to panic. She crouched down and wedged herself between the second-highest step and the trapdoor. After a three second mental countdown, she stood and pressed her back as hard as she could against the door while simultaneously dumping as much magic as possible into the telekinesis spell. This time it budged upwards, slowly and creakily, but surely. Teeth gritted, her legs quivered from the effort and her eyes squeezed shut in concentration. Cold wind flowed freely through the widening crack between door and frame, and the higher it got the easier it became. Finally, Offal felt and heard something slide off of the roof of the door and let her throw it open. Some kind of clumpy cold dust brushed past her hooves and when Offal opened her eyes, she was greeted by a dark nighttime wonderland beyond her wildest imagination.
Except for the trunks of the trees, a bluish white blanket of a strange, thick white powder covered absolutely everything, the moonlight almost making it glow and twinkle in the night shadows. Offal stood in shock, thoughts of the earlier loud crash suspended while she processed the scene before her. But no matter how she squinted, the night still hid the details.
She looked down to levitate her candle and saw a small pile of fluffy white dust melting next to the waxen stick. She froze for a few seconds to process the fact that the sparkly little lump of dust was snow.
Offal returned her stunned gaze outside, candle now held aloft and illuminating the frosted trees and bushes surrounding the hatch. All of them, everything, all she could see was covered in snow.
She glanced this way and that, mouth agape, following the gentle contours of the snow-smooth surfaces, seeing how it built up on the tree branches above and sagged them closer to the ground. Even the tiniest twig had a little ridge of white running along its back.
And what silence!
Offal's own breathing threatened to deafen her – there was simply nothing else to be heard. Neither peep nor whisper found their way into her swiveling ears. No chirping crickets, no rustling leaves, no cricking branches, not even the wind from before dared disturb the enraptured changeling.
The cold, however, wicked insidiously throughout her shell.
A shiver ran down Offal's spine and she realized she was standing outside in the dead of the coldest night she'd ever experienced in her life. Quickly she took the candle in her magic and practically fell down the stairs again to get to her blanket. The candle still hovering, she unfurled the blanket, threw it over her back, and pulled it up a bit so the leading edge crumpled up into a rudimentary scarf. The candle she levitated close in front of herself so the flame's faint warmth could radiate against her chest.
Clopping back up the stairs, Offal again paused at the top. The candle illuminated the ground immediately before her, and she leaned down to get a better look at the snow.
Millions of tiny crystals reflected the candlelight every which way, some back at her, making the ground sparkle more radiantly than any magic she'd ever seen.
Tentatively she put one hoof down to the snow and pressed, and was surprised at how easily it yielded, her hoof sinking a full seven inches before finding dead leaves and solid ground. She put another hoof forward, and another, and another, until she was standing entirely in the snow beyond the edge of the cave door.
An experimental kick sent a little white cloud out in front of her, all of which plopped right back down without delay.
Scooping a bit up in her hoof, she brought it to her nose for a smell but was surprised to find that it smelled like nothing. Nothing except cold.
Touching her tongue against it revealed, well, that it just tasted like cold too. A little bit melted into water, and she realized that all of the fluff she saw before her was just that – frozen water. Offal licked a little bit of snow from her hoof and let it melt in her mouth before tossing in the rest and swallowing the water as it formed. Chilly but edible.
Turning to look behind herself, she remembered the loud crash from earlier and saw its unmissable source. One of the enormous leaning trees near the cave lay on the ground, pulled down by the sheer weight of the snow overloading its, as Offal could now see, rotten core. Good thing that didn't land on the cave door.
Satisfied with her discoveries thus far but still craving more, Offal readjusted her makeshift cape and gingerly stepped further into the snow. For the first few steps she watched where she was going, but soon enough she walked through the snow with her eyes at the sky, mouth slightly ajar and puffing out little wisps of steam, in awe of how much snow there was and all of its beauty.
Stopping at a large evergreen bush, Offal nudged one of the sagging branches with her hoof hard enough to knock a little bit of snow off. The branch lifted up, a great weight lifted from its back, and with budding excitement Offal shook the entire bush. Lumps of snow spilled from the bush like flour, and some dropped onto the mare.
