Angujaktuat

Chapters

Chapter One - Winny
Chapter Two - Muktuk
Chapter Three - Sewer

Chapter One - Winny

For what it was worth, Wind Whistler was a lucky mare.

The castle maids all said so, after all, and what reason had she to disagree? With so many other ponies looking at her with wide, envious eyes, it seemed rather selfish to think otherwise.

So, she wore a small smile through her days. She greeted her husband's friends with polite bows and cups of steaming tea, and she garbed herself in well-tailored dresses with elaborate stitching and tightly-fitting corsets.

When her husband returned, she greeted him with a bow more formal than the ones she gave the others. She kept her voice low and her words calm, and she always spoke of his affairs and never her own. She had the right to nothing but gratitude, after all, for what had a humble mare such as she done in her life to deserve the royalty-like life she had been gifted?

Indeed, she was a lucky mare, she reminded herself, as she made her way through the crowds of staring ponies with glints of hatred and envy on their subtly concealed glares. She even ignored the subtle accusations hurled in her direction; the softly growled claims she was a 'whore' and a 'murderer' blending in peacefully with the rest of the idle marketplace chatter.

She was no such things, after all, and if these ponies chose to say them, it was their mistake.

Certainly not one they would make before her husband, after all.

Eventually, her scurrying hooves left the glowing torchlight of the marketplace behind, and Wind Whistler found herself standing before a stretching void of black arctic night, and furiously swirling snow. The dome-like heat shield erected around the marketplace ended here, and Wind Whistler took care to fasten the clasps on her parka before traveling any further.

A red cable stretched forwards into the dark, whipping about as it was battered by the blizzard that enveloped the shield. Wind Whistler reached into her saddlebag and withdrew a small rope attached to a sturdy harness clip, which she attached to the red cable and then wrapped several times around her front hoof.

The road between the marketplace and the housing district she was heading to was a relatively short one, but it was one ponies had frozen to death on nonetheless. Wind Whistler had no intention of joining their frigid corpses.

Through the snow she trod, her thick parka preventing her dress from catching the howling wind and dragging her off of her hooves. Eventually, Wind Whistler could once again make out tall buildings exposing themselves through the curtains of snow. At one time, they may have stood proud, but now the lengthy, three-story group housing buildings had long since been eroded by wind and snow and poor maintenance. Even when they had first been erected, some thirty-years ago, and when the less-than-wealthy were forcibly uprooted and shoved into them, they had been constructed with the cheapest available resources.

Of course, that was long before Wind Whistler's time. In her memories of playing hide-and-seek as a young filly, the community housing had already been fifteen years old.

Trotting quickly up the rickety, ice-coated wooden stairs and taking care not to stumble and fall, Wind Whistler swiftly found the apartment she was seeking, and rose a hoof to knock softly on the door.

Then, she froze, her hoof suspended in the air, fear and doubt swirling about in her head.

Before they could overtake her and send her back down the stairs she had come, Wind Whistler quickly rapped her hoof onto the door and took a single step back.

From within, rustling hooves, moving with calm grace but no shortage of urgency.

Then, the door swung open, and Wind Whistler forced a plaster smile onto her face. “Hey, ma.”

For all that had happened between the last time they had seen each other, Wind Whistler was at least happy to see that the sickness that was plaguing the Empire had yet to take hold of her mother. While she looked every day as old as she was, she was still quite clearly recognizable as her daughter’s mother. Even her mane, while greying, still bore the same traces of blue highlights within the more predominant violet, albeit not nearly as pronounced as they were on her daughter.

“Winny,” her mother breathed, as though some part of her didn't quite believe her own eyes. “You're… you're alone?”

“I snuck out,” she said, nodding and trading her shy smile for a mischievous one, “and before you ask, no, he doesn't know. Neither do the guards.”

“He will, you foolish child!” Winny's mother chattered urgently. “What were you thinking, sneaking away like that? With all those ponies getting ransomed! Not to mention the flu!”

Winny grimaced. She didn't need to be reminded of that. The pillars of smoke outside the city borderlines did that job plenty well.

“I was thinking I was going to go insane unless I saw a loving face again,” Winny replied. “And I'm thinking I'm going to be back long before my husband even knows I'm gone.”

“Well, I hope that doesn't mean you can't at least have some lunch,” her mother tutted. “Come in from the cold, Winny.”

Wind Whistler obeyed instantly, shaking her parka and boots clear of snow before entering her mother's apartment. The apartment was a humble affair—no more than a bedroom and a kitchen, but it felt more like home than the mansion Winny had grown accustomed to. A fire was cracking softly, casting the entire room in dancing orange light and soft waves of warmth.

“Your timing is rather good, Winny,” her mother was saying from the kitchen as Winny settled down onto a scrappy-looking and ancient couch. “I just made a pot of crowberry tea. I know how much you like that.”

Winny smiled, shuffling out of her parka and setting it onto the arm of the loveseat.

Looking around her, Winny didn't know whether to feel somber or satisfied. Her home was unchanged, even after being away for so long; the small coffee table before her still proudly bore the crude soapstone-carved inukshuk statue Wind Whistler's younger brother had made. The same four chairs were there, even though Winny and her Mother were the only ponies left who would ever be seated at the table. Even the cloth on the dining table remained unchanged.

Truthfully, Wind Whistler admitted to herself, it had only been several years since she had seen her old house last, and even with her mother being classified as a 'peasant' in status, Winny still saw her at the occasional gala or Crystalling—even if she had to sneak away from her husband in order to say hello.

Nonetheless, it felt good to be home.

Winny was torn from her thoughts as her mother emerged from the kitchen, holding in her mouth a platter of steaming tea and a large bowl of borscht, which she set down gingerly on the coffee table before Wind Whistler without uttering a word. Winny smiled gratefully and said a soft 'thank you.'

“So, how have you been, Winny?” her mother began, somewhat awkwardly. “Are you still painting?”

“Of course,” Winny said. “I was actually going to ask if I could have the guards bring you one. I remember you saying you missed the sunsets, so I did my best to paint one for you.”

“That sounds wonderful,” her mother said. It could have been a product of Winny's overactive imagination, but her mother's tone seemed more melancholy than pleased.

Whether it was melancholy towards the mere thought that it had been two years since the Angujaktuat had evolved from a seasonal fluctuation in the weather to an eternal curse, or towards Winny herself, she could only guess.

With a shaky rustle of her left wing, Winny used it to lift the mug of tea to her lips and take a light sip, the move slightly impeded by her tightly-fitting dress.

Apparently, however, her struggle was more than 'slight', for Winny's mother noticed it immediately.

“Why don't you take off that dress, dear?” her mother said tiredly. “I can't imagine it is very comfortable.”

Winny sighed. “I'm… not trying to be rude, ma, but tying these corsets is a pretty troublesome affair, and I don't want...”

“...him to find out you were walking about in public without it anyways,” her mother finished with a long sigh. “You're right, I suppose. Still, it's so troubling to see my own daughter treated like—”

“Ma, I think you should drop it.”

“No, I don't think I will. Don't you realize you're nothing but his slave?!”

“We're all his slaves!” Winny shot back. “I'm no different! What I was given, mother, is a choice. And you've made it very clear I made a mistake, but sorry to surprise you, I already know it was a mistake. Yeah, cause I totally like living in fear. I just love having to wear what he wants or having to act like somepony else just because it's what he wants me to be! So, yes, it is troubling to live like that, but what choice do I have?”

The moment the last word left Winny's mouth, she felt a wave of horror overtake her at just how easily she had allowed herself to rant so openly about her husband.

It had been a fit of emotion, she internally consoled herself. A culmination of weeks of stress. Nothing more. Nothing that would happen again.

Her poor mother looked shell-shocked. Clearly, she hadn't expected such an outburst from her daughter. Then again, the last time she and Winny had been sitting together on the same couch, simply as mother and daughter, had been when Winny was fourteen.

Now, here she was again—both so much more mature and so much more like a frightened child.

“He’s been hitting me more and more, Ma,” Winny whispered. “For less and less. The other day, I accidentally cursed in K’anquitut and I honestly thought he was going to kill me.”

Her mother bristled. For such a warm and loving figure, Winny’s had little doubt her mother would have much hesitated to confront any stallion who saw fit to lay a hoof upon their wives. She was no modest, obedient servant like her daughter had become.

“It’s your tongue,” her mother growled. “The one your father taught you—spirits bless him—and his father before him. We are Crystal Ponies, and that is our language. If he refuses to see that—”

“Then what, ma?” Winny replied shortly. “What do you expect me to do? Lecture him? Do you think that’s going to end well for me?”

“No,” her mother confessed, sinking her head slowly and nodding. In contrast to her brief flare of fiery assertion, she was now meekly spinning her bowl of borscht into a tiny vortex with a spoon. “Winny, just… you need to understand how much I fear for you.”

“I know, ma,” Winny said, her gaze locked on the soup in front of her. “I'm sorry.”

“I still remember when… when she died, Wind Whistler. The one before you. I was only a filly then, but I still remember what she looked like. Such a pretty mare. Not any older than you.”

Winny simply nodded, not looking up from her food to meet her mother’s eyes.

“I don’t want you to end up like her, Winny. Please. Promise me you won’t. Promise you’ll be safe.”

Still, Winny found herself unable to divert her gaze from her soup. “You know I can’t promise you that, ma.”

The night wasn't eternal throughout winter in the Crystal Empire, but it may as well have been. At best, one might be able to see the Sun in the dwindling hours past midnight, but hardly anypony had reason to be up then.

Winny didn't mind the near-eternal night, however. She dearly loved the rare occasion when the Angujaktuat ceased its fury, and she could see the cool purple glow of the Moon peering down at her, rippling like a reflection as its light was distorted by The Shimmer. No matter how frequently her life was torn apart and put back together again, the Moon was a universal constant.

As she made her way back home on hurrying hooves, her mother's words were repeating again and again in her head, and Winny didn't know whether she had made a grave mistake opening herself up to somepony, or if it had given her some much-needed courage and self-worth. For the first time in so long, she had actually spoken her thoughts to somepony, instead of burying them behind an endless stream of 'yes sirs' and 'no sirs.”

And that, as much as she felt the necessity to deny it, felt rather nice.

Winny wrapped her scarf around her snout several times before she once again clipped herself to the snow-cable.

The cable was, for all intents, a bridge between the marketplace district and the lower-tier housing. Between them lay several hundred feet of seemingly unused space eternally trapped in perpetual snow-storm. The Empire had a layout that, when looked at from the top of the Crystal Tower, slightly resembled a wagon wheel—the Tower itself was the hub, and the snow-cables branched off in nearly every direction, leading to the various housing and market districts of the Empire.

The result was a scattered Empire that had about it a perpetual sense of artificial vastness.

The marketplace was relatively busy even in the midst of the Angujaktuat's fury. Pausing beside a fishstand to get her bearings, Winny spotted two guards laughing and conversing beside a large bonfire. She doubted they would be able to recognize her, but she tightened her scarf just in case.

Still, even if the marketplace were a conduit back to the Tower, Winny was in no mood to travel through it. Besides the frequent harshly whispered remarks spat in her direction, one of the Empire's guards could easily be milling about, and being spotted out and about in the Empire without an escort was rather low on her list of priorities.

No, all she had to do was sneak back home and hide her parka and boots, and all else would be fine. The guards would just chalk up her several hours of disappearance to her simply taking a nap or becoming too engrossed in a book, and they wouldn't think twice to question it.

And so, she diverted her path from the cacophony of talking and street music, and instead ventured into the dark and narrow back-alley that snaked through the peasant district to the main hub of the city, where the castle soared abruptly above all else.

Of course, she wasn't used to navigating the labyrinth-like back-alleys, so she truthfully shouldn't have been so surprised when she found herself lost.

At first, it simply resonated through her mind as an inconvenience. But, with each ensuing echo, Winny slowly realized she was in a greater degree of danger than she had initially believed.

For getting lost meant being late. And being late, meant being seen. And being seen, meant being caught.

Which meant, her husband would find out she snuck away.

Horror brought her walk to a trot, then to a gallop. The alleyways were deserted—the peasant district had more red crosses on her doors than any other district in the Empire, and nopony quite wanted to mill about in their streets—and the Angujaktuat's fury had blotted out any point of reference Winny may have used in the air above the alleyway. Her corset would surely prevent her from actually flying to any sort of altitude, but to abandon it would surely be to raise questions when she returned.

“You lost, lady?”

Winny froze, her entire body going rigid. Slowly, she turned towards the mare's voice.

The mare had a frown on her face, one that only grew when Winny did not immediately answer her. “Well, you certainly look it. That, or you were just mugged.”

“I wasn't, thank you for your concern,” Winny said. “I'm just trying to find my way back to the Crystal Tower.”

“You look like you belong there,” the mare tutted, stepping closer, her curious eyes examining Winny's form from head to toe. Her voice was somewhere in limbo between haughty and peasant-like. It was a mixture Winny had seen before, amongst ponies of a middle-class who wished to distance themselves from their peers deemed ‘worthless’ by the rest of the empire. “What are you doing in the peasant district?”

It was a somewhat hypocritical remark, Winny thought, for this mare—while hardly looking like a princess—surely was no peasant herself. Her mane was well-groomed—albeit not the mighty length that Winny’s was‚ and she appeared to be wearing a set of fairly valuable-looking earrings with some manner of gemstone imbedded within. If the stone served any practical purpose (as gemstones oft did) Winny could only venture a guess.

Perhaps not a peasant, but no high society citizen, either. Somepony from a family of worth—agriculture, perhaps, or even the arcane arts.

No, Winny reminded herself. That might perhaps be pushing things. Nopony practiced the arcane arts except those related to the unicorns. And the unicorn of Winny's generation had died at four months old, leaving her peers to a magic-less world.

“Hello? I asked you a question. What are you doing in the peasant district if you're from the Crystal Tower.”

“I'm… I'm sorry, but that's none of your concern.”

The mare laughed. “Look it, lady. I'm not gonna beat around the bush. You made a mistake coming here. You're going to get kidnapped and ransomed wandering around these back alleys.”

“I believe I can take care of myself, but thank you for the warning.”

“It's not a warning. You're going to be kidnapped and ransomed. By us.” The mare gave a small grin. “Sorry, I guess.”

Winny's eyes grew wide, and she took a fruitless step back. She opened her mouth to retort, but her words ended as her world fell to black.

And yet, surprisingly, her last thoughts were still of Sombra.

iii

It took Winny a few moments to realize her consciousness had actually returned at all, because her eyes fluttered open to perfect blackness. Still, she knew without sight that she was inside, for she could feel and smell a nearby fire. Something seemed to be over her head, blocking out her sight, although Winny figured that, even if it were off, she'd be able to see nothing anyways.

Her right front hoof seemed heavier than her left, and giving it a little shake, Winny instantly knew why. Her hoof seemed to be chained to something sturdy nearby.

Slightly muffled, as though in another room, Winny thought she could hear voices. A stallion seemed to be speaking, his voice a high and panicked shrill.

“...dead! All of us, we're dead, Opal! You've killed us all!”

“You need to stay calm, Cottonfoot! You aren’t helping anything!” A voice Winny recognized as belonging to the mare in the alley shot back. “Anyways, I did exactly what Fox Trot told me! This is on him!”

“I said to get a rich-looking mare! Not the wife of the tyrant king himself!”

“Well, I didn't exactly know who she was, alright? She was wandering around the back alleys, and there were no guards. Tell me when that ever happens.”

Slowly, Winny's racing mind slowed. Her confusion faded into clarity as she realized exactly what was happening to her.

She had been mistaken for somepony else. Or perhaps kidnapped solely based on her obvious high-society affiliations. This mare… Opal, hadn't recognized her as Sombra's wife.

These ponies were some vagrants, possibly. Desperate for bits, willing to do anything. It was an old story Winny had grown used to hearing.

Or, they were the others. The rebels. The ones even Sombra feared, if only for the abstract notion that anypony would think to rebel against his ultimate rule.

The ponies who had no desires for ransom, and felt more at peace harming those close to Sombra in an attempt to make him yield to their demands.

No, this was the unlikely option, Winny told herself, and one over which she would get nowhere from fearing. She had to keep a level head. They were not rebels. Such was a silly notion. They were desperate ponies, and nothing more. It was all a simple misunderstanding. A nigh impossible one that she would be unable to explain to Sombra, but a misunderstanding all the same.

“...just, y'know, let her go?” Another, younger-sounding female voice, was saying. It still had the distinctive squeakiness of fillyhood—this mare surely was no older than twelve, and yet here she was amongst a group of criminals.

“No,” Opal replied, her voice a low hiss. “We can't do that, Amber. She saw my face.”

“Well then what are you proposing, Opal?” A stallion retorted. “We send an innocent mare to the farm cause of your poor judgement?”

“I don't know why you insist on putting words in my mouth, Fox Trot. But, unless you see another option...”

Winny felt her stomach wrench in terror. Rebels or not, these ponies were desperate indeed.

And truthfully, as much as Winny feared what they would inevitably do to her, she did not quite disagree with their line of thinking. While she—the docile, delicate little housewife she was—hardly posed them a threat, simply letting her run to Sombra with apt descriptions of her kidnappers was akin to simply marching up to the Crystal Tower with written confessions.

“...hardly innocent, anyways. She's Sombra's whore, after all! We'd be doing the Empire a favor!”

“Shut it, Cottonfoot,” Opal growled “Look, so, we can't just let her go. I don't think anypony here wants to kill her, either. So. What if we went through with the ransom?”

“No way,” Cottonfoot said. Winny heard him give a squawk-like laugh. “No bucking way. If that's your plan, you can count me right the buck out.”

