Stinging needles of ice whipped across the frozen landscape. The howling wind seemed to blow from all directions. Despite the chilling weather, the sky was clear, a full moon casting its light across the tundra, imbuing the land with an eerie gleam.

A small crater, hardly a metre in diameter, adorned the side of a snowdrift. Leading away from the crater was a set of boot prints, clearly indicating someone recently trudging through the knee-high snow. The tracks led on for nearly a kilometre, occasionally swerving for no reason, or even circling back on themselves. Eventually, they stopped, their owner standing still, cross-armed for warmth. His light-grey lab coat rendered him nearly invisible against the snowy landscape.

After several minutes of just standing there, staring off into the stormy distance, the figure fell to his knees in defeat. The cold was harsh, but he had bigger worries.

“…Just don’t understand it, don’t understand it…” the man muttered to himself, under the howling wind. He closed his eyes for a few moments while huddling for warmth before reopening them with a newfound vigour. “No, stop it! We are not dead. If the Universe thinks She can kill Alexander Weaver with a bit of snow, She’s got another thing coming!”

Rising back to his full height, he filled himself with determination.

“Right. First things first. Survival. What did my Scout manual say about that again?”

The Tundra is the worst place to have to survive. The absolutely bitter cold mixed with little life in any form creates a unique landscape that is nearly impossible to survive in…

“You know what? Screw the Scouts. Never taught me anything useful anyway. Okay, let’s see… Body heat! Need to keep my body heat. Let’s keep moving.”

Alex recommenced his laboured ploughing through the snow. He pulled his arms into his lab coat and held them against his core and the bottle of pop he was keeping under his shirt to help store heat.

“Next up: shelter.”

Alex began to survey his surroundings. In the distance, he spotted the jagged outline of rock formations though the blinding snow. Even further, he imagined he could just make out the faintest glow of light on the horizon, perhaps of some town. Dismissing it as a trick of the moonlight, he turned back towards the large rocks.

“That’ll do, I suppose. If I’m lucky, maybe there’ll be a cave o-of some s-sort.” At this point, Alex’s teeth were beginning to chatter.

Like a ghost in the wind, the sorrowful howl of a wolf echoed across the tundra. Alex gulped. He pulled a large gun from his pocket and brought it back in under his coat, his numb index finger firmly set on the trigger.

<~.~.~</^>~.~.~>

“You’ve gone and done it this time, Shining,” Shining Armor lamented to himself as he trotted across the surface of the snow on his snowshoes. “’It’s just one night out with some friends, Cadence,’ ‘Nothing could possibly happen, Cadence,’ ‘I just need some time to myself, Cadence’.” Shining paused for a moment to adjust his hiking saddlebags over his winter parka. “Well, seems like you’ve got quite a bit of time to yourself now.”

After convincing his wife to let him use his hard-earned day off, Shining had somehow managed to lose sight of his hiking buddies while admiring the dazzling display of stars in the clear night sky. The unicorn had apparently gazed for longer than he had intended, and by the time he had turned to re-join his friends, they had vanished into the snow. He had now spent the better part of an hour calling out for them, and at one point had sworn that he could hear them doing the same. But eventually his strength left him, and he had resigned to moving as best he could back towards the city.

That is, until the storm had come.

Now, at least two hours later, the unicorn prince squinted through his snow goggles as he struggled to keep walking in a straight line through the screaming wind. He had lost sight of the Crystal Capital to the storm long ago, and the stars weren’t precise enough to lead him. At this point, he had accepted that he wouldn’t make it back that night, as the cold would surely take him if he tried to hike through the night.

The group had planned to set up camp at Raven Ridge, so he wouldn’t be missed for the night back home. If things got dire, he could fire off a magical flare, since the sky was clear above the snow cloud that was being whipped up from the ground. The reason he refrained from doing so in the first place was because he knew the Crystal Guard was relatively untrained, and forcing them to come out into a harsh storm to retrieve him would be putting ponies in unnecessary risk. After all, he was a soldier by trade, and had endured worse with fewer supplies during his career.

Also, seeing Cadence’s ‘I told you so’ face may have had something to do with it.

As Shining considered how selfish it was to leave his pregnant wife to go camping, a group of rocks in the distance peeked out from the haze of blinding snow, and so he started towards them.

An ounce of shame crept through Shining as he realised that if he died out here, not only would he be leaving Cadence to rule the Crystal Empire alone, but also to raise their child without a father. Not that he was likely to die; he knew that the wolves rarely wandered too close to the city. Still, even with all his training, he still harboured his natural fear of predators. And as if to spit in the face of his common sense, an ominous howl sounded across the icescape.