She shook herself of the snow like a dog does water and admired her handiwork. The bush, minus several pounds of snow, once more sat tall and proud. Small bits of white still clung in some crevices between leaf and twig, but for the most part, this bush was an outcast in this new blanketed world. It would be a useful marker for her return trip since the snow buried her usual trail. Fortunately, the candle still had plenty of wick left so that would not be happening quite yet!
Offal began wandering again, and absentmindedly found herself approaching the edge of the field housing the guards and their cabin. The dark trees parted before the blue-eyed changeling and the largest, purest canvas she'd ever seen met her eyes. From black treeline to black treeline a perfectly even expanse of moonlit snow covered the ground, interrupted only by the guard's cabin, the trails of smoke coming from its chimney, and its glowing orange window-
Offal froze.
A shadow slid past the window.
She immediately drove her candle into the snow to kill the flame and stared at the cabin like a hawk. The regret of not bringing her saddlebag, or even just her spyglass, gnawed at the back of her mind.
Squinting, all concentration focused on the cabin window, Offal watched.
Her heart thumped hard when a white-furred, gold-maned body moved from right to left, towards the side with the door, but seconds later it moved back across.
Offal visibly sank and breathed out an enormous sigh of relief. No harm done.
She began to walk the perimeter of the field, the crunch of the snow so loud yet so quiet at the same time. Glancing ahead momentarily while keeping her eyes on the window, Offal made her way around to an area of the field behind the cabin, out of sight from anyone inside. Only once there did Offal let herself relax.
But now what?
She was here now – great. But what to do with all of this snow?
Letting her inner foal take over, Offal kicked the snow again, sending another little cloud out and back down. Then she kicked harder. And harder. And harder! Smiling widely, Offal could tell by the moonlight that the snow she kicked flew a good several hooves. And it was so light and airy, she barely felt any resistance. Even easier than kicking the sand outside the hive as a foal!
A gentle breeze sifted past Offal and she shivered, the giant hole in her covering where it fell around her shoulders and down her sides gladly let even minute currents of frigid air inside. A quick hoist of the blanket got it bunched up at her neck again and dragging less on the snow, but the act threw little blobs of cold onto her already cold chitin. The blanket wasn't a bad insulator, but Offal felt her core temperature dropping every minute she stood out here.
Stomping around in circles like a cat finding a spot to sleep, Offal flattened out a small circle of packed snow where she was standing. Now her blanket wasn't dragging through it anymore. She gave the area a few more experimental stomps and found the packed snow to be quite harder than the light and fluffy stuff all around. She sank down to sit, wrapping the blanket around her completely and using her back legs to drag it beneath herself to sit on. Her horn acted like a little tent rod, and a slit in the wrappings of the blanket let her peer out at the guard cabin while she took some time to warm up.
Still no signs of activity, though smoke continued to rise from the chimney.
Offal's blue eyes wandered up at the night sky. Thousands and thousands of stars shone back. She remembered from her courses back in the hive that Equestria had three princesses. One that controlled the sun and ruled the land Offal spied upon, the one that her queen had replaced during a wedding and was off on a diplomatic mission to some faraway place, and then a third one. This one was active only at night and from what Offal understood, only a couple years ago had been imprisoned in the moon for trying to overthrow the first princess. Now she raised the moon and arranged the stars in a different beautiful pattern every night.
Offal wondered if that princess made these canopies just for her subjects, or for any who would look upon them. Griffons, dragons, buffalo, even an enemy changeling huddled in the middle of a snowy field.
A few more minutes saw that very changeling stand up and stretch, ready to continue with something else.
In a gigantic waste of the warmth she just achieved, Offal let her blanket drop around her hooves, reared up, and fell flat onto her back into the snow.
She sank into it immediately with a gentle crunch. Arctic cold raced up her spine and her backplate became one enormous heatsink that sapped her warmth into the ground. A sharp gasp revealed how off guard the cold caught her and she arched her back and flailed her limbs trying to roll over. Snow flew this way and that until she managed to flop onto her side and jump back to her hooves. Quickly diving back under her blanket she chastised herself, this time not even bothering with a vision slot and waited for the warmth to come again. She forlornly thought of her candle in the snow.
=========================<><><>=========================
Small green auras of magic carried out and deposited small clumps of melting snow through the new slot in Offal's wool cocoon. Diving back into the blanket without first shaking off the snow proved to be a terrible idea and a now damp and even colder Offal regretted every moment of it. Perhaps if she could requisition some snow gear...