“Eh. Cottonfoot's right, there,” the second mare said. “Sorry Opal, but we've only got two options here. Threatening King Sombra is a death sentence.”

“Oh, so killing his wife is just a minor offense?!” Opal retorted. “No, you know what? Screw this. I'm going to talk to her.”

“What?!” Cottonfoot screeched. “Are you insane?”

“She's a helpless housewife, Cottonfoot. What's she going to do to me? Besides, I think she has the right to be a part of a conversation involving her own life.”

The sound of horseshoed hooves echoed as Opal approached. Winny shuffled into a more dignified sitting position, staring straight ahead at the source of Opal's approach. There was silence for a moment, as Opal undoubtedly hesitated at the door. Somewhere in the distance, a fire was crackling, and a floorboard creaked as one of the half-dozen other ponies in the dwelling shifted in anticipation.

Finally, a door creaked open, and Opal's hoofbeats ceased.

“Hey. Are you awake in here?”

“Yes, I'm awake,” Winny said. “I have been for some time.”

“Then you’ve been listening to our conversation.”

“Yes.”

“So you know what predicament you're in?”

Winny nodded.

“Then… I just wish for you to understand… this is all a misunderstanding. I'm not going to split hairs or give you false hope, but regardless… what we may have to do to you… it wasn't any of our intentions.”

“Then don't do it,” Winny replied. As terrified as she was—not of Opal, of course; she seemed relatively understanding and sympathetic—she kept her tone as calm as she could muster. “You don't have to do anything.”

“I'm afraid it's a bit more complicated than that. You saw my face. You can tell your husband who I am.”

“I won't. I promise you, I won't.”

“Well, as much as I appreciate that, it really changes little. I cannot simply be betting my life and the lives of my friends on your 'promises.'”

“I won't tell him. Trust me. If he finds out I was out without an escort, I'll be punished. I imagine my mother, too, since I was visiting her without his permission. I can't give you ponies away without giving her away, too.”

Winny lifted her unchained hoof to her blindfold with the intent of removing it, but Opal's hissing voice stopped her.

“Hey, leave that on!”

“I already know what you look like!”

“Well, I don't need you knowing what my friends look like, too!” Opal barked. “Just sit there and listen, alright? Can you do that?”

Winny nodded again, lowering her hoof back to the floor slowly.

“For us to let you go, we'd need some sort of assurance that you're not going to rat on us. And unless you can give us that, I'm afraid you may be out of luck.”

“I told you already!” Winny protested, unintentionally raising her voice. “If I tell Sombra, he'll know I went out with an—”

“Escort. Yes, you said. But I'm sorry if I doubt he'd be angry at you if he found out you'd been kidnapped and nearly killed.”

“You're not married to him, so I don't expect you to know what he's like.”

Opal let out a long sigh. Winny had a mental image of her bringing a hoof to the bridge of her snout in irritation. “I'm sorry, Wind Whistler, but you're going to need to give me something more concrete. I'll give you a bit to think on where you want to take this.”

“No, wait! Don't go!” Winny exclaimed. “Please, I need to be back soon! Before Sombra knows I've gone missing!”

Opal shuffled, the ancient floorboards singing out her nervousness. “Wind Whistler, I’m truly not trying to be gross or morbid, but the next time Sombra sees you, there's a high chance it's just going to be your decapitated head in a cardboard box. So, I think you'd better start re-evaluating what you should be afraid of right now.”

“I'm afraid of Sombra,” Winny said firmly. “And if you had any sense, you would be, too. I'm not the one who needs to come to a decision, because if I were the one making it, it seems pretty obvious what I'd pick.”

“Oh? And what's that?”

“You can't negotiate with him—your friend was right, that's a death sentence. If you kill me, he'll find you, and he won't be content simply killing you in return. Last time he caught the Flu, he had the entire cooking and cleaning staff executed out of suspicions of poisoning. Ponies I knew, and considered my friends—cause what the hell else am I supposed to do trapped in a mansion my whole life? So, don't act like I'm an idiot to be afraid of my husband.”

“So what? Let you go? With the blind hope you won't rat on us?”

“At least then, you'll have a chance. I know you see it as a slim one, but any other option is a guaranteed death for you and your friends.”

Opal Charm may have had some remark or retort, but if she did she did not express it. Instead, she sighed again, and the sound of her hooves once again carried her out of the room, leaving Winny back into perfect darkness.

In the other room, the other ponies' voices were clamouring over each other once again, but Winny tuned them out as best as she could for sometime, and after what surely must have been a few hours had passed, they had gone silent—the only sound of note was a rather violent, hacking cough, that seemed to belong to the younger mare Winny had heard earlier. It was as though all internally contemplating their own approaches to the situation, but none wished to reprise the yelling argument Winny had heard earlier.

Winny, likewise, focused her attention on creating some manner of hasty plan in what little time she had left before they came to some sort of twisted, macabre decision.

Urgently, she ran over the facts again and again in her head. They were reasonable ponies, reluctant to the concept of killing but not unwilling to do so. They hated Sombra, and while they did not respect nor like his wife, Opal did not seem to see her as the whore who had backstabbed her family like many other Crystal Ponies saw her as.

They were obviously desperate for something, but that was hardly a rare occurrence in the Crystal Empire.

Obvious for what, Winny couldn't begin to guess. The Empire had no arcane families to ransom, so she couldn't imagine the rebels were trying to gain some sort of resource against Sombra.

A fruitless, foolish fight, but one that had been going on for decades in the shadows. One only brought back into resurgence by the flu epidemic, and Sombra's seemingly arbitrary distribution of medicines the entire Empire dearly needed.

At this thought, Winny's ears perked up.

Medicine!

She knew it was rather insane, giving her predicament, and the unlikely nature of her own solution, but nonetheless she smiled madly at its mere presence.

After several more hours the sound of hooves and the opening door repeated. This time, however, Opal approached Winny more closely than before, and, before she could speak, Opal ripped the blindfold off of Winny's head.

For several seconds, the two mares simply locked eyes and stared. Winny was the first to divert her gaze downwards, but she did so with a single word on her lips.

“Medicine.”

“What?”

“You need it, don't you?” Winny said. “I heard a younger mare coughing. Amber, I think you called her. She's sick, right? The flu?”

Opal was silent.

“Nopony has gotten the flu and survived without medication, Opal. But I can get some for you, if you let me go.”

“Oh yes?” Opal gave a patronizing laugh. “And how do you imagine you'll convince your husband to do that?”

“I won't convince him of anything,” Winny said. She was hardly familiar with lying when her life depended on it, for normally Sombra was quite adept at telling when a pony was lying anyways. “My mother has the flu as well. But she has medication.”

“So?”

“So, I can get you a jar of the serum for your friend. You let me go, you save my life, and you can save the life of your friend, too,” Winny said. Then, she smiled as she realized something else. “That's what you were going to ransom me for in the first place, isn't it? What else would you be looking for?”

“You're… offering to steal medicine from your terminally ill mother to save your own life.”

“Yes, that is pretty much it,” Winny nodded.

Winny had half a mind to grimace at her own remark, but if the Wind Whistler she was spinning in her lie was as much a monster as Opal was making her seem, she had no choice but to play along.

No, she was a despicable rich mare desperate to save her own hide. Terrified of death, of her husband, and of these dastardly rebels. She'd heard it on the tongues of every Crystal Pony in the empire—selfish whore, who had abandoned her family to death and disease for a life of luxury.

It was hardly the truth, but the truth wasn't what Winny needed right now.

Instead, she smiled coyly, like the spoiled young housewife she was supposed to be. “Well?”

Opal simply rolled her eyes. "And they call us the savages. Between your husband and his affinity for mass executions of those he deems unproductive, and your willingness to save your gaudy hide at the expense of others, it seems to me like you two were a match made in the heavens."

Now that was something Winny wasn't going to simply sit back and agree to.

"You couldn't be any more wrong about that," she growled. "If it makes any difference to you, I probably hate Sombra more than you ever will."

Winny knew defeat loomed on her horizon no matter her best efforts.

And so, she also knew better than to even make an attempt to the contrary.

Opal Charm had barked at her to put her blindfold back on, the whole while muttering disgusted insults under her breath. Then, she was marched down several flights of stairs that had the same tell-tale stench of community housing that her mother's apartment had had, but to a much worse degree.

Back in the snow, Opal had barked at her to count to sixty before removing her blindfold, and when she finally did, she saw she was alone in the middle of a deserted alleyway. Traces of elusive sunlight lined the horizon, the Angujaktuat low enough in its fury that Winny could see them rippling through the shifting surface of the Shimmer far beyond the last building in the Empire.

It was beautiful, but Winny couldn't bring herself to smile.

Before long, she was spotted by a guard. She didn't care—there was no getting around what had happened now. Instead, she fell into step willingly next to the guard, who led the way towards the great Crystal Tower. She did so without objection, and with a worried and apologetic frown already on her face. The guards, however, regarded her with cold annoyance, like she were some pestersome insect.

The walk to the Mansion seemed an eternity. Neither Winny nor the guards spoke, and Winny's blood was pumping so loudly she doubted she could even hear if they did. She kept her head low and submissive as she was led up the endless stairwells and down the endless hallways of the Crystal Tower.

Eventually, the door to the Mansion was ahead, and the scuffling of the guards' heavy armour ceased.

“Go,” one spoke. “He's inside.”

“Th-thank you.” Winny said, fear and panic bringing a warbling to her words.

A shaking hoof pushed the door open and walked unceremoniously into the Mansion.

Sombra stood, his back to Winny, facing the swirling winds of the Angujaktuat.

“Sir, I can explain.”

Sombra did not reply. His gaze strayed to the Angujaktuat, his head turned from her. Winny could not see if his expression was one of fury, and yet some part of her knew it was anyways. Perhaps not violent fury, but instead the cold fury Sombra reserved for his bouts of deadly calm.

Slowly, he turned. Winny instantly descended into a bow, closing her eyes and crossing her forehooves shyly.

Winny hated the bow—it was one more akin to admission of vulnerability than an expression of respect—but for Sombra she knew better than to stand proudly before him.

Even with her eyes closed, Winny knew he was looming over her. It was as though Sombra had about him some supernatural omnipresence that manifested itself beyond her senses.

With no attention given to reservation, Sombra struck her skull firmly with an armoured hoof.

“Ah!” Winny gasped, the impact sending a firm ripple of pain through her. “Sombra, please!”

“You said you could explain,” Sombra said softly. “Explain.”

“I… I didn't mean to be out so late, I swear! I was trying to hurry home, but I got lost in the Angu—”

Sombra hit her again, this time hard enough to knock her off of her weak, bowing hooves, and onto the cold marble floor. “I do believe I have warned you against speaking that prehistoric nonsense. It's a blizzard, Wind Whistler. Call it such.”

“Yes sir. I'm sorry.”

"It is okay, my dear," Sombra cooed. Winny felt his armoured hoof once more rest upon her still-stinging skull, but it was simply to stroke her mane which had been rendered unkempt from her sprinting. Winny opened her eyes gradually as he continued to speak in his abnormally calm tone. "I am sure this is a misunderstanding, yes? But we'll work through it, as we have before. Isn't that right?"

Wind Whistler kept her head low and did not speak.

"Answer me!" Sombra barked.

"Yes!" Wind Whistler chirped immediately, her head snapping up to meet Sombra's fiery eyes bearing down upon her. "I'm sorry, Sombra."

"You’re sorry? Is that so?"

"Yes, sir."

"Intriguing. And are you sorry because you feel sorry, or simply because you think you are going to be caught doing something you shouldn’t have been doing?"

Wind Whistler had to fight to keep her gaze from sinking again, for she knew that with uninterrupted contact Sombra would surely see the flicker of contemplation in her expression. "I meant what I said, Sombra. I swear I did not mean any harm, and I know now that I have made a terrible mistake."

"I see. You can stop shaking, Winny. It is alright. I am not going to hit you again." Sombra gave her a warm smile that nopony in the Empire would ever mistake as warm at all. "Now, are you going to tell me what happened?”

“I… I simply wanted to get out of the castle. I know you cautioned against it, but I… I know now I was a fool, but I—“

“Winny, I don't believe I cautioned you against anything. I believe I told you what I expect of you, and it seems to me you see it as otherwise. It seems to me like you knew I would disapprove of your actions, and you chose to perform them anyways.”

“Sir, I would not disobey you like that!”

“So you are saying I am mistaken?”

Winny was silent for several seconds. “Sombra, please. I only mean to say I meant no harm with my actions. I only intentioned to be out for the morning! I meant to be back before noon, I swear! I got lost in the Angu—in the blizzard.”

“And the guards?”

“They did not know of my absence, sir. I snuck out without telling them. I am solely to blame. Please do not punish them for my misdoings.”

“You do not get to make that decision, Wind Whistler,” Sombra growled. Then, as though flipping a switch, he blinked and in a split-second his persona was back to the unearthly calm. “Come, my dear. I have something to show you."

Winny obeyed, falling into step behind Sombra, who weaved through the polished Halls of Arkadia with authoritarian grace. Thrice they passed gleaming doors of solid crystal; doors that even Wind Whistler had not strayed through, for they bore the spindly tendrils of billowing dark magic that prevented anypony but Sombra himself from opening.

"Winny, do you feel you are of importance to me?" Sombra said after opening the third and final door.

"Sir?"

"Your life, my dear. Do you feel that it has value to me?"

"I... I do not wish to assume anything of you, Sombra. Your thoughts are far beyond the level a mare such as I could follow."

"I asked you a question, and you respond with insincere cajoling?" Sombra growled, stopping in his tracks and giving her an icy sideways glare.

"No sir! That was not my intent!"

"Then answer me."

Winny's gaze fell to her trodding hooves. "I... I can only assume that you see value in my life, for a mare of my lowliness does not deserve your presence and yet you grant it to me daily. And to an extent no other mare may know. And I am eternally grateful for--"

"Be silent," Sombra commanded. Winny looked up. They were in a long hall, adorned with three immense portraits of beautiful looking mares. "These ponies. Do you recognize them?"

Winny shook her head.

"That is to be expected. They all passed long before your time."

"Who are they?"

Sombra smiled. "Take a guess, Wind Whistler."

"Ah... mates? Past wives, perhaps?"

"Very good!" Sombra said, as though praising an obedient show dog. He pointed up to the portrait nearest him—one of a gaudily-dressed, peach coloured mare with an elaborately styled mane of multi-toned purple. She bore no smile in her portrait, instead wearing an almost disinterested scowl that Winny would never dare to make herself.

She looked several years younger than Wind Whistler herself was—surely no older than 17. There were no other paintings of any older incarnation of this mare, leading Winny to believe she had died quite young.

"This mare passed about fifty years ago," Sombra explained. "My last wife before you."

"I am sorry," Winny offered. "What was her name?"

"Doesn't matter. Why do you think I am showing you her, Wind Whistler?"

"I do not know."

“Do you know how she died?”

“No sir.”

“Then I will tell you,” Sombra said, with calmness like an old stallion telling a campfire story. “She was a beautiful mare, not unlike yourself. Younger, of course. But somewhere along the line of our marriage, she began thinking herself my equal. She began to lie to me. To sneak out. Speaking to me with stern tones I never gave her permission to speak to me in.”

Sombra ran a freezing hoof through Winny's frazzled mane again, smiling a devious smile.

“To be frank, I am still confused as to why she looked at me with an expression of surprise when I killed her.”

Winny gasped, and Sombra detached from her, still wearing his impossible smile.

“So tell me, Winny. Do you think she mattered to me?”

“N-no sir.”

“Do you think you matter to me?”

“No sir.”

“Do you think I will so much as hesitate to end your life if I feel you are being unfaithful to me?”

“No sir.”

“Good,” Sombra cooed like a dove. “Now look me in the eyes, and tell me again where you were today, and if I so much as sense a shadow of a lie, you will greatly come to regret it.”

Winny gulped. Slowly, she brought her gaze towards Sombra's cold, feline-like eyes, with their unnatural pupils, and perpetual wisps of magic swirling from the corners of his sockets.

“My mother is ill. I knew I was going to be in trouble for staying, but I stayed anyways, because I knew that I may never see her again. She has no medication, so I know her time is limited.”

Sombra kneeled down, no longer towering over Winny, and instead looking into her eyes at her own level. For what seemed like an eternity, he simply stared, as though reading a great story buried in the depths of Winny's wide lilac eyes.

Then, he turned, walking past Winny, back where they had come.

“Tomorrow, you are to rise early. I am going to provide Private Nigeq of my guard with a box of medication, and he is to escort you to your mother's. You are not to stay, and you are not to go anyplace else.”

Winny stared, her mouth agape.

“Well?”

Her mind caught up instantly, even when she still did not quite believe her ears. “Thank you! I cannot… I can't even—!”

“Be silent, Wind Whistler, for one ‘thank you’ shall suffice. Now, you are to return to our quarters and change out of that dress. I will be there shortly.”

“Yes sir.”

And so, like she had grown so accustomed to doing, Winny obeyed without objection.

For a reason Winny did not know but dared not question, Sombra had always seen fit for her to rise at the same ungodly hour as him, despite usually having no immediate use for her that warranted such.

Not that she really had any right to complain. Indeed, Winny liked rising early, for it was the only time that one could get a proper glimpse of the dwindling moments of sunlight. The Crystal Tower, tall as it was, often ascended past the lowest level of the Angujaktuat's frigid fury, which meant that they were sometimes granted small windows to the sky above.

Still, she rose groggy and tired, but dared not express such to Sombra, who was as stoic and unflinching as Winny had ever seen him. For all she knew, he was using dark magic to keep himself awake. He seemed to be using it for every other aspect of himself—his longevity, his stature, his magical aura impossibly frigid like an arctic sea—that she wouldn't be surprised.