Swallowing his growing agitation, Shining continued towards his prospective shelter. He carried on pushing through the biting wind, until he noticed a figure though the haze in his peripheral vision. It was also moving

He stopped, and the figure immediately halted as well. Fearing the imminent attack of some hungry wolf looking for a meal, Shining readied a thunderclap spell to scare it off. However, upon closer inspection, he found that, whatever it was, it couldn’t be wolf, due to its height and frame.

A silhouette against the moonlight, the figure was stock-still. Had he imagined it moving? Was it simply an odd tree swaying in the wind? It was only about ten metres away, and it certainly wasn’t moving now.

“Some weird tree. How’d a tree get all the way out here, anyway?” Shining started to walk towards it to investigate, but froze in surprise as a “branch” rose towards him, and its end began to glow a brilliant blue.

Before he could reign in his wits and scamper back, a bolt of the blue light lanced across the space between them and cut across his side. The last sense he could recognise before blacking out from pain was the smell of burning flesh.

<~.~.~</^>~.~.~>

As Alexander neared the group of boulders, his ears picked up something other than his own feet shuffling over the ever-present moaning of the wind. He turned to his right and froze as he made out the figure of a wolf about ten metres away. Its coat was dark brown, and it looked rather muscular.

It stopped when it noticed that Alex had spotted it, seemed to stare directly at him.

Alex’s body filled with adrenalin, preparing him to throw a punch or to run like hell. After a small eternity of just looking at him, it growled, and started towards him.

Alex took a sharp breath of chilling air, pushed his firearm out from under his lab coat, and pushed out the forstock to engage the weapon’s plasma chamber. As the compressed gas within the gun rose to ionization temperatures, the blue light emitted from the sides of the barrel formed a corona in the flying snow, giving the impression that his hand was alight with a blue flame.

Before he could come to know the bone-breaking bite of a wolf, Alex instinctually aimed the weapon as best he could and fired.

At first, he had only intended to fire a warning shot to scare the animal off, but apparently, the shot glanced across the beast and exploded in a puff of steam and glowing rock several metres behind. The figure collapsed to the ground, and Alex breathed a foggy sigh of relief. Alex was about to hurry away for fear of the rest of the pack, when an unpleasant thought crossed his mind: I’m going to need food…

The man glanced back and forth between the rocks and the body of his late friend. He shivered for a few moments of indecision before giving a groan and trudging towards the carcass. Alex began wondering how he was going to drag around fifty kilos of wolf at least a hundred metres, but paused when the creature came into focus. He frowned at the mass lying in the snow. This was no wolf.

Now standing within arm’s reach of the creature, Alex could see that what he had mistaken for muscle was actually a pair of canvas satchels on either side of its torso, and what at first glance looked like brown fur was a hooded coat made of some sort of fabric. The most disturbing part, however, were the four hooved legs attached to wooden snowshoes.

Alex momentarily forgot the cold as he stared at this queer sight. Who goes to the trouble of giving an animal snowshoes? Or custom-tailoring winter clothes, for that matter? Out of curiosity, he reached down and pulled up the hood to reveal the creature’s face. Alex’s jaw dropped at what he saw.

The muzzle was vaguely equine, though not nearly as protruded. Its eyes were rather large, set nearly, though not quite, forward facing below its forehead, which held the most bemusing feature of the already odd animal face. A horn, of the same snow-white colour as the thin layer of fur covering the rest of the visible skin. The perplexing protrusion brought up a single word in Alex’s mind.

Unicorn

After several more moments of dumbfounded staring, Alex closed his eyes and slowly shook his head in disbelief.

“Start the day with a call from my mother, then a surprise visit from my ex at work, then zapped from my lab to the middle of an arctic wasteland. Now I’ve shot a fashion-conscious unicorn. Why am I even surprised? What’s next, aliens?”

At that moment, a tiny puff of condensation escaped the alleged unicorn’s mouth –Muzzle? Maw? …Why do all those words start with ‘m’?– as a barely audible group of what could only be described as syllables reached Alex’s ears. Their meaning was lost to Alex, but the implications were clear.

“And it can talk. Maybe even intelligent. Things just keep getting better and better.”

The unfortunate scientist sat crouched in the snow next to the body of this scientific impossibility, trying to keep the absurdity of the situation from going to his head, when a realisation hit him that filled the man with panic anew.

