Chapters "...I'm in a warm place now - an old village or hamlet.
There's plenty of tinder and firewood. Old thatched roofs have fallen down in a lot of the houses, so while I couldn't stay there, I still got some things for a fire or two. Some other houses fell down with beams and walls and the like, so I grabbed some pieces I could carry. I tried not to, though. It seems like such a waste - even if nobody is here. After all, this was someone's home!
One of the places had a stack of firewood outside. I had to break it apart and dig around to get the drier stuff underneath because the logs on the outside were basically just blocks of ice. I'm not even going to try to burn one.
I'm in one of the most intact buildings. It's at the center of the village, and pretty big inside. It might be some kind of theatre or concert hall. Upstairs, there's an office with some comfy chairs and cushions. I set a few around a fire. It's like a little ski lodge of a camp, now. It is so nice to rest my hooves, though. I ran for I don't know how far - literally. I don't have a map, and the white out hit so hard, I didn't have a chance to guess...
I should be dead.
I ran blindly, in the middle of a massive snow storm, not knowing how far, for how long, with this little pack of food and no ropes or extra satchels or any tinder or a flint or
I'm lucky I found this place. I'm lucky the white out ended when it did. I don't deserve to be here.
I passed out before. I don't know what exactly happened, but I just started breathing hard and... freaking out, is the only way I can put it. Like I was being overwhelmed. I read back to what I put down, and the first couple pages were gone. I guess I ripped them out.
I'm a little rattled. I got a cold-flash right before I went under, which means that it could have been some kind of shock from the heat of the fire or just exhaustion catching up to me at a weird time. I'm praying that I'm not sick. Maybe it has something to do with a panic attack? I used to have them as a filly whenever I was overwhelmed with a situation. I wrote all that "luck" and existential stuff, so that'd make sense, but it's been so long. I was around eight or something.
I guess I'm still lucky, because I passed out next to the fire. Even at the corner of the room, I could've never woken up from that. I don't know what time it is, and I remember seeing some clouds out of a dusty window in that office. I'll go do a better sweep, check it out, and head back.
I found a box of pencils and a few bottles of ink in a cupboard upstairs, and snagged some loose ones from the floor and such. I guess I'm pretty great on that department. There are no windows where I set up "camp" - I guess it technically is a camp - so after swiping what I could, which I still feel bad about, I peeped outside. I still couldn't see the sun, but the sky was definitely a darker gray than before. I swept around for anything else useful, came up empty, and headed down back to my comfy desk chair. No blankets, so I just made a sort-o'-fort.
I feel a lot better now, and after a little bread and a cup of snow over the fire, I feel even a bit relaxed. After how fast all that happened, getting a quiet rest is... well, restful. Besides all of this "homely comforts", I'm still really uneasy. The wind stopped blowing too hard, and when it did, it seemed eerie with how quiet it got. It whistled around bare trees that were still standing and loose thatch and windows of other houses. When I walked in this town, it was like... a dying creature. On it's last leg, wheezing or gasping for air. Shaking shutters, whipping curtains, even if they were on the ground. It was like it was asking for help. Now it's... gone. Dead. I'm just left with the crackling of the fire, and no slamming shutters, whistling windows or trees, and definitely... hopefully, no animals to chitter or howl.
I don't know how to follow that up. I get these spurts of poetry every once in a while, and I guess I need something to do to pass time alone. For a few reason, now that I think of it.
I can't sleep yet. I'm not as tired as I could be from that episode earlier, but that is going to change really quick. The sky's black now and I didn't grab enough wood on the first run to last the night. I don't know what's going to happen soon, whether that's tomorrow or in a year. The best I can do is prepare everything I can. If I need to buck the trees down for wood in a week, I guess I will, but that's just one thing. I don't know how long or how well this bread is going to keep. Trotting through the town earlier, I saw some kind of mini-theme park-restaurant thing. I didn't look inside, but it looked a bit shambled. On the other hoof, it could have just been like that for the most part. It's almost like a fort? I'll check it out, even if that's not the case. My thought process is that it might still have some parts of things I could stick together to be useful.
There's a ton of snow around there, though, so maybe I should scrap together a small travel package tonight, too. I'll make a small list:
x - Fire Wood x - Ration for Trip - Find Other Pages - Search Upstairs Again?
"...I couldn't find those pages I ripped out earlier. I hope I didn't throw them away somewhere. I'm going to sleep. Good night."