When she had shed her corset and dress, she had done so with the assumption that her disappearance and the drama she had produced would be enough to warrant retiring early, but of course she was wrong. And so, in a sort of horrified afterglow, with her head still resting on Sombra's rising and falling chest, she had laid awake, the past day still swirling about in her mind. Glimpses of Opal Charm, and fragments of what the other reluctant rebels had said.

Since Winny had first been released from the rebels and brought to Sombra, she had hanging over her a sense of unshakable dread. It was as though she had inadvertently created a spark that, given time and fuel, would burn down everything she knew. Living with Sombra, she had learned to be obedient and submissive, for she had no doubts that the fear Sombra was so adept at radiating was senselessly founded.

No, she knew that her safety would only be guaranteed through Sombra's satisfaction with her. And so, sneaking out, betraying his trust…

Any safety she'd been building before was gone. And when the guard arrived to take her back to her mother, when he saw that there was no red cross on her door, no tell-tale signs that she was even suffering from the flu that was killing the rest of the damn empire…

And yet, there was intrigue amidst her fear. As much as the rebels now posed the largest threat to Winny's safety, part of her could not wait to see them again, even if it would only be Opal Charm and even if it would just be to deliver the medication. After all, with Sombra's trust towards her now at risk, Winny knew quite well she had to start planning some manner of escape strategy if she really did wish to avoid ending up in the same proverbial grave the rest of Sombra's partners were now lying in.

At that thought, in the early hours of the morning, with the feared tyrant-king that was her husband snoring and drooling beside her, Winny couldn't help but cry. She did so mutely, and not from any sort of sorrow. It was more akin to a near-indescribable sensation of conflict and fear.

When she met Opal Charm, Winny decided, they would talk. For if these rebels really were what they claimed, then perhaps aligning herself with them would be a welcome option. Her proximity to Sombra meant she was feared by the Crystal Ponies in a similar light as him, but perhaps such could be used as leverage. For all the times Sombra had struck her or called her a whore or degraded her before his friends for a cheap laugh, Winny knew she had a better chance of tricking him than any other pony in the Empire.

Winny had been living a long time regretting traveling the road that was turning her into nothing more than a possession of King Sombra's. With all the fear it had birthed, the spark that the rebels had created was burning into the first bit of optimism Winny had truly known.

Not long after Sombra had left to pursue his daily affairs, Private Nigeq of his royal guard made his presence known when Winny heard him flirting with a cleaning servant in the hall outside of her study.

Gently putting down her paintbrush and turning to the door Nigeq would undoubtedly be emerging from, Winny rose and tugged at the string to her apron just as the door squeaked open.

“Good morning, Miss Wind Whistler,” Nigeq said, smiling and bowing. Of all the ponies in Sombra's guard, Nigeq was probably Winny's favourite—he was one of the few who didn't seem to feel the need to flaunt what power he had been gifted, and instead carried himself with charm and maturity. He was, indeed, one of the more unlikely ponies in Sombra's guard that Winny had met—charming, sociable, young, and much to Winny's guilty chagrin considering he was married with foals, rather attractive.

...then again, Sombra's guard itself was rather small. The Empire itself was no more than a city, after all, and it wasn't as though crime and poverty seemed to be something particularly insulting to Sombra. It was as though Sombra trusted a desperate and dying populace more than he did a well-trained group of guards.

Nigeq was not wearing any of his traditional armour—instead a heavy parka and scarf—leading Winny to believe that he had not even been on duty today. Winny felt a tinge of guilt at having robbed this poor stallion of time probably better spent with his family, but Nigeq's smile was warm and convincing all the same and she didn't quite get the impression he was angry at her.

“And what a lovely morning it is,” Winny replied, finally turning around completely, giving him a quick bow in return. “The endless droves of snow are particularly wonderful, wouldn't you say?”

Nigeq laughed. “As always, Miss! Ah… I am to escort you to the Southeast Spire District, yes?”

Winny nodded.

“I'm sorry to hear about your mother, Miss. I hope this medicine helps her.”

“Thank you, Private Nigeq. That is very kind of you.”

“Of course. Now, if you're ready to go, we shouldn't waste any time. Typical escort rules apply as always, and while I'm not wearing my armour I'm still very much under oath to obey them.”

“I understand. I won't stray from your sight.”

Nigeq lead the way down the spiral staircase descending to the Empire below. The staircase weaved down through one of the legs of the mighty Crystal Tower—the other legs all had spiral stairwells of their own, but Winny knew that they did not lead to the same destinations. While the other three legs of the tower also contained stairwells which led to the more practical section of the Tower, the stairwell Winny and Nigeq had descended from led only to the section of the Tower popularly referred to as The Mansion simply due to that being its one discernible purpose.

It was in this section that Winny had the majority of nearly every day for the past four years, and while it was indeed as massive and luxurious as its nickname suggested, Winny was rather excited at the prospect of leaving it behind two days in a row.

The stairwell finally came to a stop in a large foyer built into the foot of the Tower's leg, a heavy and tightly-sealed door separating Winny and Nigeq from the cold beyond. The foyer was no more than a small room, and fulfilled little purpose beyond serving as a temperature-lock of sorts to prevent the cold from seeping into the one weak-point of the largely window and balcony-less tower.

On one wall of the foyer, several heavy parkas were hanging on hooks, and Winny quickly shuffled into one. Then, as an afterthought, she grabbed a scarf and an ushanka, too, and trotted to where Nigeq was waiting at the heavy, wheel-sized valve that opened the vault-like door to the outside.

As they crossed the marketplace, Winny noted that the whispered remarks she had heard yesterday were largely gone—undoubtedly thanks to Nigeq's presence. Crowds parted to make way for them, and while nopony bowed, nearly everypony refused to look up as they passed.

The whole walk to the snow-cable, Winny found herself scanning the crowds, searching for Opal's familiar form amongst them, but the mare was nowhere to be seen in the marketplace district. Still, as if by some sixth sense, Winny seemed certain she was there—she, or perhaps one of the other rebels that she had only heard. They would surely be tailing her all the way from the Crystal Tower, watching as they had promised they would as she brought the medicine to her mother's.

A proper meeting had been stricken from their options straight away—both Winny and Opal had agreed that such would only lead into fear of being lured into a trap. Instead, Winny would lead the medicine to one place and they would come later to pick it up—the whole while watching to make sure that her assertions of travelling alone were (mostly) correct. She doubted the rebels would be surprised by Nigeq's escort, after all, and so long as it was just him and not a guard party, she doubted it would raise much concern.

In a trance of familiarity, Nigeq lead the way up the stairs, down the causeway, and paused before his hoof could rap on the door to her mother's apartment.

Winny braced herself for his questioning remark as to where the red marking on the door was, but Nigeq offered no such remark, slowly lowering his hoof and raising an eyebrow.

Then, he shrugged and rapped gently.

Winny's mother opened it after a few seconds. To Winny's great relief, she didn't look terrified to see them, instead donning a curious frown.

“Hello again, ma,” Winny said, giving a shy smile. “Been awhile, huh?”

“Winny. What happened?”

“I believe I can answer that, ma'am,” Nigeq cut in. “My name is Private Nigeq. From His Royal Majesty’s Guard?”

“I recognize you,” Winny's mother tutted. “Armour or not. What do you want?”

“Well, first of all, Miss Whistler, I want to inform you that your daughter has apparently been spinning quite a tall-tale,” Nigeq said. “I think you should let us in, so that we may have a little chat.”

Winny tensed, even as her mother nodded and opened the door further to let the two of them in from the cold.

What the hell had she done? Involving her mother into her lie? What was she thinking?!

Nigeq calmly closed the door behind him, only slightly muting the howling winds outside. Out of instinct, Winny's mother was already in the kitchen, placing a kettle onto her ancient wood stove.

“Now, what is it you want from me?” she asked without ceremony, walking back into the living room proper.

“Your daughter got caught long past the Empire's curfew. She had apparently been wandering about all day without an escort. To justify her behavior, she asserted directly to King Sombra himself that she was visiting her ill mother. Now, forgive me for jumping to conclusions, but this is a lie, correct? You are not ill?”

Looking from Winny to Nigeq with a cold, seemingly fearless glare, Winny's mother shook her head. “No. I am quite well.”

“Then, your daughter did lie to King Sombra.”

At that, Winny's mother's expression changed. Her lips curled into a small snarl, and her eyes glowed with intensity as she spoke. “I'm sure she can be forgiven for lying to save her life. Isn't it your responsibility to keep her safe, too?”

“It is,” Nigeq replied. “I did not know that she was lying to me until I saw you had no markings upon your door.”

“I can explain,” Winny piped up. “But… Nigeq, you… she didn't know about any of this. Please… don't tell Sombra...”

“I have my obligations,” Nigeq replied shortly. “And yes. Explain yourself now.”

“I… wasn't lying when I said I came to visit my mother yesterday,” Winny said. “But I only meant to be gone for several hours. But when I was returning, I was… well, I suppose kidnapped is the best word.”

“What?!” her mother shrilled. Nigeq, too, looked shocked.

“Kidnapped,” Winny repeated, her voice a low whisper. “By a group of Crystal Pony rebels. They wanted to ransom me, but I managed to talk them out of it.”

“You… talked down a group of rebels.”

“I told them I could get them some medicine. That's why I told my husband what I did. Please, I didn't want any of this to happen, I swear. All I wanted was to speak to my mother. You have to believe me.”

“These rebels,” Nigeq said. “Describe them.”

“I can't,” Winny said. “I didn't see any of them.”

“But you heard them?”

“Only one. All I can tell you is that he was a stallion. An older sounding one.”

“Winny,” Nigeq said somberly, “are you still lying to me now?”

“No! I swear, I'm being honest.”

“And you didn't tell this to King Sombra… why?”

“Because I thought that if the rebels found out that I told him, they would… uh, change our agreement conditions. I don't know how much they know about me, but I think they at least know where you live, ma. And I think we both know that Sombra doesn't care if you live or die.”

“He sent this medicine,” Nigeq pointed out.

“Because he cares about me,” Winny replied. “Look, please. Can we just leave this here? Sombra doesn't have to know. Everything will just go back to normal if we leave this medicine here. The rebels will come to collect it, and they won't have any more reason to bother us. Please?”

Instead of immediately replying, Nigeq rose and wordlessly started towards the entranceway again, giving Winny a glare that commanded her to follow. She did without argument, although she had half a mind to ask what he was planning. He had left the bag containing the medicine on the loveseat and was showing no signs he was willing to take it with him.

“Thank you for your time, Miss Whistler,” Nigeq said. “I have no doubt that, if Wind Whistler's story is not another fabrication, those rebels are undoubtedly waiting for us to leave to collect what is theirs. For your sake, I hope Wind Whistler is right, and they will see no reason to bother you.”

With his piece said, he pushed the door open and headed back into the Angujaktuat.

At the snow-cable, Winny finally worked up the courage to speak.

“You're… are you going to tell Sombra? Please, Nigeq, you don't have to—”

“I have my obligations,” he said again. “And your mother was right—protecting you is one of them. Nopony gains anything from letting this escalate, and it brings me no pleasure to see harm befall you.”

He clipped his parka to the snow-cable, and motioned for Winny to do the same.

“Letting things go back to normal seems a perfectly acceptable solution to me.”

Chapter Two - Muktuk

Winny kept her focus on her painting, pretending not to notice that Sombra was watching her from the entranceway to her study.

She and Nigeq had parted ways without a word spoken between them past the snow-cable dividing the Southeast Spire from the central district. Both knew just what commitment they had now made for each-other, and while Winny was pining dearly to let Nigeq know just how grateful she was, she knew that any gratitude expressed on her part would not be accepted warmly by Nigeq.

No, she could not let any of those feelings show. Not with Sombra as an omnipresent guest to her thoughts and emotions. Once more, she had to be the same passive husk of a mare the moment he entered the room.

When Nigeq had left, Winny was once more thrust into the perilous realm of uncertainty. At least delivering the medication had been something, now she was back to not quite knowing what was going to take place. Opal and Nigeq had become unknown variables towards her safety.

It was draining, Winny thought, to have such unknowns. And so, she instead returned exactly where she had been when Nigeq had first come to collect her. Her most recent brush strokes had since dried, but they had dried in all the wrong ways, leaving long, wayward yellow streams of the sunset crawling down into the snow.

She had cursed quietly, before grabbing the largest brush she had and decimating the entire canvas with white paint. It was unsalvageable, and although the former painting would always exist as a sort of ghostly palimpsest, Sombra would hardly be impressed to see she had wasted another canvas.

With the canvas clear, she began again, and there she kept her mind. When it threatened to stray back to doubt and fear, she forced it back to her painting again, the constant inner battle making her brushstrokes harsh and pronounced.

As conflicted as she felt whilst doing so, painting was still a glorious sort of catharsis. While her nervous, shaking hooves were destroying her attempts at smooth brushstrokes, her mind soon slowed enough that she could hear it properly again.

At the present, her safety rested on a very tiny thread; the restraint of Nigeq. While he had no reason to rouse suspicions, and while Winny doubted he would be put in such a situation, she did not imagine his loyalty for her went nearly far enough to result in much hopes for safety. If Sombra had any bit of suspicions towards Nigeq, she might as well save the poor guard the trouble and tell Sombra herself.

Overtime, such suspicions would likely disappear completely, and things would go back to normal.

And, even if such was the ideal outcome, Winny didn't find a whole lot of comfort in that idea, either.

Ever since Sombra had shown her that sad portrait of the long-dead wife, Winny could recall every line on the mare's face. The small scowl, as though she were tired and annoyed with the demands of whomever was depicting her.

The deceased wife had looked regal, healthy, and yet so, so lifeless. The portrait had been a strange sort of black mirror for Winny. She had only been Sombra's bride for four years, and already the prospect of growing old at his side was impossible to imagine. Before her eyes, every tie towards her past life was cut. Any friends she'd had before now looked with scorn at the whore who had sold herself for a better life while they all stayed squabbling in poverty and disease. One by one, illness and labour took away her father and uncles and brothers, and now only she and her mother remained.

Sombra had said it himself—she meant nothing to him, no more than the forgotten mare in the portrait had.

For a long, long time, Winny had wanted to run. And now, for the first time, she was actually considering it. She was tired of denying the idea to herself. Even long before the nervous breakdown that had brought her running to her mother, she had been denying the idea, and now, in a strange burst, the 'idea' was already twisting into some manner of 'plan.' But where was there to run to? The fishing or mining settlements lost to oceans of Angujaktuat? The mythical Equestria that may or may not even exist?

Part of her didn't care. Part of her would rather freeze to death than become another sad and nameless wife in an ornate portrait.

When she felt Sombra lingering, she instantly cleared her thoughts back to her painting and her painting alone. She hadn't felt him listening in on them, but one could never be too sure. She grabbed a damp rag in her left wing, and dabbed her paint brush softly, before injecting a sliver of blue into the jagged lines of the sky on her canvas.

“You are absent from the castle for nearly two days, and when you return, you hide your snout away in that wretched canvas.” Sombra said from the entranceway of Winny's study, frowning solemnly. “What is it supposed to be?”

Winny winced, for she did not know the Equish word Sombra preferred to hear—only the literal K'anquitut translation. “The… ah, 'demon's lanterns', sir.”

“The auroras.” Sombra swished his tail, his voice a stern growl. “How many times do I need to tell you not to speak that primal snowspeak?”

“I am sorry, sir,” Winny said. “It seems my mind is elsewhere, today.”

“Is that so?” Sombra snorted. “And what is distracting you? What shade of grey to use?”

“No sir,” she said, wincing a little, for the same otherworldly cold was upon her, and she did not need to turn in order to know Sombra was now lurking directly behind her. “You're right, I have no right to complain.”

“Indeed,” Sombra said, sounding distracted. Winny chanced a sideways gaze and saw that he was examining her canvas more closely.

“Like the rest of your paintings, it's lacking any sort of detail,” he noted. “Everything seems too overstated, even the colours, which aren't even mixed properly. There isn't even a clear subject—indeed, I don't even see a single pony in the entire painting. It is merely an aimless depiction of the land. I don't think a single art gallery in the Empire would see much value in it.”

Winny felt some indignant retort bubbling—she hadn't asked for a critique of her art—but it did not make it anywhere beyond silly wishful thinking. Besides, he was more or less correct—her vague, muddy landscape scribblings would hardly have sat comfortably beside the meticulously ornate depictions of mighty, long dead stallions.

“I'm sure I will improve eventually,” Winny said cautiously, although truthfully, she was quite proud of her work.

“After wasting every canvas in the empire, perhaps,” Sombra tutted, raising an eyebrow in faux-annoyance. “I trust everything went smoothly with Nigeq?”

There it was. The faint humming of magic. Winny felt it, like it were some strange itching from within her head.

Sombra had asked her a question, and now he was taking a peek inside of her mind as she answered.

Winny kept her breathing calm and her thoughts on the mundane—on what had indeed happened, minus the extra details she need not describe.

“It went fine. He is a very nice stallion. Did you know his wife is expecting another child?”

The statement had the exact effect Winny had been hoping, for Sombra instantly grimaced in anger.

“Another? They are like rabbits. They should be sterilized, the lot of them.”

Winny said nothing. The itching was still there, and so the wisps of green on the clouds were far more important than any retort she may have had.

“I am retiring to my study,” Sombra announced. As silent as it had began, Winny felt herself be released. “Do not disturb me until the servants have dinner prepared.”

Back in the safety of her own thoughts, Winny listened to his armoured hoofsteps echoing across the empty halls of the Tower.

Then, as she did so, a wild idea came upon her.

Before she had quite convinced herself she was not being suicidal, she found herself trotting after Sombra down the hall.

“Sombra, wait!”

