Snow crunched loudly underhoof as my princess made her way through the landscape of white. The furs draped across her back kept the worst of the cold and the wind at bay, and her alicorn nature protected her from the rest.
Even still, Flurry Heart shivered beneath the onslaught, though from the cold or something else I could not tell.
"Are you alright, Rutherford?" she asked me.
"I am fine, princess. My coat keeps me warm enough."
"We can stop and take a break, if you need to."
In truth, I would have liked nothing better than to stop and make a fire. The unnatural cold had seeped past my natural defenses some time ago. But our destination was closer than it had ever been, and it would have been unwise to stop then.
I did my best to make my smile a reassuring one as I replied, "I’m fine. You don’t have to worry on my behalf."
"If you're sure."
She said something else, but the wind chose that moment to pick up again, howling past us like a windigo's cry and drowning out her words. The snow enveloped us like a swarm of insects upon rotten fruit, blinding us and forcing the chill even deeper into my bones. I had to stop just to weather the onslaught, holding a foreleg up to protect my face as I clenched my teeth against the cold.
I felt a hoof press against my shoulders, and when the wind had at last died down again, I opened my eyes to the face of my princess. The worry was evident in her eyes.
"I'm f-fine," I said, though the chatter in my teeth betrayed the truth. "We don't have time to s-stop now. We're s-so c-cl-cl—"
She quieted me by draping a wing over my back, bringing me close and hugging me against her side. She was warm, in spite of the cold, and the contact lent me some respite. Still though, we had stopped moving.
"Princess, I don't think—"
"Rutherford, you know I trust you completely, but in this moment and this one moment alone I do not care what you think. I will not let you die out here; the cold has taken enough lives from this place already."
"I... Thank you, Princess."
We stayed like that for a while, until I regained some of the feeling in my legs. I could have stayed like that forever, truly, but to do so would have been selfish beyond reason, and so I insisted we begin moving again as soon as I could bear it. It was not just my life that hung in the balance, after all; this journey could not be allowed to end in failure.
And so we pressed on, into the land of white. Our landmarks were few and far between, many of them no more than simple formations of stone. There were no modern maps of this wasteland; only a madpony would dare explore a place such as this. Our path had been compiled from the old maps, maps made when this place still knew the warmth of the sun. The two of us had spent weeks pouring over those old yellowed parchments, plotting the route that would, we had hoped, lead us to our salvation. We had memorized the landmarks and their order together, each testing the other until we knew them as well as we did our own names, just in case we ever got separated.
Following one particularly strong gust of wind, my ears, once recovered, caught the soft sounds of a song. Looking over to confirm, I saw that it was indeed my princess, humming a tune both soft and happy. Curiously, I was certain I had heard it before, but found myself unable to place it. I chose to wait until she had finished to ask about it, and let the oddly soothing notes of the melody wash over me.
"That was beautiful," I said once the song had ended, "but it seems strangely familiar, and I can’t remember where I would have heard it."
"I'm surprised you remember it at all," she said. "I used to sing it to you when you were just a calf."
"Ah! And, what is it called?"
She paused for a moment. "It doesn't really have a name, I suppose. It was my mother who came up with it; she would sing it to me when I was a child, when I was upset. But I don't believe she ever named it, nor did she ever write it down."
"Oh! I'm sorry, I shouldn't have—"
"It's alright, Rutherford," she said, looking at me once again with that smile of hers. "You don't need to apologize. Besides, it's your song now, too. She would have liked that, I think."
The conversation was killed yet again by the wind, blinding and deafening us once again. In fact, the storm seemed to be growing more violent as we grew nearer to our destination.
When it died down and the air cleared, I looked to the horizon, where the outline of the next landmark lay just visible.
"T-there, do you see it?" I asked, pointing it out to her. She nodded, and we corrected our course.
As we approached, the outline became more distinct, details becoming clearer through the snow. This was not a collection of rocks, not at all. This was a building, or perhaps more accurately the remains of one. Half the building had collapsed in on itself, the room having fallen under the weight of the snow and the constant battery of the weather. It lay mostly buried now under a layer of white. The other half of the building had fared better, though not by much. Its crystalline walls still stood, but the climate had worn away at their finish, leaving them dull and pitted. The windows had shattered long before we arrived, an open invitation for the wind and the snow to enter and consume the interior.
"We can set up camp inside the tower there," she said as we stepped up onto the raised platform that sat beneath the building.
"Yes, Princess."
We quickly got to work making the place hospitable. I took several of the sheets of canvas I had been carrying and covered over the broken windows, providing us some modicum of shelter from the wind, while she began clearing the snow out with her magic. We set up the fire together, and she lit it with a spark from her horn. It grew quickly, spurred on by kindling and gentle magical encouragement, and soon the interior of the building became wonderfully warm. Truly, it was as if I had died, and in the heat, I had been brought back to life.