Now that she thought about it, it was kind of odd that Slink didn't bring any for her. What if the storm had been worse? What if the snow was so deep that she couldn't get to the guards? She could fly to the spot, as difficult as it would be with so many branches, but where was she supposed to hide? A charcoal-colored changeling would stand out against the pure white snow. Even just a white towel would have been better than nothing. Although, what did Slink say? That this area was tactically useless?
Offal drooped as she remembered that her assignment here wasn't of any actual importance. But then why did Slink want journal entries and activity logs? Was this a tough-love training? What caste would this even get her into? Would it even?
Maybe if she proved she could survive an assignment as simple as this, they would let her take on something more challenge- a glint of gold caught her eye through the blanket's slit.
Offal quickly came back down to Equus and peered through the slot at the armored royal guard trudging determinedly at her through the snow.
By sheer coincidence her latest tiny haul of snow wasn't outside of her blanket yet; she promptly killed her magic and dropped the snow all over her hooves.
She stared intently, fixedly, her focus so ridiculously pinpointed that she swore she could make out his white coat's individual furs even in this low moonlight. Her heart thrashed against her emaciated ribs, and in the back of her mind the terror of the guard hearing her pulse and rapid breathing threatened to knock her out. Offal ever so slowly sank in place, making herself as small as possible, when all of a sudden the guard turned to his left.
Offal blinked as the guard's yellow magic encompassed a log from the woodpile behind their cabin, floated it over, and held it aloft by his side as he turned right around, pushed through the snow back to the front of the cabin, and returned to the warmth inside. After a few seconds, the bright firelight shining through the window faded to a low glow.
Stunned silence encompassed the blanket. Even with the guard gone, Offal stayed still. Belief escaped her – how did she get away with that? A giant black stain in the middle of a white field glowing under the moonlight and he didn't even so much as glance her way?
Her legs gave out and Offal flopped onto her belly like a sack of potatoes inside her makeshift tent. Little bits of snow still melted in her fin-like mane and on her chitin, but she didn't notice and sighed the longest, deepest sigh of relief she could ever muster.
To the guard, she must have blended in with the dark trees on the horizon. Or maybe looked like a rock. Or perhaps he just didn't look up.
=========================<><><>=========================
Offal laid in that spot and did not budge, though not out of fear. Her breath expelled faint plumes of steam from her numb nose; her tired eyes stared ahead at the cabin, at the chopped woodpile, and at the smoke still drifting out of the chimney. The cabin's firelight shining through the window continued to flicker as a faded orange trapezoid on the snow, teasing Offal with the dry warmth inside the cabin. Her dark cave and the now-lost candle couldn't compare.
The earlier melted snow left her damp, chilly, and exhausted. Snow stuck to the blanket made that wet and heavy too. But Offal couldn't find the energy to care. That one guard's surprise appearance really took it out of her.
Yet the night sky did not brighten no matter how long she laid there, and the stars remained just as steadfast in their position as always. Even before the night princess was a concept Offal understood, she'd seen these stars on clear nights for as long as she could remember. She thought back to the hive, many years ago when she was a foal, and how she and her friends used to play in the sand and rocks outside of the hive's dark caves all through the day and sometimes into the night. Before their duties split them apart.
Who were they again?
Offal's brow furrowed in thought.
...Allure? Allure was one of them, way back when. Eaves and Hither too, though Eaves was assigned to the Subversion caste early and she never saw her again. Hither stuck around for a while but went into the Seduction caste with Allure. That left just her, in Pending, setting and breaking her own record every day for longest unassigned changeling with no real position anywhere in the hive.
Offal ignored how they'd split apart and thought further back to the games they used to play outside, kind of like right now. Miles of empty sand dunes with the occasional sparse trees and rock formations did not give much for the imagination to work with. Fortunately a foal's imagination didn't need much.
Races through the dunes, seeing who could dig the deepest burrow, Queen of the Dune, burrow and seek, playing hive, hover buzz tone matching, the ponies' 'telephone' game but with disguises, sand drawing, the list went on. Allure in particular liked to make fancy sand castles with the wet and clumpy sand by one of the closest watering holes. Then Hither would turn it into a competition like she did for nearly everything. The largest castle, the fanciest castle, the castle with the most towers, the most gates, the most top-heavy, all sorts of arbitrary requirements. Offal remembered her own attempts being lackluster and Eaves could never be bothered.