He turned, giving her an impatient backwards glare. “Yes, Winny?”

“Perhaps I can take my canvas into your study!”

He rose an eyebrow—not in suspicion, but seemingly simple curiosity. “And why would you do that?”

“Well, it is as you said! I do not like locking myself away in my study when I could be spending time with you, Sombra! Perhaps we can work mutually, in each other's presence!”

For a long while, Sombra simply regarded her, his expression an unreadable neutral. “This is an unusual request. I have made it quite clear to you I do not like disturbances while I am in my study.”

“Yes sir. You have.” Winny bowed her head. That wretched itching within her head was back, and this time she did not have a canvas to flee to.

“And yet you directly contradict me with this request? Why?”

“I'm sorry, Som—”

“Don't apologize.” Sombra's voice rose suddenly. “Answer!”

She winced at the sudden shift, although her thoughts had become so firmly rooted in terror that she did not imagine Sombra would be able to read much else.

“It was a foolish idea. A foolish, selfish idea. I just thought, since the windows are taller and the view is nicer, my painting may impr—”

Sombra interrupted with a soft laugh. “Yes, yes, I see. I should not have yelled, but you have been acting considerably peculiar. Have a servant help you with your affairs.”

She said she would, but truly she did not bother. She tucked a few brushes behind her ears and a few tubes of oil paint under her wing, and then plucked her canvas free from her easel and set it aside, collapsing the easel upon a brand-new one and slinging the whole affair over her back. It was heavy, but even for the passive maiden she acted as, the blood of a big-boned, arctic-enduring Crystal Pony still flowed through her.

Even if it were someplace she never should have been, Winny knew exactly where to go to find King Sombra's study. It was a route he had taken her down the night prior, after all. This time, she passed the portraits alone, casting fearful glances at them as she passed, half-expecting one to come to life and begin berating her for marrying their husband.

The most recent wife—the youthful one Sombra had singled out, still sent cold shivers down her spine. There were two other portraits—both older than Winny, but only one significantly so. Sombra's second wife could have passed for Winny's peer, but his first seemed to have lived to an age beyond even her mother.

Considering his assertions that he did not carry any value towards his companions—and such seemed to be evidenced by the second and third's and soon to be fourth's youthful demises—it seemed this first wife was an exception.

“Congratulations to you,” she softly growled to the mare in the portrait. She knew it was a stupid, immature thing to say, especially in regards to a mare dead for centuries, but she figured that the proud and self-satisfied smile on this mare was enough to warrant it. 'Congratulations on being even more of a whore than me,” she was tempted to add.

She instead pursed her lips, flaring with immediate shame. Did the rest of the Empire feel the same about her? It made sense. Truthfully, it was rather humorous when she considered it.

The door to Sombra's study lay at the end of the hall, and he had left it ajar in anticipation of Winny's arrival.

Easing it open, she entered without ceremony, for there was absolutely nothing understated about King Sombra's study she needed to compensate for.

Indeed, anypony else in the Empire would have been satisfied with such a 'study' being the entirety of their home, for its vastness easily dwarfed the average Crystal Pony's cheaply constructed two-room homes.

Still, it was perhaps humbler than somepony would have expected from King Sombra, especially considering it was where he spent the greater majority of his time. His absolute rule had meant that his decisions required very little bureaucracy on his part, but Winny knew better than to assume he had a plethora of free time as a result. As curious as she genuinely was regarding his day-to-day life, he dismissed it as details no mare deserved to hear.

He did not allow her entry on her lonesome, and although there was little in place to prevent her from doing so anyways, she knew better than to test the enchantments he had put in place. Still, the ban, as it were, was relatively arbitrary and unenforced, and she had been in the study several times in the past. Entering again, she was unsurprised by how little it had changed.

A great glass window immediately greeted whomever was entering. The window was as tall and wide as the study, and was the only north-facing window Winny had ever seen—the rest of the Tower was restricted, and impossible to reach from the Mansion.

It was a shame, for the view of the Crystal Mountains from such a height was one of the most breathtaking things Winny had seen.

The rest of the study seemed to serve a strictly practical purpose. Much of it was populated by bookshelves—a small library but the largest in the Empire— but the larger percentage was devoted to Sombra's own personal niche: the arcane.

Such was an art the average Crystal Pony regarded with a strange mixture of apathy and intrigue. While pegasus births were uncommon and sporadic, unicorns were a different matter entirely. When they were born, they were born alone to their generation. Sombra himself had told Winny that, himself included, he did not believe there had ever been more than two unicorns in the Empire at any given point in history.

Unicorns typically became Sombra's apprentices, standing beside him over the Empire as some depressing product of his creation.

'Not unlike you,' Winny internally trilled.

The unicorn of Winny's generation had been a miscarriage, and the Empire was thrusted once more into an arcane-blackout. While this had all happened before Winny could recall, her mother had told her the story, as well as the aftermath that was Sombra's fury. An entire line of blood had been purged from the Empire before the day had ended, merely because the would-be mother had, in his eyes, 'failed.'

Still, Sombra's affinity for the arcane arts was clearly and obviously his passion. The study was as much a room for work as it was experimentation and creation. While Winny painted, Sombra expressed himself with his quill held to ancient animal-hide parchment, scribing runes whose meanings she would never know.

Vials and beakers and flasks lined some surfaces, charts and diagrams and maps on others. It was truly the study of a stallion that Death had warranted an exception for.

What those rebels would give for a drop of those vials contents, Winny couldn't begin to imagine.

Shaking her head clear, lest he was listening upon her thoughts, Wind Whistler locked her eyes back upon her canvas and stayed silent. She'd convinced Sombra to not be alarmed by her presence in his study. One major victory would suffice for now.

The week passed, and gradually, Wind Whistler's presence in Sombra's study become less and less of a novelty.

In the past, he had made countless threats against her ever entering, and she had obeyed. While there were no magical wards keeping her out, Sombra had spoken before of his ability to detect a pony's magic stream even days after they had been present—like he were some wolf picking up a scent. Winny didn't doubt him, and didn't doubt the fear such a thought stirred within her.

To her surprise, however, he did not seem to mind her joining him now. They seldom talked, but on occasion Winny would feel him behind her and turn her head slightly to see him silently examining her painting, offering a few cynical observations. When she tried to make conversation, she usually received little in response—sometimes nothing at all. The only notable exception was a question she'd intended to be innocent; as they passed in the hall, Winny had politely asked about the first wife, and how she had passed. She received a prompt scolding and backhoof in return, and so she fell silent for the remainder of the night.

Whilst in the study, she focused her attention on her painting but kept her thoughts occupied with far more important matters. She watched Sombra through sideways glances, ensuring he was as seemingly occupied as she was. At her familiar spot before the great window, she had quickly discovered that she could watch him with near-clarity through the reflection in the glass. His work was visually uninteresting—typically involving him peering at parchment, although truthfully, Winny thought, he was probably reviewing some family's productivity output and deciding whether or not their continued survival was of importance to the Empire.

It was despicable. It seemed as though the entire Empire were his hostage, always worried that whatever they were doing to help the Empire, it wasn't enough. It wasn't their lives on the line, it was that of their families, too, for if they were deemed unneeded, it only produced a few more unneeded mouths to dispose of as well.

Winny had been lucky. Her mother worked as a baker and her father a miner. When an accident had taken her father—hardly uncommon, as shattering at it had been—her mother had been too busy worrying about herself and her children to mourn him properly.

And then, a dozen years later, Sombra had married her daughter. It was funny how fate worked, sometimes.

While Sombra wrote upon his parchments and passed his judgement across the nation, Winny would watch him with feigned disinterest. Her sympathies went out to whoever the ink on the parchment would slay, but truly, there was little she could do to help right now.

Far more relevant to her interests was the crystallized dragon fire that Sombra used to send the parchment off.

There were entire sections of mines devoted to producing this substance, and yet Sombra seemed to hold an exclusive monopoly over it. It's purpose was mundane at best—it's role could be filled by a pony and time, but there was something about watching these scrolls flare into green ashes, only to reappear someplace else entirely, that seemed to intrigue Sombra.

It intrigued Winny, too. It intrigued her so much, that she was tempted to ask the only pony who knew how it worked. Yet, she knew better. Asking would raise suspicion, and heavens knew she had enough of that swirling over her as it was. Sombra would frequently dip into her thoughts at inopportune moments—she would feel him brushing upon them, sometimes whilst in the midst of her scheming, and she would have to forcibly jerk her thoughts to the mundane.

He was suspicious indeed, even if he did not speak such. It was only a matter of time before he would confront her, and she would have no way of defending herself from him when he did.

Nonetheless, she doubted he had traced his suspicions to the dragonfire itself. It was too mundane a thing for him to contemplate his wife caring about.

She ceased her cynical thoughts the moment foreign candlelight danced across her painting. She didn't need to turn her head to know that Sombra was standing behind her. For several seconds, he was silent, simply content watching her paint with newfound nervousness.

“Do you… like it?” Winny ventured.

Sombra ignored her, and went straight for the kill.

“Nigeq is dead.”

Her brush halted, and her mind reeled.

“I thought that would get your attention,” Sombra said softly.

“That's… that's terrible,” Winny managed. “He was such a nice stallion.”

“Yes, I figured your opinion of him would be inflated, considering he lied for you.”

“I… I don't...”

“Oh, don't be facetious, Wind Whistler,” Sombra said. “I trust my own judgement.”

“You killed him,” Winny translated, her blood going cold. “Or… or… had him killed.”

“Of course,” Sombra replied, waving a hoof, as though it were nothing. “Do you think I can allow for insubordination in my Guard?”

“His wife was expecting! Sombra, they had foals!”

“And now, the Empire has less mouths to feed. I lose nothing. It's only natural for a ruler to cut off any and all limbs that may slow down the wheel of progress, you see.”

Winny didn't offer a reply. She simply stared straight ahead at her painting, her head pounding with fury and disgust. Sombra gave her a sly smile—Winny knew he could read her emotions clearly, but he did not comment on them.

“You should think very carefully on what the collateral may be before you think you can betray me, Wind Whistler,” Sombra said. With that, he turned back and left her to her lonesome once again. She had a thousand accusations and curses on her tongue and she did not dare offer a single one as he stalked back to his desk on the other side of the study.

On the last day of the week, Sombra had asked the Empire's district advisors to dinner and cigars. Such was, admittedly, not completely out of the ordinary—he seemed to keep a somewhat friendly relationship with them, if such a bizarre relationship could indeed be called such. Winny imagine it was, in most respects, a more subdued and politically-oriented version of her own relationship to Sombra. He didn't seem to trust anypony enough for anything proper, instead keeping ponies close so that they could fulfill some personal need of his.

With the Empire as subdivided, Sombra kept tabs on the districts through ponies of his choosing—typically ones he thought were of value to their respective sectors.

Whilst they were present, Sombra had her play the part of a hostess—bringing out coffees and trays of desserts when she wasn't sitting silently by his side. He had servants who could do such a task, but part of him seemed to find pleasure in showing off to his friends the mare he had married. He chose her dress for the evening and told her to behave, and she had spent the evening sitting by his side, simply staring at the tablecloth while they talked of affairs she couldn't be bothered by.

In a strange way, though, it was a good evening. She watched through glances as Sombra sipped away at a glass of cognac—a stallion's pleasure, he had growled once—and she had to repress a smile when she noticed his words starting to slur as he asked her to go retrieve his cigar box from their bedroom.

The guards in the hall had heard him as clearly as she did, and so they didn't object when she trotted past them into the hallway, alone. They'd been shadowing her ever since her disappearance, but it seemed they had been doing so on Sombra's orders, for neither of the two made any real move to follow her.

For the first time in the week, she was alone in the halls of the Mansion.

She looked from one end of the long corridor to the other, her brain only now informing her just how significant this was.

A slip in judgement on the part of Sombra, thanks to the plethora of whisky within him.

Some gambit he was playing against her…

She didn't care. It was a chance and it was probably the last one she'd get.

She trotted quickly down the corridor, her hoofbeats echoing against the dark grey crystal-tile floor. The Mansion was a labyrinth of unused space, often breaking off into mighty stairwells to one of the hundred rooms Sombra would probably never go in and would have somepony executed if he found unkempt.

With nothing better to do, she'd memorized the floor plan of the Mansion, but she was sprinting down the corridors long after the servants had extinguished most of the sconces now, the Mansion cast in an unfamiliar half-light that made it feel anew.

Then, she made it as far down the traditional path to their bedroom as she could go, before finally coming upon the proud marble staircase that led to the unsettling corridor of wifes. The Halls of Arkadia, as the blueprints had would have called it. Whatever 'Arkadia' had meant to Sombra, Winny could only guess.

She hesitated before the stairwell.

Sombra may have let his judgement slip, but she had no proof his observation had followed it. He knew as well as she did how long it would took her to retrieve the cigar box, and she had her doubts he wouldn't notice when she took nearly triple the time.

I stopped to talk to a maid.

Winny frowned. Yeah, involve more ponies in your downward spiral. What could go wrong?

Any suspicion would mean mind magic, and she didn't want to bring that approach back.

She took one last glance at the stairwell, before turning and continuing down the corridor towards Sombra's bedroom, all of the urgency gone from her step, shame and guilt dissolving her excitement immediately.

Their conversation halted when she returned into the dining hall, Winny instinctively flinching as her hoofbeats filled the void their conversation had left.

One of Sombra's friends—some discount tyrant Sombra had given the responsibility of a Crystal Mine to—gave a small chuckle when she sat down beside Sombra again and folded her hooves politely.

“Your wife is very well behaved,” the mine owner had observed passively when she had returned, setting the small wooden box down before Sombra, her head swirling with hatred and her face timid and coy.

“Trust me, it took a lot to get her that way,” Sombra replied. “Isn’t that right, Winny?”

Winny smiled shyly, feeling as though she were about to gag. “It is.”

“I wouldn’t mind one like that,” Another one of Sombra’s friends, this stallion different from the last—Winny couldn't recall where his responsibilities lay—piped up. “She for sale, Sombra?”

“Not until I grow bored of her,” Sombra replied, his joke received with mutual laughter. “And if she keeps getting lost in the blizzards, I suppose I won't have to.”

He gave a short laugh, and Winny nearly shivered at the sound as the conversation continued on without her like an impatient dogsled.

It had been subtly veiled, but Sombra's meaning was quite clear—her days were as numbered as they came.

A week had gone by, and she was no closer to Opal Charm and the rest of the Rebels. She was sitting with the roundtable of the rest of the scheming slave drivers; as helpless as a caribou calf in a field of wolves. Day by day, Sombra was closing in upon her—she was past a warning and now in dangerous waters, and she hadn't even been able to outsmart him when he was in a drunken haze!

She felt dizzy, as though she had to flee. Her hooves were trembling, and she felt as though she were about to pass out.

On and on, the stallions prattled. It was white-noise to Winny, her mind a flat-lining drone of dreadful thoughts and predictions clashing for dominance. There truly was no way out—she couldn't even bide her time, not with Sombra always peering into her thoughts, his suspicion growing every time he did so. Some weird survivalist instinct within her was simply begging her to do whatever it took to ease those suspicions, but at the course she was already on, Winny doubted she could. Unless she truly did give herself over to Sombra completely, and such would be impossible with even a trace of eventual betrayal on her mind.

No, she'd already stumbled onto the path she was on. Whether or not it ended with her portrait on the wall next to all the other dead wives, Winny would be damned if she was turning back now.

She waited until Sombra was on his second cigar and the evening's fourth glass of cognac before striking.

“Sir,” Winny folded her ears back as she spoke, willing the dread from her voice and instead keeping it low and in blatant disregard to the conversation she was interrupting. “I am going to retire for the evening, if it’s all the same. I would like to make headway on my painting before bed.”

It was a stupid request, one foolishly leaning onto Sombra's insobriety in order to work, but nonetheless it was a decidedly safe request. Before his friends, Sombra wouldn't draw much attention to the flaws in his well-preserved show-wife, and even so, there was hardly much suspicion to be found in her question.

“She paints?” One stallion blinked, before Sombra could answer.

“Like a child ‘paints,’” Sombra replied. “Very well, Winny. You may be excused.”

Once more in the corridor alone, this time Winny didn't hesitate. She made quick work of the long distance between herself and Sombra's bedroom, shedding a few layers off of her dress and swinging her easel over her shoulder, grabbing a candelabra off Sombra's nightstand and lighting it on a wall sconce.

The guard stationed outside their bedroom watched her exit back into the hall again, frowning at her with urgency, but he didn't question her. Her hooves clacked on the marble stairwell that had halted her first attempt. This time, she didn't stop until she was at the ornate oak door leading into Sombra's study, and even then she pushed it open and then closed it quickly behind her.

All of the sconces in the study were extinguished, the candelabra serving as the only light. The wind was a constant unnerving howl—so much different now that she was alone and her heart was racing, but she was only there for one reason and she had no incentive to overstay her welcome. A week ago, she'd never have even considered such a thing, but a week ago, her magic stream would have stuck out to Sombra like the sky's dancing demon's lanterns.

She shoved her easel off her back the moment she was at Sombra's desk, keeping one ear perked towards the door to catch any hoofbeats that she imagined the carpet would have masked anyways.

Her paints were all organized meticulously, but in a moment she was wrenching the lid off of the lightest jar and dumped its contents into another, using her dress to clear off any of the excess she'd left behind.

The clear florence flask of dragonfire was there, unguarded, sparkling like the Shimmer on a clear summer day. She wrenched the lid off and wasted no time pouring some into her empty paint jar—a generous amount, but hardly enough that she figured Sombra would notice.