"Day 4" - "Day 5" Page Five - Ten + 1
"I slept so horribly last night...
Being so used to animals and hooligans around town raising Tartarus all night, the silence was weird. While disturbing, it was kind of nice to have a moment or two to myself. I doubt I won't get sick of it, but I have this journal. I heard something about how companionship is important in these kind of situations, and when you write down what you feel and think, you get this sort of feeling like it. I bet it sounds so much better wherever I read it first, but if anyone reads this, then that'll have to do.
Some more bread and a makeshift mug of tea - found some leaves in the back of one satchel - and I'm ready enough to start the day. That idea of the raid on funland-funnelcake-emporium, as I'm calling the colorful monstrosity I can see over the horizon for eternity now, was pretty solid. The hills of snow seemed to have thinned out while I was asleep, so it shouldn't be as bad of a trek as I thought at first. I wish I had something to carry some things in besides the half-full saddlebags and a bit-purse.
It was a bakery! Of all things, funland-funnelcake-emporium was just a bakery! I suppose it warrants a story, though.
The thing was standing like a tower in the middle of this patch of leveled houses. There were barely any real damages to it - whatever I saw before was just debris from the things around it - and inside, besides dark and frosty, it was practically pristine. The cases in the front were empty, but not like I thought they would be. They had crumbs on the bottom, and the backs were open. Almost like it was ransacked, but carefully. Either they had a lot of time and respect for the owners, or the owners themselves liquidated all their treats. Either way, there weren't any for me, so I looked around.
The back was just as, if not more, clean than the front. It had to have been the kitchen, so naturally, I look for bread or leftover flour to make my own. I didn't expect to come up with much, since the case was picked clean, but again, the place gets weird.
Bags and bags of sugar! Just so much sugar! Cupboard after cupboard! You'd think the ponies that ran the place were using them like sandbags! Somepony must have been just eating it raw, because no bakery in Equestria could have sold enough cakes, even if they swapped everything in the recipe for sugar, to use all this. A few cupboards had more practical stuff. I'll take an inventory:
- 5 full bags of flour, 2 half-empty- 3 full bags of cooking salt, 1 a third-empty- 2-and-a-half pounds of butter, intact and fresh enough - 4 bags of coffee grounds- 4 bags of chocolate chips, 2 bags of chocolate chunks, both milk- 2 bags of caramel/butterscotch? chips - A couple wheelbarrows of candy - almost literally, there's at least one wheelbarrow here that I've seen- Pots and kettles up the flank
I'll put the nifty stuff in a pile or something.
I've made an important decision. Funland-funnelcake-emporium is going to become Fort Funland. Since the thing must have been built like an actual fort to have lived through whatever blew through this town, I moved my cushions and chair over. I cleared out some space by putting anything that doesn't work outside - all the ovens, one of the ice boxes, and a few mismatched standalone cupboards that were practically taped on to the walls - and found a hole in the wall, but not a messy one, like if something crashed through. I'm pretty sure it's a brick oven. I saw a chimney on the outside, so it might work.
The wind started to pick up again while I was outside dragging my cushy chair uphill. I don't know what leads to it, or if anything even does, but it is already a pain. I'm wrapped up like a walking sleeping bag with a diving helmet, and I still feel this chill down my neck. It's a brand new coat, so it shouldn't have any tears or anything. I checked it, too, and unless it's some kind of malfunction I can't see, I don't think there's anything wrong with it. All that means that it might be getting so cold it seeps through professional equipment.
I didn't check upstairs. Hay, I barely even saw the staircase until the last trip out. The roof looked intact from the outside, but even if something's bust there's a pretty sturdy door at top that'll keep the wind or snow out.
The next run will probably be the last. I'm going to liquidate what I can from that office upstairs and maybe try to find those pages I ripped out. They were... important, in a way. They had some personal things on them, but if I don't find them, I'll just re-write it - its not like they were magical or written on diamond-studded parchment (a real thing I found in a market once). I'd just rather not have to put all that down again. It was three or four pages, so it'd be a lot to just start from scratch. I guess I have time, though.
I'll get to sleep.
Day 5
Office: - More pencils, ink + quills - Blank paper + parchment rolls - A desk clock - slow - Compass, straightedge, protractor (why in here?)