Once the feeling had returned to my skin, I got to work preparing our meager supper. Though, on inspection of our supplies, I noticed something worrying.
"We're a little shorter on rations than I would like, Princess. Are you okay with slightly smaller portions for tonight?"
"If you deem it necessary, yes. I would rather not risk the fate of all those back home for a slightly fuller stomach."
"Very true, very true." Even so, once the food was done cooking, I made sure to give her a slightly larger portion than mine. Hungry as we were from our long journey, we dug in with gusto.
"I remember this place," she said between mouthfuls. "This was the only station in and out of the Empire. My parents would always make me come with them to greet important guests as they got off the train. I used to hate that; just standing there, waving, saying hello to all those stuffy nobles. They could have replaced me with a crystal golem, and the effect would have been the same."
Flurry smiled. "Although I suppose we didn't have those at the time, so perhaps that's why."
"In fact," she went on, "It was during one of those train-side meet-and-greets that I first met your ancestor, Prince Rutherford the First. That one was far from boring."
"From what you've told me about him, I imagine there was a lot of shouting."
She laughed. "Yes, there was! Mother and Father were practically biting their hooves the entire time, worried that he and his entourage would smash the empire to bits if they so much as looked at him wrong! Which of course led my mischievous younger self to make every attempt to sabotage the proceedings."
I couldn't believe what I was hearing. "Really? You?"
"Oh, absolutely! I was quite the troublemaker in my youth. Of course, Sunburst was always there to thwart my plans. He was always strangely good at catching me in the act..."
Her head tilted towards the ceiling, her eyes focusing on things no longer there. I did not dare break her rare moment of remembrance, and so I instead returned to my food and allowed her the time to think. We sat in silence for a while.
"You know, in a way," she said, "I'm sorry that our kinds living together has mellowed yours out so much. You were far more entertaining as angry berserkers."
"You may regret that," I replied, "But I would call it an improvement! Yelling, smashing things, barely knowing how to speak our own language... our ancestors were barbaric! It's a wonder they even agreed to take you and the crystal ponies in in the first place!"
"Yes, I suppose. But I can see the old yak perfectionism is alive and well."
"Well, of course. You can't take that away from us."
"Indeed, it's a trait I've very much come to admire about your culture. It's certainly proved invaluable over the years. And it’s not like your kind haven’t rubbed off on mine, either. The crystal ponies of old were rather…”
“Complacent?”
“I was going to say dainty, but that’s also true.”
We spent a few more hours making idle conversation and going over our plans for the next day as we basked in the heat of the fire. At last, when the fire had fallen to embers, we assembled our bedrolls and bid each other goodnight.
The wind woke us early the next morning. The storm had gotten much worse overnight, and had blown out the coverings I had put over the windows, leaving our makeshift camp exposed. Together, we packed everything away as quickly as we could and set out into the blizzard, our compass' needle our only guide.
And what a blizzard it was! I had thought the visibility poor before, but now I could not see two feet in front of me. The snow and wind were constant now, whipping against us as if to drive us back, drive us away from this place where we were not welcome. The storm did not want us here.
But turning back was not an option, not anymore, and so we pushed forward into the wailing wall of white.
There was little chance of being able to find one another should we have gotten separated now, so we made sure to stick close to one another. She pressed her body against mine, and I pressed mine against hers, and we marched together against the wind. So loud was it that we had to shout into each other's ears just to be heard.
"Can you see anything, Rutherford?" she shouted.
"Nothing yet!"
"We should be getting close by now! Keep your eyes forward!"
"Will do!" A horrible thought struck me. "Princess, are we still heading in the right direction? I'm worried we might have gotten turned around!"
She levitated her compass up to her face from where it hung around her neck. "We're fine! We're still headed north!"
"Good!" I yelled back, "Keep checking every few minutes! We mustn't lose our way now!"
"Got it!"
We pressed onwards for what could have been an eternity. Unable to see the shape of the land around us, we had no way of knowing how far we'd gone, or how quickly; even the hoofprints we left behind were being wiped away as we made them. The cold bit into me fiercely, held back only by my coat and the heat we shared between us, and even still the feeling had slipped easily from my face.
And then, something emerged from the snowy curtain before us: a shadow.
She said something, but it was lost to me as she pulled away from me and dashed towards the shapes, leaving me scrambling to keep up.
"Princess!" I cried, running after her, though her longer legs kept her ahead of me. She soon vanished from view, swallowed by the white.
"Princess, please!" I kept moving towards the shadow as quickly as I could, hoping against hope that she had stopped there and not forgotten me, left me behind entirely. Much to my relief, she was waiting by the figure when I at last arrived, holding her hoof to the side one of the two crystal pylons, as if affirming it to be real. Between the two, several smaller crystals lay fallen, half-buried by the snow.