“It’s alive,” he muttered to himself. “I shot it… and it’s still alive!”

Alex scanned the clothed unicorn’s body, fixing on the terrible gash streaking from shoulder to hip. Blackened cloth and flesh surrounded the dire wound, giving him flashbacks of several cremated Thanksgiving turkeys in his youth. The wound was at least three centimetres deep. Horrifyingly, exposed bone could be seen among the charred tissues, some of which had apparently evaporated from the blast of plasma.

The chest itself was barely moving, the creature’s respiration clearly impaired. If Alex had to guess, it wasn’t getting any better.

Alex racked his brain for any medical course of action to attempt to save the poor beast, but he was no medic (or veterinarian, as it were). The physicist’s knowledge of first aid extended to stopping bleeding and splinting broken bones; here, there was no bleeding to stop from the cauterised gash, and any damaged bone had vaporised!

Then, a particularly harsh gust of wind ripped Alex’s lab coat open of his grip, causing him to lose any warmth he was managing to keep. After getting the unsuited garment back under control, he stood up once again and began wringing his hands, trying to keep himself from panicking further

“Nothing’s changed, nothing’s changed. Still need shelter. Still need warmth.”

Alex took a deep breath of freezing-cold air to calm himself and spared a glance to the night sky. As the scientist studied the once-familiar face of the moon, he began to feel dreadfully sick to his stomach with dread. He had not noticed it earlier, but the moon was slightly too large, and slightly too yellow. Worse still, he could recognize none of the craters or seas he had grown familiar with through many nights of stargazing.

Desperately scanning the night sky, he found that he couldn’t make out any of the constellations, northern or southern. And to top it all off, he also saw a star cluster that he knew for a fact couldn’t be seen from anywhere on Earth. With the last of his hope of finding a way home crushed, he let his tears freeze on his cheeks as stared hopelessly at the alien sky.

“Where am I?”

After a few moments of silence, another frigid wind called Alex’s attention back to the situation at hand. With another deep breath, he flushed his mind of any thoughts not to do with survival and turned back to the dying alien.

Wasting no more of his precious time, Alex hoisted his new furry friend up into a fireman’s carry, careful of its injury, and headed for what he hoped to be an adequate rock-shelter.

<~.~.~</^>~.~.~>

It had taken Alex nearly half an hour to reach the rocks with the alien pony over his shoulders. After he had finally made it, he was quite relieved to find that the formation could in fact provide shelter. A large overhang created a nice area free from snow and blocked a good deal of the torturous wind. It was no cave, but it would do nicely.

After finding a suitable spot, Alex carefully lowered the wounded alien onto the permafrost and removed its saddlebags. Attached, there was a sleeping bag, and inside, he found several items of interest.

First, some packaged food and drink labelled with alien writing. Alex wasn’t sure if he’d even be able to eat it, but at this point, he was willing to try anything. Next was a fine wooden box containing basic survival supplies such as blankets, matches and what appeared to be a first aid kit. He would attempt to dress his friend’s wounds as best he could, but he wouldn’t risk making it worse by applying ointment that he couldn’t read. As for the matches, it wasn’t like there was any wood around.

The last thing he found was a photograph, framed in highly ornamental silver. The photograph itself showed the smiling face of another pony alien. Its fur was pink, and it had a mane of various colours. Atop the mane sat a crown or tiara of some sort.

“The wife, I suppose. Or husband. Who knows? And a crown? Did I shoot a prince or something? Great. Now my cold, dead corpse’ll be charged with regicide.”

Finished looting the alien’s bags, Alex picked up one of the food pouches to inspect it. It opened like a bag of chips, and what the man found inside pleased him. It seemed to be some type of trail mix, only with dried flower petals and what appeared to be short bits of hay.

Alex greedily tore open and downed half of the packages, saving the other half either for later or for his alien friend, whoever lived longer. Looking over to the barely-breathing alien, he had a grim vision of more trail mix in his future. The man quickly drank about a third of the water from the canteen. Alex would have drunk from his large bottle of pop that had come with him for some reason, but he had heard that soft drinks actually dehydrated you more, so he forwent that option. He ignored the question of how the water had stayed liquid in the twenty-below weather and the strange tingling feeling it caused going down his throat. The ways he saw it, death by alien water was probably one of the more pleasant ways to go out here. He then spent the next fifteen minutes figuring out how to wrap the alien’s wound with gauze.