Looking around, in awe at the possibilities surrounding her, Winny realized this would likely be the last she'd ever get. There was no way Sombra's judgement would slip again—guards would shadow her until the day she died every moment Sombra wasn't in her presence.

She tucked the paint jar in its spot alongside the others in her easel, unrecognizable as anything out of the ordinary. She opened another paint jar and likewise emptied its contents, before returning to Sombra's mahogany desk.

His working area was unimportant to her. Far more intriguing was a sizable map table. The Mansion had a map-room proper, so it seemed redundant to Winny, but the map in Sombra's study seemed at least as proud. Underneath the table, dozens of older maps lay curled in wooden crates. Winny grabbed several at random, unfurling each onto the table. Seven were simple floor plans, but Winny felt her heart skip a beat when something far broader greeted her on a far older spread of parchment.

A map. An actual map, not the isolated, claustrophobic things Winny had grown up seeing. Mountains, the mining settlements—they were all there! The Empire stood proud in the center, and a heavy expanse of snow stretched on downwards.

And, at the bottom of the map, in the precise hoofwriting of a cartographer:

To Equestria.

Winny didn't think further. She folded the map into as tiny a square as she could manage and stuffed it into the next paint jar. Then, she clapped her easel shut, swiftly cleaned the small mess she had made, and tore back towards the corridor once again.

Her heart was still racing even as she settled into bed, but with her easel laying inconspicuously in the corner, and with Sombra's unsuspecting drunken form settling down beside her an hour later, sleep came more easily to her than she had expected.

iii

The Crystal Tower, for all the tyranny it represented, was a truly remarkable thing, Winny thought.

Watching her husband's stomach rise and fall, listening to the Angujaktuat outside, she stared at the swirling snows out the South-facing window, thinking on affairs that long predated any semblance of relevance.

With Sombra holding such a tight grasp on the Empire's recorded history, it was difficult to tell when it had been constructed or what purpose it had originally had. Winny had asked Sombra once, and he had simply told her such would be information that a mare such as herself 'would have no use for.'

According to Sombra, it had been erected by his hoof, but its architectural skeleton hardly resembled the rest of the Empire that Winny knew he had for certain had a hoof in bringing about. The rest of the Crystal Empire, by Sombra's hoof indeed, was a measure in universal efficiency. The buildings were compact, designed to house as many families as possible in as little space as needed. They were built to withstand the winters, but as a result they had about them a cold and industrial look on their concrete exterior—even if, past the concrete exoskeleton, lay cheaply constructed dwellings housing dreadfully poor ponies.

The Tower, however? It soared proud above them all—some great obsidian monolith driving upwards from the snow. While the Tower long predated any of Winny's relatives, it seemed to exist in most of the Crystal Pony folklore she had been presented as a filly. Folklore condemned by Sombra, for it seemed to offer a glaring contradiction towards his claims that it was yet another product of his glory. There was no way, he claimed, that such a thing could ever have been constructed by some nomadic snow-eating tribe.

Like so many things Sombra had told her, Winny did not suspect it to be true. Still, whatever had come before Sombra's rule was a blur that history had conveniently failed to record, and Winny doubted he looked kindly upon those who bothered to ask.

Still, the Crystal Tower, as glorious as it was, sometimes seemed too glorious. While no peasant had ever set foot within, Winny had seen it herself; that there was a good deal of unoccupied space. Clearly, it had been something more than an oversized mansion for an autonomous king in its past life.

There were so many rooms and stairwells and balconies that had begun to collapse simply from neglect, and Winny had once taken pleasure in exploring these lost areas during her long days alone in the Mansion. When Sombra had heard tell from the Tower guards of Winny's exploration he had very violently made his stance clear, but none of the bruises he had given her had quite wiped the memory of these areas from her head.

Every balcony was an incredible thing to Winny, even if the one outside of Sombra's bedroom was the only one she had proper access to. Perching on the railing of the balcony like a gargoyle, Winny could see the whole South side of the Empire. While so much of it was simply a shifting sheet of white, the pointed peaks of some buildings jutted into view through the Angujaktuat.

If she were to jump off the balcony and spread her wings, muttering prayers to whatever gods were listening, she could glide onto the roofs of the buildings below, and with the Angujaktuat as cover, nopony below would be any wiser. Of course, this meant she herself had to simply jump and pray she landed where she wished—it was just as possible she could end up landing right into the middle of the marketplace—it at least meant she had means to sneak out unnoticed.

Rise, fall.

Winny watched by the light of the fireplace in the corner of the bedroom, her thoughts grinding back noisily upon the present tense.

Rise, fall.

Up, down.

She wondered if the Empire knew that Sombra snored. It was such a silly thought, but silly thoughts kept her calm.

Sombra seemed asleep, and somehow she doubted even Sombra could bring himself to 'fake snore' in order to trick her. It seemed too childish for the prideful ruler. So, she delicately lifted the heavy sealskin blanket off of herself, and crept on the tips of her hooves across the great master bedroom. Her dress lay discarded viciously, in the midst of whatever fit of lust she'd been pretending to be in.

For a moment, she focused on the heavy looking candelabra on Sombra's nightstand, wondering if it would be enough to crack the stallion's skull. The guard on the other side of the door would come rushing in, and he'd find her in some shaking, nervous heap against the bed...

She blinked. Just where the hell had that thought come from?

Then again, she supposed it was better him than her, and she had no doubt it'd be enough to crack hers.

Still, she'd be damned if she was going to be around to find out. Instead, Winny tiptoed across the bedroom to her closet. It bore a dozen dresses—each one as loathsome to her as the last—but, more relevantly to her current interests, a small saddlebag, and the parka she'd worn out with Nigeq. She draped both over her shoulder and made her way to her easel, pinpointing the dragonfire jar and slipping it into the saddlebag along with the parka. Then, with Sombra still snoring alone on the enormous rococo bed in the middle of the room, she eased the balcony door to the Empire open.

The cold wind of the Angujaktuat was staggering, and Winny had to duck onto the old balcony and close the door behind her in one fluid motion, or else risk the cold creeping into the bedroom itself and awaking Sombra from his slumber.

She'd never exposed herself to the full fury of the Angujaktuat before, but without her parka it was nearly enough to stop her in her hooves—she had some comical vision of herself as an ice-sculpture for Sombra to find on his balcony come morning. She kept moving, trotting to the rail and scrambled onto it.

She outstretched long blue wings, testing the winds. Her pegasus brain was swirling with trajectory calculations, such thoughts overpowering whatever logical part of her was insisting she was being reckless and insane.

Drawing in a long breath, feeling her bones already beginning to freeze as the winds seared through her flesh, Winny leaped from the balcony with both hooves.

Everything was white, and so she counted. It didn't matter how much snow was obscuring her vision, with the wind at her back she knew exactly where she was headed.

Provided it stayed constant for long enough.

Fifteen seconds meant five-hundred meters, and so she folded her wings and let herself lose altitude. Tumbling blindly through the blizzard, she did not outstretch them again until the first spire came into view, and even so it was far too late to prevent her from crashing without grace onto the dilapidated roof of one of the communal housing buildings.

She was dazed, but unhurt. More importantly, she was freezing, something she quickly remedied by biting off the clasp to her saddlebag and quickly shuffling into the parka within.

She looked behind her, in the direction of the Crystal Tower, now lost to the snow.

There was no going back now.

It was long past the Empire's curfew, so Winny was hardly surprised to see that the streets were empty. She doubted the rebels would have cared much about the curfew anyways, which would make finding them all the easier.

She remained huddled in the warmth and shadow of a chimney, the fissure-like streets shooting out all around her in their depressingly geometric patterns. Over the hours, the Angujaktuat's fury dimmed, more and more of the Empire revealing itself until she could make out the snow-cable leading back to the Southeast Spire.

With Sombra's remark about 'collateral' dancing in her head, she had half a mind to make her way there and make sure her mother was safe, but such would be suicide and she knew it. Besides, it wasn't her objective and she had to focus.

The occasional sound of somepony's snowshoe'd hooves occasionally caught her attention and she skittered across the roof to get a closer look. All but once they'd been patrolling guards, and a lone husky surely out scavenging.

It was impossible to gauge time, but she knew her hours were ticking by. After the first pinpricks of the ever-elusive sunlight lined the horizon, she would have to give up and return—a terrifying upwards flight to the Tower, and one that would surely not bring her where she intended to be. Still, getting discovered by guard in the Mansion would have far less consequences than being found wandering about in the snow, past curfew no less.

The sound of movement. Winny's ears perked, and she tiptoed over the jangling steel cresting to the edge of the roof. Her hooves clicked lightly as she sidled down the frozen fish scale-shingles, the sound thankfully stolen away by the winds.

Instantly, as she squinted through the snow to make it out, Winny scowled. The same damn husky.

It continued on, but something seemed off. When she'd last seen it, it had been meandering—searching for scraps. Now, though, it walked with purpose, something most certainly foreign to any feral husky Winny had seen.

A guard dog? Most likely, but some part of Winny had her doubts Sombra's guard used husky guard dogs.

It continued deeper into the street, and this time, Winny was intrigued. Following along the fishscale shingles seemed risky considering the loud sound it produced, so Winny paced herself considerably, letting the husky dip just out of sight into the snow before following. Once or twice she had to kick off one roof and glide to another, but the Angujaktuat's winds seemed to have mercy on her.

Her pursuit went unnoticed, and she felt a tinge of optimism when she noticed familiar buildings from her last excursion, as she delved deeper and deeper into the unkempt, ghostly buildings housing the useless peasants that the guards hadn't gotten to yet. With the plague eating away at their population year by year, more and more buildings lay silent, until Winny had gone deep enough to even be past the red X's on the doors of the still dying.

She'd been blindfolded for most of it, but she hadn't been led far. Out of one building, but Winny felt she could recognize most of her surroundings before then. She'd past them at a defeated pace, giving herself plenty of time to take in their depressing forms. This was certainly where she had emerged from.

The husky paused for a moment before a derelict-looking housing complex that the Angujaktuat hadn't been kind to, and then proceeded through where a door surely had once been.

Winny bit her lip and kicked off the roof, flapping her wings several times to slow herself as she fell. The husky's panting echoed through the abandoned structure, and she followed it up two flights of crumbling stairs. Already, she heard voices, and already, she recognized them.

As terrified as she was, Winny heard a crackling fire ahead, too, and part of her didn't give a damn.

“Muktuk looks spooked,” a voice most certainly belonging to Opal Charm was saying.

“Wonder from what. You chasing another weasel, girl?” The younger mare, the one with the cough. To Winny's pride, she sounded considerably better.

“She patrolled a gods-damned graveyard, I don't blame her,” the stallion called Cottonfoot retorted. And then, the response Winny had eventually been expecting: “Wait, hoofbeats. Fox Trot, is that you?”

Winny paused for a moment. The rebels sounded terrified. Winny doubted their week had been much better than the maddeningly silent suspense that hers had been.

“It's Wind Whistler.”

There was no sense delaying. Better to get this part over with.

“The wife,” Winny elaborated. “The one you kidnapped. I'm alone, and I just want to talk.”

A long pause. Then;

“Are you bucking kidding me,” Cottonfoot moaned. Winny continued forwards down the creaking corridor, until a warm glow of firelight beckoned from one of the apartments a flight above.

Opal was standing with a scowl, along with a reddish-white stallion with a light-beige mane.

Winny stopped. For a while, they simply locked gazes.

“You made a mistake following us,” Opal said simply. “You were in the clear, and you had to push your luck. Are you insane?”

“Please, just listen to me,” Winny said, taking a step forwards. “Just hear me out. Put a blindfold on me, take my parka… whatever. I swear I just want to talk.”

“I think we're past the point of blindfolds,” Opal replied. “Take off your saddlebag and parka, and kick them across the corridor to me. Take one step, and you're dead. How many ponies are coming?”

“Nopony is coming. I snuck out.”

“Then they're tailing you.”

“I was careful,” Winny replied, untying her saddlebag and parka and kicking both towards Opal and Cottonfoot. “More careful than you ponies, it seems.”

“Trust me, following us here wasn't careful. You know you're a dead mare now, right? You really think we're going to show you mercy this time?”

“You didn't do that,” Winny replied. It seemed a moot point to object to, but if she was going to get these ponies to listen to her, she'd have to be assertive regardless. “We came to a mutual agreement. You were in just as much danger as I was, and that hasn't changed. So please, let's just talk.”

Opal took a single step forwards, just enough to grab Winny's parka and saddlebag. She gave the latter a shake and passed it to Cottonfoot. “You've got five minutes. I sure hope you can make them count.”

“Okay. Opal… I need your help fleeing the Empire.”

Opal gave a short, cruel laugh, but it tapered into a frown when Winny's glare didn't falter.

“I'm serious,” Winny said. “Sombra is planning on killing me. I know it. If not now, eventually. Either way, I've come to a decision that my days are numbered either way, so I'd like to spend them trying to do something that matters.”

“And that is?”

“Reaching Equestria,” Wind Whistler had more to her statement, and although Opal looked ready to turn tail then and there, she barged forwards nonetheless. “If not Equestria, I want to make it past the Shimmer and try to make contact with them.”

Opal snorted. “Is that right?”

“Yes. Sombra has kept us so isolated from them, and I think I know why. If there really are alicorn princesses, like the legends say… maybe we can ask them for help.”

“You are insane,” Opal tutted. “Betting your life on a fairy tale?”

“Even if it is a fairy tale, there's something to the South,” Winny argued. “I know, because Sombra is afraid. If it was nothing but snow, if he didn't think there was some chance of us reaching them… why have the Shimmer in the first place? Why are there no maps beyond the Frozen North? Opal, I know you believe me, because you and the rest of your friends want to do the same thing as me. You just can't.”

“You don't know what you're talking about.”

“I do. And Opal, I'm going. I think we have a chance of reaching Equestria, one way or another. And I think that doing so is the only way we can free the rest of the Empire.”

“If you're going, then go!” Opal rolled her eyes. “Why follow me? Why the whole production?”

“Because if I go alone, I will be far more likely to fail,” Winny said. “As in… die. With your help, we are all far more likely to… ahem, succeed.”

“More likely,” Cottonfoot repeated. “Well, that’s an encouraging prospect.”

Opal gave an agreeing nod. “...do you really think we'd be willing to follow Sombra's wife into the uncharted Frozen North? Even if you could make it past the Shimmer, then what? The closest settlement to here is a mining colony three hundred klicks due West, and nopony willingly submits themselves to mining labour anyways. Nopony sane, anyways.”

“Aren't you listening to me? I didn't say the closest settlement. I said Equestria.”

“Ah. Which we have absolutely no knowledge even exists.”

“I brought a saddlebag with me,” Winny said simply. “Cottonfoot has it. Open it.”

Casting Winny a wary glare, Opal accept the bag from Cottonfoot without breaking eye contact on the passively sitting mare beside her. Quickly grabbing the saddlebag in trembling hooves, she dumped its contents onto the floor in front of Winny without grace.

The glass jar of dragon fire clattered loudly onto the floor, but a bit of old parchment was certainly the focal of Opal's attention.

“Is this…?!”

“A map to Equestria,” Winny said, nodding as Opal broke off. “And look at the jar. Do you know what that is?”

Opal shook her head slowly, lifting the jar and turning it over and over to watch the sparkling sand tumble and fall.

“Crystallized dragon fire,” Winny said. “I stole both of these from a restricted wing of my husband's mansion. Right now, you are the first Crystal Pony besides myself to hold crystallized dragon fire in their hooves.”

“It's...” Gone was Opal's patronizing tone, in its place barely concealed awe. “Why… why flee the Empire at all? If we have crystallized dragon fire, and a… a scale map to Equestria...”

“The Shimmer,” Winny replied. “It blocks magic. All magic. You can't teleport through it, and dragon fire wouldn't be able to pass through. But if we were to make it through the Shimmer...”

“Could… dragon fire transports… things, right? Letters, books, scrolls?”

“Yeah,” Winny nodded. “And bigger things, if you've got a lot of it.”

“And… and is this a lot?”

Winny frowned. “I'm afraid it isn't. I know what you're thinking, and I'm sorry to say that no, we don't have enough to teleport somepony to Equestria. I don't even know if it works like that. But, we can still send a plea for help to them, if we make it past the Shimmer. That way, when we start our walk to Equestria… at least somepony on the other side will be looking for us.”

“How far is Equestria, from here?”

Winny pointed at the map. “The scale is a little off, I think, but from what I calculated, one thousand two hundred kilometers.”

“The mining colony is much closer.”

“Yes,” Winny agreed. “And the mining colony is where we want to go if we want lives of forced labour. And besides, if we send for help, and if Equestria really is this haven we all want it to be, they will come to us.

“Opal, I brought this stuff to you because I want you to know that I'm not what you think I am. You think I'm some extension of Sombra. Like I'm nothing more than a product of his creation. But the fact of the matter is, I've lived my life without ever having a choice. And even if I am going to my death, at least I won't be dying a slave. And anyways… at the end of the day… what do you have to lose? Sombra's guard is looking for you anyways. Your days are as numbered as mine.”

Opal growled lowly, looking behind her at all of the others now watching.

“I don't think I'll ever trust you,” Opal said. “But you're right about one thing. We were marked for the chopping block the moment we crossed paths with you. Why sit around waiting for that to happen?”

Author's Note

Chapter Three - Sewer

The Angujaktuat raged onwards into the coming dawn, the entire ruined apartment complex shivering and groaning as much as the six ponies within it. Wind Whistler was lying by the fire, her wings folded tightly around herself for warmth.

Across from her, Opal Charm was running an old engraved dagger along a beaten-up makeshift whetstone, two small piles of bladed weapons on her left and her right. Blades waiting to be sharpened, and ones that had already received her care. Preparations for some bloody battle that Winny was hoping they wouldn’t see.