Fort Funland Attic (Apartment?) - Bedroom (sheets, blankets, five million pillows, mattress, small hooful of candles, 1 and a half packs of matches) - Bathroom (sink, tub, closet, towels, soap, curling iron, five different brushes) - Small bits of candy hidden here and there in bags or taped to something?
That last one is concerning. Did this place sell drugs in the shape of candy? It was like those noir movies I saw back in school, where the guards did a bust or something and found knives and gunpowder hidden in shoeboxes or under a table. I tried a few pieces, then a few more, and even waited an hour. Either I have some paranormal immunity to something freaky in these, or whoever lived here was obsessed with ordinary, if delicious, candy. All this brings me back to those bags of sugar, too. My only guess is that this is the place of the owner of the bakery downstairs, and they have a massive sweet tooth. It makes sense - drunkards open taverns sometimes, and other things like that. Hay, if I had the money, I would open a store that sold all my favorite stuff, too.
That was probably the last list I'll write in this book. I'll do the rest on rolls or scrap that I found, now that there's so much of it.
Put some of the excess cupboards upstairs and moved the mattress next to the oven. Tested them both - the oven and the mattress - and both work amazingly. I'm staying here as long as I can."
There is a piece of paper folded up neatly and wedged carefully between the pages.
Houses intact besides Fort Funland
"Day 7" Page Ten - Thirteen
"Nothing too eventful to report in, but that's good, in a way...
"Having nothing to report means that nothing went wrong, but nothing went right, either," one of my teachers used to say.
I didn't get a good chance to write, between trying to nick things from places that were safe to go in and trying to fix things that I already nicked, and I didn't find those pages, so now's a good enough time to copy it.
My name is Winter. I'm a earth pony, my fur is white, and I wear my greasy mane in a tail. I'm a bit of a fanatic of things that involve notes, writing, maps, other things like that. It's like how some ponies like to do things with there hooves or draw, but for me, it's charts and data and all that. So, basically, a nerd.
I~~'m~~ was an assistant to a geology professor Clay from Manehatten, my hometown. He was the one that said the thing above, actually. It wasn't the most lustrous job - I majored geology and archaeology in university, "the most boring subjects possible" so I've been told, which didn't have massive amount of hype - mostly just putting rocks in a tumbler, holding things under a microscope, note taking, secretary work, those things. Prof. Clay made it a lot better for me there. He gave me more experience than I could have hoped for, from training programs after work, to access to all his equipment, and even some things under the table like food and a couch to sleep on a few times. The pay was mediocre, if not obvious, and I didn't have anything saved up, so I mostly worked. Clay himself was a great pony, too. Middle-aged, stark black hair, wire glasses, he could have made for a dashing Daring-Do clone. He wasn't renounced, but he did get a small glimpse after he wrote a book and went on radio. He was wise, almost sage-like, and he was always calm but happy. Pleasant, would be a good word to put him in.
He took me on a expedition to The Cold North once and that's where I learned a lot of the stuff that's keeping me alive out here. They had a course on an ice age-apocalypse scenario that I took for what I called "conditioning". It was mostly for fun. Its a little weird for me that it turned out like this. Almost morbid.
The first day all of this happened, I was on another expedition with Clay, this time in front of Canterlot Mountain, in a valley where we could hitchhike to the castle if we wanted to. It was just after autumn, so we took some leftover coats and things from the North trip. Neither of us could stand the cold well - ironic for both of us, considering him and I were named after un-freeze-able earth and the coldest part of the year respectively.
I don't know what happened the whole time. I was inside the camp wagon, sorting through some equipment, it was getting cold and windy, and the sky darkened. I didn't think of it - a cloud could have just passed over the sun or it could have dipped behind the mountain, and the it was the right time of year for the air to stir around, but then another researcher working with us slammed open the door and yelled about running and that Clay wanted me to just run as far as I could and someone pointed me to a forest and
I remember that in patches, sometimes more or less, depending on how much I'm trying to keep warm or when I'm working. I remember the forest even less. It was thick and the trees creaked the whole time. The wind was howling so hard, I could barely hear anything else besides that and the wind. I ran in a panic until I my lungs felt like they were filled with ice water and I took a rest. I didn't understand why the whole camp was like that, but worse, I didn't know why I was alone. Nobody had followed me, or if they did, they went in a completely different direction - either way, I was lost in the woods. I had taken a notebook, and I ripped out the first page. It was just some reminders. I wrote basically blind, since the wind was so cold and blowing sideways into my eyes, no matter which way I turned my head. I just rambled on about what happened in the camp, not even saying my name.