Instead, Eaves built changelings and ponies instead of castles. Sandlings, Eaves called them, and the name stuck. Offal helped her move rocks or sticks or other things over for props or supports, and after some time the sandlings became really, very good. Incredible renderings of still life in sand. Eaves concentrated on the finest details while Offal watched or fetched materials. Every single one was different and unique – perhaps her attention to detail is what Subversion took Eaves early for; Offal never saw another sandling again after Eaves left. But...
Offal's eyes widened. If Eaves could build a changeling out of sand clumped together... could she make one out of snow clumped together?
The cold still licked at her chitin but Offal found herself with renewed purpose. Standing up inside her gray blanket, Offal parted the front and shivered; just moving through the winter air sliced at her damp shell. But she would do this. Eaves' sandlings would not be the last!
Offal stomped out some distance further back from the guard cabin to a fresh patch of snow. Sitting down in the blanket again, the determined changeling reached down and picked up a clump of the white dust. Much lighter than sand, she found, but compressing it made it harder and stronger than the sand ever was. She stomped out a circle to build in and then began reaching around and plopping snow into the middle of her new stage.
Compact, obtain, compact, obtain, compact, obtain, compact... deja vu squirmed in her stomach as Offal relived the days of building up the basic blob shape of a sandling before Eaves worked her magic. There was no grace here, just manual labor, yet Offal found herself enjoying it even as the cold stung her hooves.
Soon enough the original circle was several times larger and devoid of fluffy snow, all rearranged and built up into a white mass standing just as tall as she. The breathless changeling stepped back, cold and numb in her legs but warmed by the work everywhere else. She huddled up for a few minutes to regain the sense of touch, but before long swept the blanket open again and got back to work.
First things first, Offal scraped a huge chunk out of the top corner of one side – this would be the snowling's back. The tall part would be the head. Burrowing through the base created an arch under the mass of snow and the vaguest interpretation of front and back legs, though they remained to be separated.
Then another few minutes to warm up.
Grabbing more snow, Offal slapped on mass to the taller part of the blob, forming a lumpy ball in the general shape of a changeling's head. Shaving some snow out from beneath it revealed a rough chin, neck, and concave cheeks.
Moving down, Offal gently wedged her hoof into the middle of the snowling's giant front support and began scraping up and down. As layer after layer of snow fell away, Offal became more and more careful, until her hoof broke through the other side and turned the front support into two front legs, thick at the base and all the way up to the torso. Eaves used to build wooden frameworks into her final sandlings to allow for thinner limbs, but Offal was in no position to attempt that. Repeating the motions to the rear support created a set of legs and flanks there too.
Scraping further snow away turned the snowling's plump barrel into a changeling's thin belly. Dragging the tip of her hoof along the contours of its sides and back outlined its elytra, which unlike a real changeling's remained the same stark white as the rest of its body.
Lastly, she built up a tiny peak of snow on the top of its head. Shaving this down as carefully as she could produced the trademark curved horn of her species.
Offal knocked the snow out of her hooves and huddled inside her blanket to look at her work. Her best efforts couldn't get every surface perfectly smooth, and the head looked a bit taller than it should be, and there weren't any holes in its legs out of the fear of it collapsing, but this was the recognizable shape of a changeling.
Little puffs of steam vented from the blanket as Offal warmed up. Though proud of her creation, Offal found herself unsatisfied and couldn't help but think something was missing. She thought back to Eaves' sandlings again and strained to remember. What made them so unique? What made them pop?
Offal considered her favorite sandling of Eaves'. Over several days, Eaves built a tall and slender body out of sand, brushing and patting it smooth, burrowing holes in mirror image to the source subject. With Offal pulling down branches and leaves, finding long blades of watergrass, and digging up different textures of sand for her to use, Eaves wove together many natural materials into a nearly spitting image of the Queen herself standing before the small fillies.
It was then that Offal realized what it needed.
