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Kholodno

The first thing Starlight felt when she came too was the wind. In fact the freezing sub temperature gusts that blew hard and fast around her body was the only thing that Starlight could feel at the moment. It was bone chilling and panic set in as she felt as if her body was turning to ice as seconds passed by. She curled into a ball trying to conserve her warmth as best she could, however her frame shook and shuddered in protest. While starlight shivered she felt as if all the fur had been physically ripped off her body, and the pale skin she had beneath was being subjected directly to this ungodly torrent of wind. It was a sensation she had never felt before.

The next thing she felt was a soreness in her face. Starlight's eyelids had begun to ache as she had tightly pinched her eyes closed. Starlight did this on purpose as she thought her eyeballs would freeze the moment she opened them up. A side effect of this is she had no clue where she was at the moment, and this scared her. As far as she knew, she was stuck in the mirror in some magical mishap, something that she could fix or break out of with enough magical energy. Starlight figured this was the worst case scenario, and that she would be out of here in no time. Her confidence helped keep her warm. However, the cold and the wind was proving to be a bigger foe than she was used to. She couldn’t move, she could barely breathe, she was freezing up completely. Panicking, she tried even harder to keep herself warm, by coiling up harder. But, curling up tighter in the darkness with this wind blasting over her, she could feel a hard frozen earth beneath her, that had grass growing from it that was stiff like toothpicks that jabed painfully into her skin.

This wasn’t an empty void like she had anticipated, she had been taken somewhere, somewhere frozen over and merciless.

Starlight's ears began to burn as the sound of the wind began to deafen her. Worryingly she could feel her blood flowing slower now, she was freezing, quite possibly to death as her energy was sapped from her. She knew she needed to move but she couldn’t muster the strength to do anything. Well, maybe not anything at all. With her vigor waning and her consciousness fading she was able to pry open her eyes. Assuming all she would see is darkness, Starlight was surprised when she saw a landscape before her, it was fuzzy and unfocused, but she could tell she wasn’t in the Crystal Empire anymore. She could vaguely see that she was surrounded by fields and forests, none of which looked familiar. This was something that scared her in her clouding mind.

Using the last bit of strength she had left, Starlight forced herself up off the frozen dirt with her forehooves. She opened her eyes up a bit wider to see more around her while trying to blink away the fuzz she was suffering from. Her head slowly paned around and she beheld the landscape before her. The sky was covered with dark grey clouds that moved fast across the landscape, barely letting any of the setting sun light through. The fields and forests, which she already saw were intermittently broken up by farm houses and small towns, all of which she didn’t recognize. In fact, they didn’t look like pony villages at all, they looked barren and devoid of life. In fact the whole world before her looked drab and grey, as if all life and color had been drained from it. However it was what she saw next that really threw her for a loop. Trying to force herself up onto her hooves to move out of the wind, she was met with even harder resistance as her body's strength failed completely and she fell back down again. Looking at her hooves, she saw why.

There were no hooves.

Instead, she saw things that she had only seen on her body once, maybe twice before. The human appendages that Sunset Shimmer and Twilight called hands. She stared at these alien flesh claws and her blood ran even colder.

She was in the human world, but this wasn’t Canterlot High, this was someplace else that she didn’t recognize. Letting out an exhausted exhale, while her hands flopped to the ground she blinked as the fuzziness returned. She was trapped in the human world, and she was going to freeze here. She tried to force herself up again to try and make it to one of those farm houses she saw, but her body's strength once again failed as the fuzziness in her eyes got worse. She was beginning to black out as she could hear her own breathing in her eyes. She listened as her lungs drew smaller and smaller breaths as the light faded around her. This was it. She was dying, and she couldn’t do anything about it, she was too weak.

However in her blinking moments as her body began to freeze completely, her heart slowly counting down her final moments here in this foreign land, Starlight could have sworn she saw somepony running towards her. In her final moments of lapsing consciousness, this mystery person had arrived beside her and had knelt down. She could feel her body be effortlessly lifted up off the frozen ground, and then bounced against this person's own as this stranger carried her away to a fate unknown. Starlight made a valiant effort to open her eyes again to see who this mysterious person was, but she just didn’t have the strength in her anymore.

Perhaps her age was truly getting to her she thought, as Starlight felt the last remaining bit of confidence slip away from her. Her struggle was valiant, but the magic she had expended trying to close the mirror portal was simply too much for her aged body, and it had drained her completely dry, leaving her weak. The last thought she had before she truly fell away from herself into the darkness, was her wishing she had just stayed in bed, letting somepony else deal with the portal in the morning. Why did she feel so compelled to investigate? Why couldn’t she just leave it alone and stay in her lane like she had been doing for the past twenty years? She was in fact not an adventurer anymore. Damn her inability to seek out trouble and challenges, Starlight cursed to herself as her mind went out swinging.

Then darkness again… Things went quiet, no more wind, no more movement. Nothing.