The others were scattered about, in various positions. Cottonfoot lay glaring at Winny with a look of icy hatred. Amber, the sick little filly, had been put to bed by a white-coated mare who’s name Winny hadn’t caught, not long after Winny had first arrived. Fox Trot and Muktuk had gone to scour the district and assemble some last minute supplies from various ‘dead drops’ hidden across the half-abandoned apartment complex block.

“How long?” Opal Charm asked, not looking up from her work but clearly directing the question towards Winny all the same. “Till your husband finds out what you stole.”

Winny scoffed, shrugging. “He’s probably going to be too preoccupied with finding me. I was careful. Covered my tracks. I’ve spent weeks in his private study, tainting it up with my magical aura so that he wouldn’t be able to single it out as well now. And he’s not my husband, anymore, Opal.”

“Till death do you part.” Opal replied, setting down a dagger and promptly picking another one up.

“Fine. Then I’ll outlive him long enough to say it in earnest, or die trying to.”

“Y’seem pretty sure the Princesses are going to give a damn about any of us.”

“Don’t have much else to believe in right now, do we?”

“Guess not.”

Silence fell, save for the steady rhythm of Opal’s whetstone. Winny could distinctly feel Cottonfoot’s gaze on her, the stallion not saying anything audibly though Winny knew his mind was alight with loathsome remarks in her direction.

For her own part, she passed her time trying not to panic too much about her current situation. She thought about what would actually change in the Empire, once Sombra realized she was missing. If she managed to escape, that was... What would really change? She’d been married to him, yes, but had she really mattered to the Empire? She hadn’t felt like it.

She imagined things would continue on exactly as they’d been. It wasn’t as though Winny contributed much to the survival of the Empire. Her father and brothers had, with the work they’d done at the fisheries and the mines. Her mother did, with her work as a baker and her--

Winny tensed up as a realization struck her like the first gust of wind when she’d left the Tower.

“I have to go.” Winny announced abruptly. Across the room, Cottonfoot let out an audible snarl.

“Over my dead body. Sit down, Sombra-whore.”

Winny rose to her hooves instead, meeting Cottonfoot’s hateful glare with one of her own. “No. I need to go. I’ll be back.”

“You don’t come and go as you please.” Cottonfoot returned, grabbing the hilt of his spear and pointing it in Winny’s direction as he paced the frozen floor towards her. “Sit back down and be quiet.”

Opal Charm let out a little groan as well, swatting the tip of the spear away from Winny and looking at the mare with an impatient expression--like a tired parent breaking up two fighting siblings. “What do you ‘have to go’ for? Number one? Two?”

Winny blinked, not understanding her meaning for a moment. “N-no. I need to leave. My mother...”

“She’s sure as seal-fat not coming with us.” Opal shook her head, frowning.

“Obviously not. But… well, Sombra is going to… he’ll go to her to try and find out where I am. I need to warn her...”

“Shit.” Opal brought a hoof to her forehead. “That’s… a good point, actually. She saw our faces. He’ll no doubt torture her for info, 'less we, uh. Get to her first.”

“Exactly. So, I need to go,” Winny said again.

“Like spirits you do.” Opal shook her head, trotting over to where the Rebels had hung up their parkas. “We’ll take care of it. Snowswirl, you coming? Might need an extra set of eyes.”

The white-coated mare perked up at the mention of her name, nodding and rising to her own hooves. “‘Course, Opal.”

“You keep an eye on Amber and the wife, Cottonfoot.” Opal ordered, tossing Snowswirl her parka and quickly shuffling into her own. “Try to get along while we’re gone, yeah?”

“Please let me come with you.” Winny practically begged. “I need to say goodbye.”

“Listen, mare.” Opal growled out, pausing in the midst of equipping her make-shift snowgoggles to narrow her gaze at Winny. “Every second you’re out there, guards’ll be looking for you. Stay here, lay low, and leave this to us. Ask Cottonfoot there for some help cuttin’ your mane and tail if you wanna be useful while we’re gone.”

There was no more time to protest. Opal stashed a dagger under the sleeve of her parka, and the two mares swiftly vanished down the old stone stairwell. Their hoofbeats sounded out as they descended until they were too far to be heard, drowned out by the swirling winds of the Angujaktuat the mares had fled into.

Across from Winny, Cottonfoot was pointedly not meeting her gaze. The angry winds outside filled any void that would have otherwise been occupied by conversation, the stallion apparently doing his best not to regard Winny for even a moment. With a small sigh, she rose to her hooves, starting towards where Opal’s sharpened dagger collection was still lying in wait. She was hardly impressed that she’d been denied the chance to say goodbye to her mother, but Opal hadn’t exactly been wrong, either. She’d been paraded around the Crystal Empire by Sombra enough that she’d be recognized, and it would be foolish to assume otherwise. She wouldn’t be able to disguise herself easily--her identity gripped her by her sides, catching the breezes and leaving wayward feathers behind. Her wings had helped her fly away from the gilded cage Sombra had kept her in, but they’d be the very first things to get her dragged right back in, too.

Her mane, of course, would be the second. If not by virtue of recognition, then by virtue of inconvenience. Sombra had liked her mane long and ornate, which was hardly practical when mobility and discretion was one’s intended goal. Winny could hardly disagree with Opal’s opinion that it had to go. Shedding it would be like stepping out of ill-fitting horseshoes for the first time in her life.

“Er… Cottonfoot…?” Winny began warily, as she started towards the daggers.

That, at least, got his attention. He jerked his head in her direction, his gaze sweeping from her to her destination and earning an angry snarl from the stallion. “And what are you doing, Sombra-whore?”

“Cutting… cutting my mane. Like Opal asked. Can you maybe help me?”

The stallion let out another annoyed snort, but rose to his hooves with a spiteful little nod. “Fine. Stay still.”

Winny didn’t need to be told twice. She sat back down, getting to work fishing out the expensive broaches keeping her mane in check. One, two, three, she threw the useless jewelry away, her long mane flowing freely down her back for all but a moment before Cottonfoot roughly grabbed a length in a hoof. With no measure of grace or precision, he hacked away at it with one of the unsharpened daggers like it were dense foliage, garnering a sharp cry from Winny.

Over the course of a few minutes, Cottonfoot worked away at her mane, cutting it down until it was a dreadfully messy, unkempt mess of a short mane. His work apparently completed, he threw down the dagger and trotted away from Winny without taking so much as a second to look back at his work, leaving her to cut her tail down to a little over a foot.

“G-guess you don’t like me very much, do you, Cottonfoot?” Winny said softly as she worked, glancing back over at him.

“What was your first hint?” he returned, sneering at her with a stern expression.

“If we’re going to be escaping together, we’d probably do well to, uh. Talk about that?”

“Listen, wife. You stay quiet, you speak when you’re spoken to, and we won’t have any issues. Beyond that, I owe you absolutely nothing.”

“Now you just sound like him.”

He didn’t reply to that, lumbering back over to the other side of the room and not bothering to meet her eyes.

Fox Trot and Muktuk returned first. Winny had been grateful that somepony that wasn’t Cottonfoot was now there for company, even if Fox Trot wasn’t particularly talkative either. Cottonfoot had explained Snowswirl and Opal’s absence in hushed whispers to Fox Trot, the two glancing over at Winny without properly involving her in the conversation.

Winny sighed, and looked away, waiting tensely for Opal and Snowswirl’s return. While she’d quickly pieced together the sobering truth that Cottonfoot would just as soon slice of his own ear than willingly express anything but disdain towards her, she still wasn’t quite sure what to make out of Fox Trot. The older pony had been... Impressively neutral, in his dealings with Winny so far. In her eyes, it could have gone either way. At the very least, she figured Fox Trot wouldn’t act against the will of the group’s de facto leader Opal Charm, even when she was currently preoccupied with other matters.

The night continued to pass around them. Winny watched it from the cracks of a boarded window on one side of the apartment, the sky turning from various shades of pink and purple. She tried to visualize, as best as she could, how Sombra would react upon waking to find an empty bed next to him. She hoped he was frightened. She hoped he loathed her. She hoped his fury was palatable and true--she’d been dreaming of the day she left him since the day she married him, after all.

Perhaps, for once in his life, he would see her as she saw him.

Opal and Snowswirl returned an hour or so after Fox Trot had. Cottonfoot had felt their approach, calling it out to Fox Trot before it had happened, and after a few more minutes the two mares appeared in the torch-lit entrance, coated in a heavy dusting of snow from their expedition.

“Your ma says she loves ya and she won’t spill,” Opal reported immediately, devoid of any emotion or care. “She’s stayin’ with a friend, and then she says she’ll keep moving. Crashing in different places, keeping a low profile, until... Well. Until the heat is down.”

Winny let a heavy sigh of relief roll over shoulders. “Thank you, Opal. Thank you... I can’t even...”

“It’s fine. I get it.” Opal held up a hoof to silence her, and Winny say that Opal had instantly redirected her attention to Fox Trot. “Nothin’ outta the Tower, yet. But we have to move fast.”

“Right.” Fox Trot nodded. “This is all so... After all this time, I didn’t think we’d actually be doing this...”

“Guess it’s safe to say none of you have ever been out of the Empire, then?” Winny said softly. “Never gone through the Shimmer?”

“I have.” Fox Trot piped up. His voice was soft--Winny had to raise an ear just to be certain she would not miss anything the stallion had said. “Once. And not through the Shimmer.”

Winny blinked. “Really?”

Fox Trot nodded. “Was taken to the Crystal Mines when I was a teenager.” A distant, cloudy look flooded into the older stallion’s expression. “Spent… spent decades there...”

“He escaped,” Opal Charm cut in as Fox Trot went silent, as some spectre of an ancient horror overtook him. “Contrary to what Sombra will have you believe, it can happen.”

“How?” Winny whispered, amazed. “How did you--”

“Luck. Hell of a lot of blind luck, and a gods damned strong drive to prove that slave-keep wrong that I wasn’t ever going to see the sunlight again.”

“Not that any of us have,” Opal added spitefully, more at the blizzard raging outside than anypony in the room.

Fox Trot let out an agreeing grumble. “Yeah, well. Better to die free in at the fury of the Angujaktuat then in chains. That’s what motivated me then, and I guess it’s what’s motivating you now, Sombra-wife.”

Winny nodded. “You trekked here from the mining camps?”

Fox Trot smiled, distant and sad. “Yes. Me and a couple others. It wasn’t easy. I... Was the only one who made it.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“They died free ponies. I believe that even in death they took some solace in that fact.” Fox Trot’s smile was a sort of passive neutral. An ancient, crystallized resignation.

“Where... How did you get through the Shimmer?” Winny asked.

“Not through,” Fox Trot said. “Under. The Empire used to be a lot bigger than it is now, as it turns out. Do you know what we used to have underneath, centuries ago, before the Angujaktuat made that impossible?”

For a few moments, Winny thought it over. She didn’t want to seem like an idiot to these ponies staring dumbly, though, so she ventured a random shot into the conversational dark. “An aqueduct?”

Fox Trot clicked his tongue. “She’s brighter than she seems. That’s right. An aqueduct. Sewers. And, if you’re escaping a mining colony, and you managed to swipe a pick-axe on your way out...”

“Oh, that’s clever...” Winny breathed out, eyes wide in awe. “How far do the sewers run?”

“Close to the Shimmer, but not far enough. But where the sewers stop, there are uncountable networks of caves snaking their way through the ice-packs far beneath the Empire. I discovered this when I decided to take shelter from the Angujaktuat in one. Imagine my surprise when it... Continued on into the darkness.”

“That’s... Incredible.” Winny gasped. Behind her, Cottonfoot let out an irritated snort at her obvious excitement. Winny ignored him.

"...And they come up at a few junctions, though they’re all sealed up under too much ice for us to get through. With the exception of one." Fox Trot continued. "We still got that map, Opal?”

Opal was already ahead of him, it seemed. As he’d been explaining, she had been rifling through the group’s limited supplies and produced a strip of seal-skin parchment that she set down before Fox Trot. On it, Winny could see a charcoaled sketch of what she assumed to be the sewage system of the Crystal Empire, erected long, long before the Angujaktuat’s fury but sketched in the midst of it. Presumably, it had been Fox Trot himself who had done so, with how intimately he proceeded to speak of it.

“The junctions are all impassable, like I said. For a while, I thought I was just going to starve and die down there, after having come so far. Surviving eatin’ rats like some wild beast. But there is a way out, right here.” He pointed to one of the junctions on the map. “I figured, if there were rats, there had to be a way in and out. This junction here comes up right underneath, well. I won’t sugarcoat it, it’s a mass-grave. Pretty sure of it. The pit kinda was hastily dug out, and I guess it collapsed one of the walls of the sewers. And that was my way out.”

Winny looked closer at the map, trying to reconcile it with the mental map of the Crystal Empire held within her own mind. “I think I know this place. The graveyard in the peasant district, yeah?”

“That’s right,” Fox Trot said, nodding. The old stallion’s expression turned softer, as he read Winny’s own. “Who’ve you got there?”

“Everypony, ‘sides my ma. My pa first. Mining accident. Then my brothers, both of ‘em. The flu, during that first big outbreak.”

“I’m sorry,” Fox Trot said gently, and somehow, Winny knew he meant it.

Cottonfoot, however, let out a little huff. “Don’t see how learning about Sombra-wife’s tragic past is helpin’ and of us right now. No offence.”

Fox Trot glared at him, for but a second, before sighing and turning back to the map. “Right, well. I’m pretty sure my little excursion through here was noticed. I’d be surprised if we were able to get back in there a second time.”

“There’s other mass graves, though,” Opal offered. “Sombra’s guard is fond of them. ‘Specially during, well. Like the wife said. During that first outbreak. Probably a similar story, right?”

“We can try.” Fox Trot shrugged. “They’ll be buried underneath a gods-damned brick wall of pack ice, though. Angujaktuat’s gotten a lot worse since I last did this.”

“There’s more of us, now,” Opal said. “Five, instead of just one. Only problem is that we’re going down, instead of up. Bigger chance of someone noticing us.”

“Not if the bulk of Sombra’s guard is looking for his little lady lost,” Winny said. “I can, uh. I can try luring them away? Give you lot a chance to work, while they’re looking for me.”

Cottonfoot scowled at that. Opal and Fox Trot shared a look, though, seeming to weigh the probability of that actually being an intelligent counter-proposal. Neither spoke up for nearly a minute, and so Cottonfoot predictably broke the silence.

“He’ll skin you alive if he catches you,” he growled out. “Torture you for information on us, what you were planning, where you were going.”

Winny exhaled. “I know that. But even if he did, I’d still be buying you lot time.”

“Oh, good!” came Cottonfoot’s irritated, sarcastic reply. “That’s both of our problems solved, then. We give him the wife to play with while we make our escape.”

This time, it was Opal’s turn to glare at Cottonfoot, for several seconds, before turning her gaze back to Winny.

“It’s too risky. Besides, you do wanna get out too, right?” Opal flicked an ear, seeming conflicted by the compassion she was showing. “You brought us the map and the dragonfire, so you’re one of us now. And we don’t leave anypony behind. Right, Cottonfoot?”

He grumbled some spiteful affirmation out, and looked away. Winny felt a swell of gratitude toward Opal, having fully expected the five ponies to ditch her at the first sign that she’d further endanger their survival. She supposed they still might, but the lapse in compassion was at least good to have for the moment.

Opal shooting down the idea did leave them at a bit of an impasse, though. The group went quiet once again, each of them seemingly working out an alternative to their plan.

It was Opal herself who eventually thought of one. “What about crypts?”

Fox Trot tilted his head thoughtfully. “Mm. We don’t know if any run above the sewers.”

“Still the best we’ve got, from where I’m standing,” Opal said. “And at least we can hide out there. Sombra’s gonna have his guard doing apartment complex searches, and you can bet this’ll be one of the first places he looks. If the wife found us that easily, imagine how long we’ll last with the Dark King himself sniffing around.”

“Right. Okay.” Fox Trot nodded. “We should move soon. Give some time for the snow to cover our tracks. Where are you thinking, Opal?”

“It, er. Well. Not really ideal to our goal of avoiding Sombra, but the best place for us to be going I think is the cemetery closest to the Tower.”

“What?” Cottonfoot let out a panicked laugh. “And waltz right into Sombra’s guard? No no, you can count me the buck out of that one!”

“Cottonfoot. Relax.” Opal glared. “I’m not saying right away. But those crypts are the biggest ones in the Empire. Biggest underground spot I can think of off the top of my head... And if this...” She gave the map a little shake. “Is any indication, we just have to knock down one or two walls or floors to be into the sewers themselves.

The group moved with urgency. From the other room, Opal and the milk-coloured mare (who, Winny had heard through her eavesdropping was Snowswirl) were both helping the young filly with her parka. Snowswirl’s mane and coat were both rather indicative of the mare’s name, so that if she were to lie down among the snow itself, she would’ve been practically concealed.

She was, simply put, beautiful, and had about her a sort of motherly grace as she helped the young Amber. The whole while, Snowswirl was constantly shooting little sideways glances at Winny, whilst in the midst of a whispered conversation with Opal about their current destination.

The filly Amber, meanwhile, seemed to be intrigued by the stranger in their midst. Winny afforded herself a little smile and wave back at the filly. Amber coughed a few times while they were getting ready, each sound a dagger in Winny’s heart.

The six ponies left the apartment complex with the pinpricks of daylight slowly beginning to fade into the sky. The Angujaktuat had calmed somewhat for the first little bit of early morning daylight, but everypony had known it would not last long. As they hastily travelled--in two groups of three to avoid rousing too much suspicion--Winny watched the sunlight fade in from darkness, burning from behind torrents of snow. The purple sun danced in distorted patterns, as it’s first first few beams hit the Shimmer.