Wearing a smile despite the cold, Offal turned and trudged through more of the untouched snow to return to the field's edge. Staying out of sight of the guards in the cabin, she deftly used her magic to shake the snow from a small branch of the nearest pine tree and sent piles of white tumbling to the blanketed ground. Twisting and bending the branch, Offal's concentration broke right after the branch did, a quiet crack sounding off but not echoing, or even getting much farther than Offal's own ears. She stood still for a moment to appreciate how well the snow suppressed noise.
Doing the same to two more branches netted Offal three healthy pine branches fanning out into hundreds of pine needles. She traced her hoofprints back to the snowling and one by one stabbed the branches deep into its body. Two for the wings sticking out and one for the tail hanging down. A bit misshapen, but with a little imagination it looked even more like a changeling. From a distance, at least.
From that distance, Offal contemplated its face. There was still more to do.
Shivers now wracking her body regularly, Offal gritted her teeth and returned to the field's edge. Pushing past snow-packed branches and leaves, and getting her blanket covered in just as much, the cloth-wrapped changeling kicked around through the snow. Large and small boulders popped up everywhere in the leaf and snow layers, but those weren't what she was after. Glancing around a bit to make sure nothing was watching her lonesome self in the dark, snowy forest, Offal used the front edges of her perforated hooves like scrapers and got digging. Excavating the snow took seconds, as did ripping through the layers of dead leaves and grass beneath that, but then she hit frozen dirt that hurt to burrow into and got nowhere.
No less determined, she moved a step over and kept digging through the snow. She lost feeling in her hooves again, the several gouges and tunnels marring their shapes letting cold air and snow steal warmth almost directly from her muscles and bones, but pressed on. Leaving a little trail of pits in the snow behind her, Offal almost jumped for joy when she hit a pebble lodged in the surface of the dirt. One down...
She paused for a moment to think about how many she needed. Two for the eyes, one for the nose, and maybe ten or so for the mouth? She nodded decisively at her new goal of thirteen pebbles in mind. Offal slipped her magic around the tiny rock, stepped over to another spot, and resumed digging.
=========================<><><>=========================
Bursting through the treeline and dodging piles of snow falling from the branches above, Offal re-entered the snow-laden field. Not quite from where she'd first left it, but still well out of sight of any guards looking through the warm window. In her magic she floated thirteen pebbles of various shapes and colors and two splintered bits of wood, all destined to comprise the facial features on her misshapen masterpiece. She quickly kicked loose snow off of her blanket and out of the holes in her legs and walked towards the snowling one more time. Soreness permeated her body except where the cold masked it, constant sniffling barely kept her nose from running everywhere, and she swore she could hear her joints creak with every step.
She almost salivated at the thought of her bedroll.
Offal considered skipping her spying duty tomorrow to recover from this ridiculous excursion. There was no way she would be able to watch the guard cabin all day if she couldn't keep her eyes open. By Chrysalis, if Slink ever found about her activities tonight she'd be sent back to the hive for reassignment before she even woke up the next day! Offal let a small smirk creep across her face at the idea of keeping such a secret from Slink.
Stomping through the fluffy snow, kicking little puffs ahead with every step, Offal put one hoof before the other in the giant white canvas of a field, beneath the bright moon and starry sky.
And then she was there again, back at her snowling, with pebbles and splinters floating aloft.
One by one, Offal dotted her pebbles across the snowling's jaw, forming a flat, inexpressive line. The two wooden splinters followed just beneath. The eleventh pebble sank snugly into the changeling's nose. And lastly, one by one, Offal slotted the remaining two pebbles into the head right where real eyes would go. Shivering violently, Offal sputtered out a sigh of contentment and stepped back to behold her creation.
Beautiful, it was not. But Offal knew it wouldn't be. She wasn't Eaves, she wasn't a master sculptor, and that was alright. The branches roughly flared up from the back, and the tail hung limply just as it did for all changelings. The two wooden fragments poked out at just the right length to represent the fangs, and the pebbles sealed the deal with recognizable facial features. As imperfect as it was, it was perfect, and Offal beamed.
This snowling stood here, in the backyard of an Equestrian guardpost, because of her own two hooves. How many of the hive's seducers or replacers could make that claim? How many in Subversion could say that they built a statue right next to the enemy and got away with it?
She sat contentedly, letting her limbs droop and her brain relax. Several hours of plodding through a field of snow and she had to shake her head to stay awake. There was no energy left to think.