And then, the wind picked up even more. It was like a tidal wave, concussive, it tore down massive trees and whipped branches like they were made of string. It knocked me off where I was sitting on a log, and I'm glad it did. Right after, this giant crashing starts barreling through what's left of the forest. It was the wagon - the one from the camp that I was just in. It landed just hoofsteps away, and it banged so loud, I was in shock.
When I shook out of it, I felt something hit my leg. It was almost like a ghost, with the then freezing cold wind making everything that wasn't covered numb, but I felt it. It was snowing and hailing, little things at first, almost sleet. Though after standing up and staying still, dumbfounded, for a minute, it grew into marbles, and they started to sting my legs like crazy. I blacked out, and when I came to, I was running again.
I passed in and out of a fear induced trance and forgot completely about the camp and even Clay. By the time I stumbled out of the woods, it was snowing fat, heavy snow and huge chunks of ice the size of oranges. One of them could have came down on my head or even a leg and I would have been out of commission. I saw a house, half torn down and abandoned, and huddled behind what was left of the place, mostly out of the wind. The thing still could have collapsed on me, or the wind could have changed and hurled hail right at my face, but I wasn't thinking. I wrote a quick blurb, something along the lines of "My name is Winter. Equestria is frozen. I need to move on." I couldn't move on, obviously, so I just leaned against the wall, gritting my teeth under my mask.
After who knows how long, the wind died down and the hail shrunk enough to be safe for me to move. The rest is history; I look up and see the whole town, ruined, and find a bigger, more intact place to rest.
I think that's enough to sum it up. It was probably more than what I wrote at first, actually. I ought to sleep soon...
"...I found a decent haul in one home across town, and I'll be spending most of tomorrow lugging them up."
Author's Note
Two chapters in a day?! Who is this person possessing my hands and how do they get to be so productive? I need to know.
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"Day 10: I think something's here" Page Fourteen + 1
"I've been feeling it since I got to this building - Fort Funhouse...
Something, maybe someone, has been watching me or stalking me or something. I felt like this for so long, but I didn't write about it because I thought I was being paranoid or delusional but I have proof.It, they, whatever, left something wedged in the door of the Fort.
A haggard, crumpled piece of yellowed paper has been smoothed out and folded, placed between the pages.
Stay indoors tomorrow
It was balled up and put right inside my door."
"Day 37" Page Fifteen + 1
"I'm scared for my life. There's something right outside the door..."
I can't see it besides bits and pieces from different angles of windows, but no matter what it doesn't look like... anything. It's almost as if it changes whenever I look at it. It's just a glassy whisp with no color. I've seen a tail-shape and something that looks like maybe a hoof or fin. Fins! What could survive in this kind of cold that has fins? What has fins that can float in the air?!
And the wind has gotten stronger. It shakes the building, even though the Fort has never even creeked before. The windows are bowing and chattering like they're afraid of something. The floor is icy cold, but not like before. Before it was like a deep sunken cold, left being out in the cold for a while, but now it's like it just went cold . I can barely describe any of it to begin with, but now I'm having another attack.
The sounds are horrible. It's like the forrest all over agin, but now I can't run. Now I can't run anywhere, I can only stare at he thing on the steps and not know if I want it to leave when I blink because it could have left or phased through the dorr. I can barely write except for short bursts between looking at the thing.
Its gone. I had to move to eat and I came back when it was gone. Its night and I hear the wind picking up even more. It burst windows and put out any fire I tried to make, even in the oven. I tried burning a bonfire. I broke chairs and cupboards and made a torch that lasted long enough for me to throw it on the pile, but it didnt work. It just went out, as if it had been sucked into the air.
Its so cold. Im so tired. I cant keep my head up. I think Im trying but I dont know why. Why am I so
scared
The book is half empty. Pages and pages have been ripped out, leaving ripples of paper left in the spine. A small stack of pages have been spared the treatment and between some are loose scraps of parchment - notes, drawings, lists, and other odds and ends.
The hoof writing is curly, but through the small read, it grows hectic. Scrawled in a fever, letters bigger and sentences incoherent.
On the dark cover, fashioned from hide, is one word - "Winter".
These were the excerpts.
Author's Note
Had to wrap this up, but I'll probably make this into something with more content. Peace out girlscouts.