Winny could not help but wonder if she'd ever see it again, in the same way.

Their destination was a cemetery that was a bit closer to the Crystal Tower than any of the gathered company necessarily felt comfortable approaching, especially with the first traces of daylight starting to slip into the sky. Snowswirl, Cottonfoot, and Amber had made up the first group, along with Muktuk, who they were planning on then sending back to accompany Winny, Opal, and Fox Trot.

The three huddled behind a tall snowbank, looking over at the snow-cable that led on into the eternal whiteout. They waited, tensely, for Muktuk’s return, and when he finally did the poor husky was nearly impossible to spot with how much snow now clung to his fur.

Opal whistled to him, and he came over to where they were huddled.

“Good boy,” she breathed out, sweeping his back clear with her hoof, and hugging him close to her own barrel to warm him up a bit.

They could not wait long, though--not with the other three still waiting for them on the other side. Opal glances at Fox Trot, first, and then at Winny. “Ready?”

Winny nodded. “Let’s go.”

“Alright. Stay between me and Fox Trot.”

As they began to make their way towards the snow-cable, Winny caught the faintest glint of movement in her peripheral, amidst the swirling snow. Glancing over, she felt her heart sink into her chest.

“Get down!”

Fox Trot and Opal did so in an instant without having to stop and verify why, though when they glanced in Winny’s direction they quickly saw the reason for her sudden exclamation. Back in the direction of the Crystal Tower, a rather dramatic amount of guards were pouring out of the structure as though they were rats leaping from a sinking ship.

“Damn it...” Opal growled, crouching back beneath the snowbank. “They’re already looking?!”

“Sombra must’ve awoken early,” Winny said. She didn’t dare raise her head to see if the guards were heading their way, or even how many there were. “What do we do, Opal?”

“Can’t stay here, that’s for sure,” Fox Trot replied. “I’ve got an idea, though. Come on.”

“Hold it, old timer,” Opal hissed. “The hell you thinking?”

“We cut the snow-cable. Won’t stop ‘em, but it’ll slow ‘em.”

“And if we get lost?”

Fox Trot gave Muktuk a little tap with his hooves. “Then we’ve got fleaball here. Right, Muktuk?”

Muktuk wasn’t capable of replying, though miraculously, to Winny he seemed to understand all the same.

“Right. Kay, good plan. Let’s go,” Opal said. She was already withdrawing a dagger from her parka as they headed towards the snow-cable, leaving the cover of the snowbank. A glance backwards showed Winny nearly a half-dozen guards were already heading in their direction. The three cantered to the snow-cable, and when they were there, Winny glanced back a second time. Now, the guards were starting towards them, and her heart began thumping rapidly in her chest.

“Go, go, go!” Opal barked out. Their previous arrangement was forgotten, it was just a matter of getting across the cable now, the specific order be damned. Winny hooked a wing around the snowcable, the cold biting at her feathers in an instant. She couldn’t help but gasp out as it did, but she did not slow. Behind her, Opal hacked at the cable furiously with her dagger, but there was enough ice and snow coating it that she would’ve surely been there all day had Fox Trot not come behind her, and drove the blade of the pick-axe on his back down onto the cable. Instantly, it severed, and the cable whipped past Winny, slicing off a few feathers as the wind grasped it and stole it with lightning speed.

The three did not linger further. They stayed close together, and close to Muktuk, as the husky resolutely carved his way through the Angujaktuat. It was a lengthy, arduous journey, and the blizzard provided a relentless elemental beating to the three ponies and one canine, but eventually they could see the tell-tale shape of wind-battered-buildings poking out from the roiling white expanse.

Snowswirl, Cottonfoot, and Amber were waiting for them on the other side, though they didn’t initially see them from their vantage point in a back-alley of the decrepit apartments.

Opal delivered the bad news without hesitation. “Think they saw us. We need cover, and we need it fast.”

Cottonfoot groaned, and offered nothing helpful. Snowswirl, however, pointed a hoof back behind her. “The cemetery is that way.”

The group scurried toward the cemetery as quickly as they could manage. The old cemetery had once been surrounded by a fence and bore a proud stone archway at the entrance, but now both were practically buried beneath snow. Most of the tombstones were, too, for the few ponies from the olden days, when they still bothered with those. The only structures that existed besides the boarded-up chapel were the mausoleums, most of which were buried beneath a meter or so of snow.

Fox Trot had taken up the front of the party, and he led the charge towards the chapel. They moved at a brisk, near-canter, which was difficult in the snow but necessary given the intensity of their situation. Even with the snow-cable snapped, she knew it wasn’t long before the guard would make their way to their end of the Empire.

They would likely begin their search with the apartments, at least. It was the more logical option for anypony who wasn’t aware of the Sewers. Which... Winny wasn’t even convinced Sombra himself was aware of them, anymore.

At one of the windows of the chapel, Fox Trot pried off a board as delicately as he could manage, and the six of them scrambled inside, with Fox Trot lifting Muktuk up to a waiting Opal Charm.

And then, Fox Trot replaced the board as best as he could, obscuring the blinding white to a rectangular outline, and flooding them back into darkness.

While the snow storm continued to rage on outside and the guards continued to search the nearby district, Opal and Cottonfoot had ventured out to begin digging out one of the mausoleums nearest to the chapel. Winny watched them from the cracks in the boarded windows, as they worked as quickly and efficiently as they could to clear a path into the long-submerged structured.

As quickly as they worked, it was still several hours before they had made any sort of progress. They had been working with an old shovel recovered inside the chapel, which surely had not simplified matters. The snow storm was strong enough that they were somewhat obscured even from Winny’s vantage point in the chapel, and certainly from anypony looking into the cemetary from the rest of the district.

Eventually, though, Opal and Cottonfoot lumbered back to the chapel, tapping on the hastily re-boarded window. Fox Trot removed it, and then relayed the message to the others.

It was time to move.

The crypts beneath the Crystal Empire smelt of rot and decay struggling to penetrate through the layers of ice and snow shimmering all about.

They stumbled through the darkness for long enough to be within the crypts themselves, and then after Cottonfoot and Fox Trot had heaved the mausoleum door back in place, Opal Charm began to light the stone walls with the sparking of a sheet of flint and steel, and then the more consistent burning of an oil lamp once she got it lit.

“Everypony here?” she glanced back, using the extra light to do a quick inventory. “Good. Okay.”

The first room of the crypt, which would have been the mausoleum visible on the outside, was large enough for one tomb belonging to some noble none of the gathered party knew enough to respect. Besides him, the only other thing of note was a staircase that descended down a single flight towards the underground realm beneath the Crystal Empire.

Opal led the way down, and Winny followed, flanked on her side by Snowswirl, with Amber riding on her back.

“Cotton, gimmie a hoof with our friend here,” Fox Trot was saying. Winny turned with a hoof on the first step, and when she saw the two of them struggling to push the ancient stone coffin, she trotted over to help.

Cottonfoot telegraphed his annoyance with her presence with a low grunt but did not actually seem to be intent on dissuading her. The three of them, with a good bit of effort on all of their parts, managed to push the stone coffin against the entrance of the mausoleum... Not enough to block any legitimate entrance, but Winny supposed any amount of slowing would help if the situation required it.

Then, the three of them joined the others in the bleak corridor at the bottom of the steps, following the only source of light ahead. They took their time on the stairs themselves, so they did not all come crashing down together in a heap. Opal was already heaving off her pack and taking inventory of her supplies, with the oil lamp itself resting atop a stone coffin affixed in a resting spot along the frozen dirt wall behind her.

The Catacombs of the Crystal Empire were an ancient affair, and they travelled for some distance beneath the Empire. On both sides of them, in the first corridor they had descended into, there were about half-a-dozen coffins total, all affixed into the walls on either side. There were plaques on some declaring who the ponies within had been--important figures, no doubt, from a time when the Empire hasn't been such a wretched place to be alive in--or, dead in, Winny supposed. A time when they’d still been permitted to honour their dead in some capacity that they'd deserved, instead of just shovelling them into a great big hole in the ground.

They had just arrived at one of half-a-dozen junction points where one could access the subterranean tunnels, which meant navigation would be key to finding out where they were actually going. As such, Winny was unsurprised to see that the map was the first thing that Opal withdrew, and promptly hoofed over to Fox Trot, who was already helping her unpack.

“We’ll redistribute supplies evenly,” Opal was saying. “Everypony shares the weight. Nopony gets left behind. I know these tunnels seem cramped, but everypony needs to stay close. We can’t afford to get separated down here.”

Opal received a chorus of affirmations from Winny and the Rebels. Winny was given some of their water rations to carry as well as some cookware, and while she hadn’t come to the rebels with a particularly large pack, it was still enough to carry her affairs.

As soon as their affairs were all collectively sorted out, they began to head into the catacombs proper. Even shielded from the wind and pelting snow outside, the cold was intense enough that they all kept their parkas on, and Snowswirl kept the young Amber held close to her barrel as they trudged down the corridor, with Fox Trot and Opal both leading the way taking alternating glances at their hoof-drawn map. Winny had been wedged somewhere between the group, with Cottonfoot behind her. Considering what she’d seen of his cowardly behaviour thus far, she was hardly surprised.

The catacombs snaked on in the strange, labyrinthine way they’d been known to. Dug as the dead piled. Growing and growing and interconnecting with other catacombs that had been growing in other places in the Empire... Halls upon halls of the entombed. A more prestigious fate than being thrown into a hole in the ground with a dozen or so other ponies, as Sombra had deemed fitting those beneath him.

She found it interesting that despite the frozen nature of the catacombs, a rank scent still hung over everything, to the point that it was almost choking at its absolute worse. She knew she wasn’t the only one to notice it, either--Amber’s coughing had become more violent, her sickness stirred by the dank and claustrophobic air. A glance back at Cottonfoot, and she could see him traversing forth with his snout scrunched up and a scowl on his face.

“Surprised anything’s even alive down here,” Winny piped up softly, hoping some conversation might break the chip Cottonfoot seemed to have on his shoulder about her.

“Obviously it isn’t,” he gruffly replied.

“Mare’s right. It’d have to be,” Fox Trot piped up. “We’re smellin’ rot and decay, so. Somethin’s alive, even with the frozen temperature.”

“Shouldn’t be possible.”

“Nature’s a fascinating thing, Cottonfoot. Lots you don’t know,” Fox Trot replied, glancing back with a smirk. “Wait till you see what it looks like outside the Shimmer.”

“Uh huh. Less talkin’, more walkin’, Sombra-whore.” Cottonfoot grumbled out.

Winny rolled her eyes. “You see me slowing, Cotton?”

She received another wordless grumble by way of reply, and nothing further, not that she’d really been expecting the stallion to be very verbose.

It was hard for any of them to really be certain as to where they were going, even with the map. The oil lamp did not grant them a plethora of light at their disposal, and they knew better than to light a second one with what limited oil they currently had. Technically, they had three oil lamps--one of them she could hear jangling against Cottonfoot’s side as he walked. The other was attached to Opal’s pack, with the lit lamp held in her maw.

On occasion, the group came upon another junction, where a flight of old wooden stairs rose up towards a ceiling of ice and hard packed snow. A mausoleum once, now lost to the constant blizzard and forgotten.

They were largely walking in circles, Winny figured. It was to be expected, considering the point they were searching was a fairly narrow one, and they were going entirely off of Fox Trot’s intuition and an old scrap of paper that hardly qualified as a map. On occasion, Fox Trot would stop, and Winny would see him dig his hooves into the snow a little more firmly, as he tried to get a proper feel for the layout of the earth beneath his hooves. An old earth pony trick. Sombra had always insisted that they were the ‘magicless’ tribe, which only further convinced Winny that they were something to be looked to and not underestimated.

Eventually, on one such occasion, Fox Trot’s expression shifted to a thoughtful frown. He withdrew the map, checked it again, and mumbled under his breath. “Think...”

He removed a pick-axe that had been strapped to his pack, and left the blade crack down against the ice beneath his hooves.

“Think this might be it,” he said again, louder, turning back towards the others.

Winny could hear a collective sigh of relief between the group. Opal shuffled her pack off and gave Fox Trot a single nod and smile. “Only one way to find out, old-timer. Which of us is the strongest digger?”

“How ‘bout you and me take turns, Opal,” Cottonfoot grumbled out, removing his pack, too, and trotting close.

Winny took a step forwards, too. “Me as well.”

“Alright,” Opal nodded. “Snowy, you and Amber okay?”

“Yes we are, Opal. Right, Amber?”

A cough. “Yes, Miss Opal!”

Opal smiled a weary, tired smile. Then, she jerked her head towards some of the old wooden boards that had been erected to keep the nearby coffins from falling from their spots along the walls... Necessary, perhaps when they hadn’t been frozen in place like concrete. “Think you can get a fire going?”

Snowswirl did so, and after a few moments, the catacombs were lit by the warm burning of a small bonfire. Fox Trot and Muktuk had decided to patrol the catacombs in the interim, while Opal, Winny, and Cottonfoot took turns digging down blindly into the ice below. Opal worked for ten or so minutes, and then Cottonfoot had offered to take over when the mare’s grunts became a bit more noticeably exhausted. After Cottonfoot had taken over he worked for twice as long, and every time Winny piped up with an offer to take over, she was met with a low growl and backwards glare from the stallion.

Apparently not.

That was okay, though... After all, if she had been busy thudding away at the ice, she might not have heard the sound of a vibrating thump, from somewhere else in the catacombs.

She wasn’t certain it wasn’t just a trick of her ears. Or perhaps the sound of the ice above shifting. That had been her initial assumption, but the low vibration had seemed to come from below them, not from anywhere above or around. It had been a single, solid, thump. Not a clatter, as she would have expected from ice or rocks breaking off and falling, but instead like something large and fleshy had fallen from a high ceiling.

Winny had wanted to ask Snowswirl if she’d heard it immediately. And yet when she turned to do so, she saw Snowswirl gently singing a whispered lullaby to Amber, trying to lull her into some sort of calm with the help of the warm bonfire.

Winny wasn’t sure if the sight had disarmed her of her worry, or she’d come to the conclusion of her own silliness by her own vocation. Either way, she found herself heading over to the bonfire as well, relishing in the heat against her fur for the first time since they had left the apartment complex.

“Heya,” Winny mumbled out, settling down by the fire next to Snowswirl.

“Cotton not givin’ you a turn, eh?” Snowswirl said, her voice a soft whisper. Which... Now that Winny thought about it, was more or less its default state.

“Not for me, that’s for certain.”

“He really... You’re seeing the worse side to him,” Snowswirl said, a hoof idly stroking Amber’s mane, while the little filly herself seemed to have drifted into sleep. “He’s not usually so nasty.”

“I don’t take it personally,” Winny replied. “I just wish he’d let me help, is all. He’s allowed to hate me, but not to such an extent that our progress might be hindered.”

Snowswirl nodded. “No arguments here, I suppose. We haven't really spoken yet, have we? You and I? I’m Snowswirl. But that’s a bit of a mouthful, so you can call me Snowy if you’re prefer."

Winny smiled. “Hi, Snowy. And that’s little Amber Waves, yeah? Out like a light?”

Snowy chuckled. “Poor filly. Y’know... I wish we didn’t have to take her with us. I wish there was someplace we could leave her.”

Winny pursed her lips. “There might be. My ma. But... I don’t know if Sombra will... find her, or not."

A hollow, guilty emptiness, in her chest, as she said it. Her own mother’s fate was a question mark, and it was her own damn fault.

Snowy seemed to read the unease on her face. "I think she's going to be fine, y'know. She seems like a very smart and resourceful mare. She's worried sick for you, but... well. Opal promised her you wouldn't be alone."

Winny blinked. A small smile cracked on the corners of her lips, but she said nothing immediately.

“A-as for Amber... she’s safer with us outside the Empire than without us inside it,” Snowy replied. “This might seem... Tangential. But how old are you, Winny?”

Winny. Snowswirl had, to Winny’s knowledge, been the first of the Rebels to actually call her by her nickname. Not ‘Sombra-wife’. Not ‘Whore’.

“Twenty one.”

“You’ve been married to Sombra for four years. He married you when you were seventeen?”

Winny’s ears fell. “Yeah. I didn’t... I didn’t chose it. I mean, I did, I accepted his hoof, but...”

“But it was a lie. Y’know, I do remember the wedding. I remember seeing your face when it was happening.”

Winny bit her lip, and found herself unable to look away from the sparking fire. “Yeah?”

“Haunted. That’s what I thought of you, when I saw you. You looked... Haunted.”

“My brother had died that week. I’d... I’d been too scared to ask Sombra to delay the wedding...” Winny squeezed her eyes shut. “Had to put on a happy face. Pretend I wasn’t... Hurting.” She exhaled. “Gods I hate him. I hate him more than anything.”

“You and Cottonfoot have more in common than you think.”

Winny snorted. “Tell that to Cottonfoot. He’s already got it in his head that he’s gotta hate me.”

“He’s really not a bad pony,” Snowy said for what seemed like the second time. “He’ll come around on you. Seems Opal and Fox Trot already are.”

“And you?”

Snowy laughed. “I... Guess I just try to understand.”

Winny managed a smile, a warm and genuine one. It hardly occurred to her that it was probably the first one that had graced her visage since her visit with ma... Had it only been a week ago? It had felt like years.

Behind her, she heard a rustling of hooves against the icy floor, and a gruff throat clearing. “Sitting on the job, huh? Lazy whore.”

“Said you ‘didn’t want my help,’ Cottonfoot,” Winny returned. She did not bother looking over at the stallion, which seemed to further motivate frustration from him. She heard him stomp his way closer, and before she could turn, he'd reached a hoof to harshly pull her up by her left wing.