At that moment the right eye of the snowling fell out and thumped onto the hardened snow ground.
Perhaps it was because she was nearing a state of delusional exhaustion. Perhaps it was the cold numbing her extremities. Or perhaps it was just because everything is funnier at 3 AM. But the rock eye plopping into the snow struck Offal as the greatest act of comedy she'd seen in the last three years. Luckily she had the presence of mind to slap her hooves across her face and stifle the raucous laughter erupting from her throat. Small squeaks and giggles weaseled through and tears welled in her eyes, but Offal suppressed her hysterics and fought to catch her breath.
No less than a full minute later was she able to put her hooves back down. Offal let out a happy sigh and floated the rock back up in place, pressing it in a bit harder so it couldn't fall out again. The snowling re-completed, she looked over its face once more.
Now that she thought about it, there wasn't really a need to have a rock for a nose. Changeling noses don't look any different from the rest of their chitin; there was no reason to make it stick out with a pebble.
Surrounding that rock with her magic, Offal popped the nose stone out of its place, set it down, and died when a spear slammed through the back of her skull like a rivet through steel, exploded out of her right eye, and riveted her face to the sparkly ground. Her body spasmed in its death throes and before her remaining eye rolled back up into her skull. Green blood splattered across the snow in grotesque patterns and froze almost immediately.
The snowling kept its stoic stance above is creator, silent and impassive.
=========================<><><>=========================
A white unicorn, built like a tank and poised to run, stood in a moonlit field of snow and stared at the black lump twitching in the fluffy white dust in the distance. His scared panting expelled plumes of steam from both his mouth and nostrils. The adrenaline flooding his veins began to dissipate but his pulse didn't subside. A wooden log, previously floating in his golden magic, lay forgotten on the ground by his side.
A changeling? Here? At this section of the border?
Pinpoint shook his head, golden mane swishing back and forth through the cold winter air. Fresh images of black, hissing insects crawling all over his home city flashed through his mind clear as day. Breaking down doors, setting fires, binding him with their acrid spit while they sacked his nation's capital – there weren't supposed to be any this far North! That was the whole reason for choosing this assignment!
Keep it together, he forced himself to think. Keep your cool. There can't be many, it's too cold for them to survive in this weather. Glad we didn't doubt Talltale this time.
Deep breath after deep breath slowed his pulse, and another shake put him in gear. The white stallion grabbed the log in his magic again and turned briskly, wasting no time in returning to the warmth of the cabin. Pinpoint slammed the door open and dropped the log onto the floor with a loud thud, startling his three comrades from their sleep.
“Ugh, what the...? You know you can just open the door normally, right?” asked another white-furred stallion groggily raising his head from the couch.
“Get prepped,” Pinpoint ordered without even acknowledging the question, “we're going hunting.”
The other ponies' ears perked up.
“What do you mean hunting?”, asked a third from the lower of two bunks. “For friggin' what? Snow? Snowponies? Timberwolves? Is there a timberwolf outside?”, and after a pause, “Where's your spear?”
Pinpoint released the golden glow from around his helmet after sinking it into place, and replied.
“There is at least one changeling outside.”
Without another word, the three ponies jumped into action and threw on their own golden armors and followed Pinpoint outside into the snow. Within minutes they recovered one bloodied spear, one female changeling corpse bleeding all over the snow, and secured a perimeter around what they would later report as the worst snowpony they'd ever seen.
=========================<><><>=========================
The trapdoor thumped shut, but Slink wasn't in the dark. No, she was very, very, acutely aware of where she was and what she was doing. Her glowing green horn illuminated the gray winter hat hiding her head and ears and the thick plaid scarf wrapped around her neck. The two dense wool coats encasing her body left everything to the imagination and formed a seal with the black boots insulating her hooves. And even with all that, the cold occasionally nipped at her chitin.
But in stark contrast to her fragile body temperature, Slink's mind needed no help staying warm. Her fuming thoughts, her irate temperament, and furious state of mind out-burned even the hungriest iron furnace. The changeling mare stomped down the roughly hewn stone steps of the damp, freezing cave she'd stood in only two weeks earlier. Reports of a bunch of guards in a no-name section of Equestria having caught and killed a changeling surfaced almost immediately after she'd left. Cross referencing maps and information pointed Slink and her colleagues to the one changeling that could get herself killed by the most peaceful country in the known world.