Alex was about ready to wrap his friend and himself up with the blankets and woollen sleeping bag to try and sleep the rest of the night when he got an idea. If someone was wandering all the way out here with camping gear, then the nearest settlement couldn’t have been too far off.

Picking up his plasma gun, Alex moved to the edge of the overhang. Thankfully, R&D had decided to make the device “user-friendly”, so he was easily able to figure out how to increase the firepower on the small touch-screen control pad under the rear sight. Aiming to the sky, Alex pulled the trigger, and watched a much brighter bolt of blue plasma arc into the sky, ascending for a good forty-five seconds before fizzling out. He fired off another one for good measure before retiring into his hovel.

Even if the alien pony died and his comrades came and imprisoned him, Alex didn’t really care. They couldn’t possibly do worse to him than leaving them in this frozen wasteland, could they? The scientist chose to abandon that line of thought.

Alex carefully slid into the large sleeping bag with his alien friend, when he got another bright idea. He grabbed the gun once more and activated it, clutching it to his chest to absorb the heat it gave off. When he felt nothing, he frowned.

“Core temperature is over five thousand degrees, and it’s stone-cold. At least I know where all that military funding is going now; goddamn legendary heat-sinks.” After some more fiddling, Alex tried increasing the gun’s core temperature to just below unsafe levels, then engaged the trigger safety. He smiled with satisfaction when the weapon started to warm up. “Hmm. Maybe you’re not so useless after all–” he gave the device a piercing glare “–despite all the trouble you’ve gotten me in today.”

Done with berating inanimate objects for the moment, Alex squirmed around in the sleeping bag until he got cozy and placed the now pleasantly warm gun between his alien bedfellow and himself. Now that he was no longer moving or thinking, the cold air and hard, frozen dirt under them was even more apparent. Shivering, Alex gingerly moved his arms to embrace the alien pony in a totally manly man-hug, bringing their cores closer together for better heat-exchange.

Alex knew he should have been awestruck. The scientist should have been out of his skin with excitement over having discovered an alien species, or an alien planet, no less. Unfortunately, as he readied himself to fall asleep in an alien’s sleeping bag, he felt as though all his energy had been sucked out by the freezing air around him, and that there was simply none left to feel excited with.

Oh well. At least, as his eyes began to flutter closed, he didn’t seem to feel as cold anymore.

<~.~.~</^>~.~.~>

Thousands of blue-flamed candles encompassed a circular, stone-brick room. In the centre of the room, a shaft of pure white light shone down through a hole in the ceiling from an unknown source. Directly in the beam was the figure of a pony sitting stock-still, whose features were obscured by the intensity of the light. It sat facing away from a set of doors, the room’s only defining feature. Despite the beam’s luminescence, the rest of the room was ominously dim, barely lit by the strange candles.

“Enter,” the figure said in a low, raspy voice. Despite there being no indication that anypony was at the doors, they indeed creaked open, and a dark figure slid inside.

“You summoned me, Mistress?”

“I did. There has been an awakening. Have you felt it?”

“Mistress?”

“The Awaited One is among us. The Star-Creature has arrived and is being held in the Crystal Empire.” The dark figure seemed shocked.

“This… this is wonderful news. How would you like us to proceed, Mistress?”

“You are to go to the Crystal Capital. It is likely to have already been captured by the Crown’s agents, so exercise caution. You shall attempt to… acquire it. By any means necessary. I trust you are equipped for this task?”

“The Nox are always equipped to serve the Order, Mistress.”

“Good. Go, then, and recover the Star-Creature, so that we may fulfill our Cause.”

“I shall succeed in my mission.”

The stallion turned to exit the room, when the old mare added something.

“I also trust that you know what must be done should you be captured, Nox?” The stallion paused, standing in uncomfortable silence for several moments before responding.

“I will not be captured.”

“Correct.” The stallion waited for several more moments, and when it was clear that nothing more would be said, slipped back out the doors. The mare’s figure did not move once, always facing away from the entrance, contemplating her plans for the future. Equestria's future.

“Soon. Soon the Nightmare shall reign supreme once more, and we shall reclaim the night.”

Author's Note

So it begins. If you enjoyed, please like and let me know in the comments. If not, any constructive criticism is welcome and appreciated.

Big thanks to AlicornPriest for editing this chapter.

The Tundra is the worst place to have to survive. The absolutely bitter cold mixed with little life in any form creates a unique landscape that is nearly impossible to survive in…

Excerpt from survive-prepare.com