“C’mon. Up. Your turn, Sombra-whore.”

Across from the bonfire, Snowy narrowed her eyes. Not at Winny, but at Cottonfoot. “A ‘please come help’ would suffice, Cottonfoot. Let her go.”

Cottonfoot snorted out a laugh and did not relent. “Like blazes it would.”

“Wind Whistler, you don’t have to follow his orders,” Snowy said, not breaking eye contact with Cottonfoot.

For her own part, Winny didn’t want things to escalate unnecessarily. She rose to her hooves, wrenching her wing out of Cottonfoot’s grip as she did and shooting him a filthy look. “I’m coming. Jerk. Don't touch me like that again.”

Cottonfoot continued to complain about something or other to Snowy after Winny had left, but she did not stick around to listen to what it was. She was already trotting back to where Opal was leaning against the shaft of the pickaxe, which had been driven into the ice with enough force that it had stuck there.

“How’s Snowy and Amber holdin’ up?” Opal asked.

“Amber’s sleeping. Snowy’s... Nice, isn’t she?”

Opal chuckled. “Got every right to be nasty, that mare. But she’s the nicest pony I know. Go figure, right?” She plucked out the pick-axe with her teeth, balancing a hoof on the metal blade and easing the handle towards Winny. “Know what you’re doing?”

“Sharp end hits the ice. Try not to hit face.”

Opal nodded, and a small smirk formed on the mare’s typically stone face. “You’re a natural.”

Winny got to work, with Opal lingering off to her side and offering the occasional pointer as she began to beat the blade of the pick-axe down into the hole that her and Cottonfoot had started to make in the catacombs floor. It was a few hooves deep, and every time Winny hit the floor she could feel a distinct reverberation in her hooves, as though there were some sort of empty space beneath them. The sewers, as Fox Trot had predicted? She certainly hoped so.

It was tiring work, but with the knowledge that Opal was silently scrutinizing her from the sidelines, she did her best not to stop or slow. Gripping the pick-axe with one hoof and one wing wrapped around the handle for extra leverage, she chipped away at the hole she was making. Piece by piece it grew and deepened. Occasionally, she would the pick-axe lean against the side so that she could scoop out a hoof-full of the compacted ice and shovel it out of the hole.

And then, when her wing and forelimb felt ready to give out in exhaustion, the pick-axe impacted the ice and she heard the distinct sound of ice clattering down below into empty space. When she drew it up, a patch of darkness lay where the blade had been.

Opal was peering over the edge of the hole in an instant. A little whistle left her as she did.

“Looks like we’ve found our way out.”

Winny let out a lengthy, relieved exhale of relief. Opal was already scrambling back towards where she had deposited the oil lamp, removing a piece a piece of rope from her pack and tying it around the lamp’s handle. Winny worked on clearing a bit more of an entrance in the meantime, and by time Opal was ready there was a hole large enough for Amber to squeeze through. Not quite any of them, but they’d get there.

Opal lowered the lamp in gently and slowly, and Winny peered over the side with wide-eyed intrigue. Their little beacon of light in the catacombs vanished, and the glow instead spread across the curved walls of the sewers beneath.

As it did, Winny could have sworn she’d seen movement, though it was the sort of movement one sometimes ‘sees’ when their eyes are adjusting to the dark after the last candle of the evening has finally burnt out. That strange swirling of the shadows that wasn’t really there, as though darkness itself were lurking and spreading across the fringes of the last light meeting her eyes.

A simple trick of the light, of course. There was nothing down there.

The sewers, from what she could see by the light of the descending oil lamp, were more spacious than the catacombs they were presently in. They were a good six or seven meters down, which meant they would have to descend with a bit of caution. It also meant that return would be... A difficult affair, not that Winny imagined such being a tempting prospect in the first place.

Opal and Winny were peering so intently over the threshold, that Cottonfoot’s urgent voice caused them both to nearly jump out of their skin.

“Opal, wife... We have a problem,” Cottonfoot grumbled out, not even looking at the hole the two were transfixed by. “I don’t think we’re alone down here.”

Cottonfoot had been mercifully brief in his explanation. Hoofsteps. Multiple, armoured, at some point nearby. Whether they were within the catacombs or above, Cottonfoot hadn’t been able to see. He claimed to have felt them, the reverberations in the ice, while his own hooves had been planted firmly and he had been remaining vigil. Winny had wanted to call hogwash simply because she wasn’t quite fond of Cottonfoot, but... Earth magic was real, denying it made her feel like Sombra, and Cottonfoot may have been a flighty coward but he had at least usually been reasonably so.

Opal had retrieved her oil lamp as quickly as she could, but then dimmed it down to a dull burn. Snowswirl and Amber were on their hooves again, the fire stomped out. The five were back in inky darkness, huddled together by the entrance to the sewers with their speechless breaths rising into the claustrophobic catacomb air.

“Hole’s there,” Opal had said, her voice a hushed whisper. “I’m gonna go find Fox Trot, you two need to keep opening it up and get Snowy and Amber down there as soon as possible.”

“What?” Cottonfoot hissed. “They’re gonna hear the bloody pickaxe, Opal!”

“Doesn’t matter. Anything’s better than staying still. We need to--”

Opal went silent as Cottonfoot’s ears twitched and his eyes widened. “Hoofsteps. But... Familiar. Soft. Approaching...”

Opal turned up the dial on the oil lamp to force out more light, and Muktuk scampered into view, followed closely by Fox Trot. The two were moving at a brisk and urgent pace.

“Guards are scowering the graveyard,” he reported. “Snow seems to have blown away our prints, but... Only a matter of time.” He nodded at the hole. “That it?”

“Yeah,” Cottonfoot said. “But we don’t wanna open it up any further, in case they he--”

Fox Trot grabbed the pickaxe out of Opal’s hoof and brought the blade down with a mighty force on the corner of the hole Winny had been chipping away at. A hefty chunk detached, hitting the floor of the sewer beneath with a clatter that was loud enough to make Winny wince.

“Thank you,” Opal mouthed in Fox Trot’s direction, while Cottonfoot scowled but said nothing.

With the hole now large enough for them to squeeze through--albeit without much comfort and ease--Opal was already tying off the length of rope with one of the heavy stone coffins as a counterweight. As she did so, Winny cleared her throat and spread her wings.

“I can... I can fly you all down. I’m not the strongest pony, but I can do it.”

“Ah.” Opal looked from Winny’s wings to the rope in her hoof, wordlessly lampshading her own stupidity but saying nothing on the subject. “Good idea, Wind Whistler.” She gave Winny a single nod, already bunching the rope back up again and instead helping Winny take off her pack. “And yes, you are letting her carry you down, Cottonfoot, before you open your mouth.”

The stallion wasn’t particularly pleased at Opal’s stern tone, but he didn’t resist either, as Winny started towards the hole descending down into the sewers.

“Betcha a million bits she’s gonna ditch us,” she heard Cottonfoot grumble out as she did. She ignored him, shuffling out of her parka and tossing it down into the sewers. She heard it hit the ground with a muted thud, a second or so later, giving her a good gauge of distance. Far enough that a fall would be unpleasant to say the least, but still narrow enough that she would have to be quick which spreading her wings as soon as she entered.

Hurriedly, she squeezed her way through the small opening and into the open air beneath, trading one claustrophobic tunnel for another. It was predictably pitch black... she couldn’t see a damned thing besides the faint little glow of the lamp back where she had come. She spread her wings immediately, flapping several times to hover in place and flap back up to the hole, where Snowswirl was already squeezing her way through with the lamp in her teeth.

Snowswirl was a welcome pick for the first passenger--her lithe, spindly form was lighter than the rest and the easiest of the adult ponies, and the oil lamp piercing through the darkness would help her control her descent a bit better without any impromptu collisions.

Still, she winced a little with the weight of a full grown pony on top of her. Her flight wavered, she lost several feet of altitude immediately, but with a few strong flaps of her wings she slowed her fall into something more controlled, and was depositing Snowswirl gently down onto the icy floor of the sewers moments later.

For the first time, Winny was able to see the sewers proper--what little sight she was afforded with the light of the lamp, anyways. Rounded, brick walls that arched upwards, and a river of frozen sludgy water, rimmed by a stone causeway just narrow enough for the group to travel down single-file.

“Thanks, Winny,” Snowswirl whispered out when she put her down on the walkway.

Amber followed, and Winny deposited the filly directly into Snowy’s hooves with extra care. Then, Cottonfoot, Fox Trot, Muktuk, and finally Opal, who had first threw down their packs before-hoof.

“Alright,” Opal said immediately as soon as she was back on her hooves. She was slinging a pack over her barrel, and kicking another towards Fox Trot with her hind leg. “Packs on everypony. We need to move.”

iii

The sewers beneath the Crystal Empire had been built decades before Winny’s time. Perhaps, they had been built centuries before it. They were impressively built, Winny thought, even by the standards of structures that had grown since then. Such structures on the surface had always been... Cheap. Not built to last, but instead built to crumble, and fail, and be built again.

The sewers however were rather expertly constructed. Intricately laid bricks, forming the arched ceiling above them, still sturdily in place after so long. They continued on in lengthy straight lines, long past what their feeble light could show them. In some places, the brick walls had collapsed, which meant they had to venture off the stone path and onto the frozen river next to them, but such was to be expected.

They were a relic from a far different time in the Empire’s history. Back when they were ruled by a Crystal Pony. Back when they’d been free. Back when they hadn’t been trapped beneath an eternal chill, struggling to survive on what they were able to grow in greenhouses or subsisting off predatory diets born not from desire but out of necessity.

Then again, it was... Sewage. They were in a sewer. Winny knew it was rather silly to look at such a thing and feel put-out, and lacking, but it was a sobering reminder of just how far they’d fallen from dignity and freedom that even an efficient means of clearing their waste had been lost in favour of digging a large hole and shovelling it in.

And for what? For what, had they lost their freedom for? They were slaves, and to what end? To what purpose? To appease the ego of the tyrant who ruled them?

Was that all they were worth?

Such thoughts had been swirling through her head with such intensity and vitriol that she wondered if they’d been enough for Sombra himself to hear. For, just as she was thinking them whilst following behind Cottonfoot’s flank, did his icy voice slice into her head as though from inside.

“You’d do well to turn back now and hope for mercy, Wind Whistler.”

She gasped. It was... A similar sensation, to when Sombra had attempted to read her mind and gauge her honesty, but it somehow felt more distant and more invasive simultaneously. She didn’t feel as though her own thoughts were endanger... And rather that his own were being projected directly into her skull. She hadn’t felt him do anything like it before, and the horror that there was nothing she could do to blot it out or resist it was enough that she audibly gasped in horror.

Opal and Cottonfoot both turned back to glance at her, but neither of them had apparently heard King Sombra’s voice, judging by the lack of intensity in their expressions. Winny looked at her hooves immediately and prayed they wouldn’t question her, and that she really was just imagining things, but moments later Sombra’s voice in her head continued.

“There’s only misery in your future one way or another. I can at least make it swift if you co-operate.”

She winced and closed her eyes and willed one single thought into her head in vicious repeat. Get out, get out, get out...

She had to get out. The Crystal Empire was Tartarus, and she had to get out.

“Betray your new rebel friends, and I might even spare your life.”

“Shut up...” Winny growled out under her breath. She hadn’t even realized she’d said it, until Opal and Cotton stood dead in their tracks and looked back at her.

“What?” Opal asked.

“She’s talking to Sombra, that’s what,” Cottonfoot said. “Some freaky mind magic thing, I’d bet. I’m telling you Opal, trusting her is the dumbest gods damned--”

“He’s talking to me,” Winny replied. No sense lying about it to these ponies. “In my... In my brain. I can hear it.”

“Great. He’s probably listening in,” Cottonfoot replied, narrowing his eyes. “Nice knowing you, Sombra whore, but this is where we leave you. Goodbye, good riddance, hope nothing but the worse.”

“Is that true, Wind Whistler?” Fox Trot piped up from behind her. “He’s listening to your thoughts?”

“He... I don’t think he is,” Winny replied.

“You don’t... ‘think’.”

“Yeah. I know how it feels when he does. It’s like... Like an itch, in my head. Like my thoughts are fuzzy, like part of them is being stolen as I’m having them. And I don’t... I don’t feel that now.”

“Is this a regular thing for you?” Snowy was frowning. Amber Waves and her were the only two ponies who seemed concerned for her own well-being instead of whether or not she was now a threat.

“Back in the Tower... Yes. Constantly, when he thought I was lying to him or being disobedient. I know what it feels like.” Winny shuddered, and gave a helpless shrug. “This felt more like he was... Taunting me.”

“Right. Well, that's probably what he was doing,” Snowy replied. “Hardly a justification to throw her to the wolves, Cottonfoot. She’s a victim same as the rest of us.”

“You’ve gotta be bucking...” Cottonfoot scowled. “How much longer are we going to keep contending with this bitch’s attempts to get us all killed? Am I the only sane pony in this damn group?”

“Can’t leave her,” Opal replied. “Same goes for any of us. Sombra will just capture ‘em and torture out the information one way or another. And much as any of us can claim ‘they won’t tell,’ the bastard is very skilled at raping somepony’s mind to get what he wants.”

Silence fell between the group for a moment. Muktuk had begun to whimper the moment when they stopped, and Winny only now noticed it properly. The husky pawing at the hard-packed snow and glancing around at the ream of light that encased them thanks to the oil lamp.

“Still happening, Winny?” Opal asked eventually.

“No,” Winny exhaled. “I’ll tell you when it does.”

“Good.” Opal nodded. “What was he saying?”

“Trying to get me to turn back. Give you lot up. Said he’d kill me painlessly if I did.” Winny looked at her hooves, exhaling heavily. “I somehow don’t even believe him on that even if I did.”

“Well. Nopony’s giving anyone up,” Opal returned. “You’d better get that through your skull, Cotton.” She turned back to Winny with a frown. “And you. That... Mind reading thing he does. Always thought it was a rumour that the guard spread to make him scarier than he was. But if it’s true, like you say... Can you fight it? Resist it? Or are you just screwed?”

Winny thought of those last few weeks spent in the Mansion, when she’d been certain he’d read the thoughts off her mind while she fought as hard as she could to keep them muted.

“You can fight it. I did. It’s hard, but... Just think of something else. Drive the thoughts out. He has to focus on one to read it properly, and if you’re determined, he can’t do it.”

“Understood. Everyone hear that? Good. We’re moving.” Opal didn’t wait for an actual answer. She turned tail and continued on, and the rest of them fell into step behind her.

As her hooves took her forever onwards, Winny became aware of that same strange movement, just on the fringes of where their light stretched. The one lit oil lamp they had was held in Opal’s mouth once more, and the orb of warm orange light it cast around the sewer walls seemed forever populated by movement just where it couldn’t properly illuminate. It was... Quick, jerky. Insect like, almost, in that eternally frantic and panicked way that insects were wont to move. Yet with all of the ‘movement’ occurring where she couldn’t actually see it, it was still difficult to rationalize it as anything but a trick of the light.

Or, so Winny thought. It seemed she wasn’t the only one, because behind her she could hear Snowy and Amber sharing a whispered exchange. With their hoofbeats reverberating off the narrow tunnel walls, it was a little hard to make out the exchange between the two soft spoken ponies.

“...No dear. I see it too...”

“...trick of the light, I’m sure...”

“...running from the light. Scared, like we are...”

Winny eventually turned and glanced back at Snowy and Amber. “You see it too, huh?”

Amber gasped as Winny turned and looked away in fright, but Snowy nodded. “Yeah. I thought it was just the way my eyes were adjusting, but... Amber and me are seeing the same thing. And I guess you, too?”

Winny nodded. When she looked back to the front of the party, she saw that Muktuk was panting and mirroring Fox Trot's movements as if the two shared a brain. The husky's ears were flat against his head, his tail was tucked beneath his belly, and he was glancing fearfully all around them still, even as they walked on.

Louder, towards the front of the party, Winny called out; “Opal? Fox Trot? We’re not crazy back here, right? There’s something moving past our light?”

Opal stopped again. She looked back at them with a raised eyebrow, and Winny realized that from Opal’s own perspective it might not have been as easy to see what they at the rear of the party had been seeing. Proximity to the light being cast, compared to their own expanded field of view from the back, meant that they might’ve been seeing something that she wasn’t.

“I don’t... You’re sure?”

“No,” Snowy said. “But Amber, me, and Winny do see something.”

“I do too,” Cottonfoot said. “Didn’t wanna say anything. But... Yeah, the mares are right.”

“...What kind of movement?” Opal didn’t look particularly impressed by the revelation.

Snowy seemed to be weighing how best to describe it in a way that wouldn’t unsettle the filly on her back. “...Quick. Like, something is fleeing from the light. Scattering, spreading out. Moving away from us whenever our light touches it.”

“...Huh.” Opal glanced helplessly at Fox Trot.

“Could be insects,” Fox Trot said. “Wouldn’t think any could live in this cold, but... Who knows. Whatever it is, if it’s moving away from us, at least it’s frightened of us. If it’s there at all. And you’re sure it is?”

“No,” Snowy said again. “Could just be the way the light is dancing off the walls.”

“Most likely,” Opal said. “Whatever it is, as long as it’s going away from us, we keep moving.”

Winny could sense the general feeling on unease that had now crept around each of them. Unspoken, and it did not affect the rate of their expedition, but somehow without confirmation, Winny knew that the beating in her chest and the unease feeling that now gripped her tightly was shared with the others as well.

Regardless, it did not change their goals nor remove Winny’s greater fear of Sombra. Whatever was lying for them in wait in the Sewers, it couldn’t be as bad as the pony she was fleeing.

Or so she hoped.