Every other step she whispered a new obscenity, so quietly it didn't even get a chance to echo around the underground chamber. Upon reaching the floor she paused and glared around the room. To her immediate left, pressed up against what passed for a wall down here, sat a certain moron's desk. On it lay an assortment of items, including a stack of blank parchments. Next to the desk, a battered saddlebag.
Further down the wall, at the back left corner, a plain bedroll lay out on the floor, sans blanket.
I bet she friggin' thought that would suffice out there. Only she's dumb enough to think that the guards would bother patrolling in weather that kills what they're looking for. And to then forget all of her equipment!
The rage smoldering in Slink's skull threatened to ignite the scrap of a fin on the back of her head. What a monstrous waste of time and resources. A waste of supplies, a waste of bedding, a waste of love, a waste of her day, and a waste of an able, if stupid, changeling.
Even in death, Awful Offal strikes again.
Slink's green magic surrounded the bedroll, rolled it up, and dragged it over. While quickly tying its travel ropes together to keep it compact, she noticed a journal and pencil laying where the bedroll had been. For a moment, her curiosity outweighed her anger.
I bet she was still filling half the pages with leaves.
Slink floated the rough little book over to herself and idly flipped through the pages. She snorted at the detailed sketches and balked at how bad her charge's surveillance ability really was. Forgetting to wind the watch, falling asleep out in the open, forgetting the watch entirely, making up reports for missed check-ins... this was beyond amateur hour. Had she actually expected to get anywhere like this?
Almost enjoying the incompetency, Slink flipped to the last entry in the journal. More nothing, then a timeskip where the idiot had clearly fallen asleep, and finally some speculative nonsense. Although...
Slink reread two of the last entries in the journal and paused in thought.
She wrote that a guard came running back from the North, saying he saw a changeling. Then she left because I was visiting soon.
And thought some more.
A guard came running back from the North, saying he saw a changeling. Then she left because...
Slink stared at that page, feeling her heartbeat quicken, as a sick feeling like worms wriggled around in her gut.
I came from the North that day, after checking in with...
I came from the North that day.
The fluttering of pages followed by a thump echoed in the cave when the journal hit the floor.
I was seen.
She stared in mounting horror at the small book lying splayed open on the uneven rock.
I'm... the reason the guards all....
She could barely form the thought.
I... got her....
Slink recoiled from the journal as the consequences for lingslaughter flashed before her eyes. She sat in a stupor, contemplating the end of her career when the journal caught her eye again. Then she glanced at the blank stack of parchment on the desk. Oppressive silence, punctuated every eight seconds by the dripping of water somewhere beyond the wall of boards, rang in Slink's ears as the gears of malice began manufacturing pure treason in her head.
The official notes I brought back end before this entry.
Now a new set of consequences flashed before her eyes, but still a demented smirk deformed her face.
There's no way for anyling to ever know.
Slink's green magic grasped the journal firmly and floated it back towards herself.
What's one more deserter lost to the winter?
A spark within Slink's aura sparked against a small corner of the journal.
Her failure will not become my own.
A flame lit up and quickly engulfed over a quarter of the book. Then with a flick of her magic, Slink sent the blackening journal sailing through a gap in the boards blocking off the rest of the cave and out of sight.
They say that a changeling dies twice. Once, when they stop breathing, and the second, a bit later on, when someling mentions their name for the last time. Slink reveled in that second silence, her smirk becoming a wicked grin splitting her face. She was finally free of the ball and chain. Free to continue her life and career. Free to finally climb the ranks of Subversion and devote her skills to where they truly belonged.
Still grinning, Slink orphaned the bedroll down against the desk.
She turned her back on the resources she was supposed to retrieve, ascended the stairs, let the trapdoor slam shut, and tossed the camouflage net across its surface. The most tactically useless part of Equestria would not see another changeling stationed here. After pausing for one last sneer at the hidden door, Slink adjusted her coats and trotted merrily into the snowy forest.
Among the bare trees reaching towards the cold Autumn sky, a snowflake drifted.
Author's Note
Proofread by Fume.
Updated 2018/11/29 with some minor corrections and improvements.