"Oh, thank goodness!" I shouted, but I don't believe she heard. I could see her jaw moving, but I could not hear her words, nor do I suspect they were meant for me to hear. Stepping up beside her, I placed my cloven hoof onto her shoulder. She started at the contact, spinning about to face me with eyes wide open.
"Rutherford! Oh, I'm so sorry!"
"It's alright, P-Princess," I lied, "Do you recognize this place?"
"Yes, it's the entry arch! It marks the outer border of the city, we're nearly there!"
"Excellent news! Lead the way!"
Just the thought that we were so close to our goal was enough to banish the feeling of cold. Suddenly, the chill, the wind, the snow, none of it mattered; only a little while longer, and we would have what we came for. All we had to do was keep walking.
Flurry took the lead at this point, guiding us forward into the blizzard by the memories of her foalhood, though it soon became easier.
"Look, Rutherford! The storm's passing!"
And indeed it was; the wind had slowly died down from a howl to a purr, and the snow, while still coming down heavily, had thinned enough to give us a proper view of our destination.
For the first and last time in my life, I laid eyes upon the Crystal Empire.
Even in the sorry state it was now, beaten and battered by countless storms, it still held a great majesty to it unlike anything I had encountered before. Sweeping arches and great houses of crystal all leading inwards, existing only to frame the centerpiece of the city: the palace, its great spires towering up and up and into the clouds, needles built to scratch the sky, a monument to the spirits of equinity long past. "Look what we have done!" it cried, "Look at what our love, our strength, has achieved! We have taken this place of storms, and from it created paradise!"
If only it could have lasted.
Flurry guided us down the path between the crystal corpses of buildings ravaged by the snow and ice, towards the palace. As we drew closer, my emotions soared; at long last, we would have what we came for!
But as we drew nearer, a change made its way over Flurry's features. Her jaw stiffened and clenched, her eyes wide open in a rigid, unfaltering stare. Her walk became a march, hooves coming down with greater and greater intensity, picking up speed as she went.
"Princess,” I asked, "are you alright?"
She said nothing, instead marching forward with an even greater ferocity. Her gaze remained fixed on the palace, or perhaps more accurately, on the hollow beneath it. I could see several figures within the space, though we were not yet close enough for me to make out details beyond colour: one orange, one pink and white.
Abruptly, Flurry broke into a gallop, her wings emerging from beneath her furs. She leapt into the air, taking flight towards the castle.
"Wait!" I yelled, struggling to keep up; she quickly left me behind, her wings carrying her forward much faster than my legs could carry me. I dashed down the road after her, kicking up snow behind me as I went. I watched as she landed in the alcove beneath the palace, settling in front of the pink and white shape.
When I at last reached her, she was seated, her back to me. As I approached, I saw she was shaking, and as I walked closer and saw what she was looking at, I knew it wasn't from the cold.
I had been mistaken, earlier; the pink and white shape I had seen hadn't been one figure.
It had been two.
For there, on the ground, subject of Flurry's wide gaze, were a pair of ponies frozen solid in time. One was a stallion, a unicorn, his coat white and mane blue. He looked old, withered, even beyond what the cold had done to his corpse. He lay cradled in the arms of the pink mare, a unicorn—no, an alicorn! She clutched him to her, her head bent over him in eternal mourning. I did not need to see her face to guess that her expression would have been a pained one.
She looked just like Flurry.
"He held on," she whispered, "for so long. But he couldn't stay forever.
"He wouldn't even stay in bed. I was there when he collapsed; he made mother promise him she wouldn't grieve, would move on after he left.
"But she couldn't keep it. He died, and she died with him."
She did not cry, not then, just sat there and stared at the corpses of her parents, their bodies forever trapped in their final moments. I did not know how to comfort her, for I could not comprehend what she was feeling. I settled for a hug, one which she eventually returned, burying her face into my coat. We remained like that for a time.
At last, she pulled away. She turned to the other figure, which on inspection proved to be an orange unicorn. And, on the ground, centered in his eternal stare, lay our objective.
"Sunburst... I told him he wouldn't be able to fix it," Flurry said. "It wasn't like the first time. I could feel it; no amount of spellcraft was going to make the Heart whole again."
She levitated the broken halves of the Crystal Heart out of Sunburst's stare, bringing it over to us.
"Even as I gave the order to evacuate, he refused to move. He was so sure he could fix everything, like he had before."
"Do you think we can fix it now, Princess?" I asked.
"I dearly hope so, Rutherford. I dearly hope so."
She put the remains of the Heart into her bags, and together we turned back the way we had come.
"We can't allow home to become like this place," I said.
She nodded. “Not again.”
Bracing ourselves, we plunged back into the white.
