Our Kind of Weather

Winnette trotted to the cliff with an adult rabbit clutched between her teeth. It was barely enough to feed two windigos, let alone three, but it was far more than she had expected to catch. Wyna would have to find something else to complain about before the sun rose.

She slowed as she reached the switchbacks, a shrewd idea coming to her. Did Welga and Wyna talk about her when she was gone? Apparently they’d read at least some of what they thought was her diary. She didn’t expect them to understand that it was actually Mom’s recording of magic and lore and history. There were some things about being a windigo that Mom had explained only to Winnette.

Mom hadn’t explained enough. The voice—he said his name was Will—had taught Winnette ways how to listen to the wind in a way she hadn't known was possible.

Winnette crept carefully down the switchbacks, never moving and breathing at the same time. Her ears flicked, the little hairs in them incredibly sensitive to the slightest changes in the air. As she neared the cave, she heard voices.

Welga was speaking. “Don’t be mad at her.”

“I’m not mad,” said Wyna. Her voice was muffled; she was probably chewing on her doll or the edge of her cot, something she did to deal with hunger pangs.

“Are you mad at me?”

“Welga, you’re so annoying.”

“I want my sisters to get along.”

“It’s Winnette’s fault we fight. She probably didn’t catch anything again. She wants me to die. She probably goes into the forest and eats and then comes back with nothing because she wants me to die.”

“Don’t say that!”

“She choked me! She wants to kill me!”

“No, Wyna, don’t say things like that. Winnette loves you very much.”

“Oh, that’s why she choked me.”

“You make things difficult for her. She’s hungry too.”

“Every time she looks at me, I see her hating me.”

Welga’s voice was becoming stiffer, freezing up. “No, Wyna—she blames you for killing Mom.”

Winnette nearly dropped the rabbit. What was Welga talking about? Winnette had never said anything like that.

They sat around in the cave while she went out hunting and they told lies about her—

“I didn’t do anything,” Wyna said. “Winnette should’ve hunted better, then Mommy would’ve had more to eat and she’d be alive and she could take care of me because Winnette hates me and wants me to die.”

“You don’t remember what it was like when you were born,” Welga said. “What giving birth to you did to Mom.”

Winnette felt icicles streaming through her veins. She did remember. Giving birth to Wyna had exhausted Mom beyond belief. She barely had any milk for Wyna, who just screamed and screamed and screamed all night and day. Winnette had to do all the hunting, and Mom hadn’t taught her how, and Mom wasn’t telling her now because Mom changed after she had Wyna.

When Wyna howled for milk, Mom fed her. Otherwise, Mom lay slumped on the fourth cot in the cave, eyes blank, barely moving, barely breathing. She was saving all her strength for Wyna. She didn’t respond to words, to touch—Winnette had begged her to teach her how to hunt, and Mom hadn’t responded. Mom didn’t do anything unless Wyna screamed for it, except for when Mom died.

Winnette had been out hunting when it happened. Welga told her about it when Winnette came back and saw Wyna on Mom's cot, tearing into her doll with her new teeth. Mom, Welga said, had woken up like she was going to feed Wyna. Except she just looked at Wyna biting through the doll, ripping the fabric apart, and gave a little sigh.

That’s all it had been, a little sigh. Mom became a little sigh. Welga swore she had felt an ice-cold wind brush her cheek. Wyna kept chewing her doll.

And Winnette, when she returned and after listening to Welga’s explanation, dropped the elderly vole she was carrying and very gingerly lifted Wyna and moved her onto her own cot. Because there was something Mom had told her about dead wind. Winnette didn’t remember what exactly—she’d have to check the books.

When a windigo died and didn’t properly become part of the breeze….

No point in risking it.

Winnette sat on her own bed for a while and looked at the quilts on the empty cot. She was trying to remember the last words Mom had said to her. All of her recollections seemed to be of Mom’s dull face as Winnette fed her: the stiff, mechanical chewing, the sunken, blank eyes. The last words Mom had ever said to her might’ve been before Wyna was born at all, and Winnette couldn’t remember them.

Without a body to grieve, it was possible that Welga was lying. Mom had gone out for a walk along the beach and would be back soon.

And when Winnette looked at Wyna, all she saw was stolen time and lost moments. Sometimes she would shut her eyes, trying to imagine a little sigh. Other times she woke up shivering in the daytime, thinking a cold breeze had touched her cheek, hoping to see Mom drifting on her hoofs to her cot, hoping to feel the ice-cold hairs of Mom's tail stroking her face as she passed by, while the deadly burning sun lighting the ground outside the cave was a million miles away and could do no harm.

She never did.

Was there a certain look in her eye when she looked at Wyna?

And was Welga right, was that look hatred?

If she hated Wyna, did that mean she didn’t love her also?

She’d loved little Wyna when she’d been a mewling, undersized thing needing protection. But then Mom had given everything she had to Wyna and left nothing for Winnette. And afterward, Welga had taken over for Mom and kept babying Wyna and defending her. Kept insisting that Wyna acted out because she was hungry and afraid and felt unloved. Winnette looked into Wyna’s eyes every night and knew that Wyna would’ve been a monster no matter how much she had to eat.

“I’m not the one who killed Mommy, Winnette did by not catching anything to eat,” Wyna was saying. “Don’t make that face, Welga. Winnette doesn’t care about anywone but herself.”

A cold rage froze the blood in Winnette’s veins. She trotted loudly toward the cave, stamping her hoofs.

“Shh!” she heard Welga hiss.

They thought they could hide things from her. Talking about her in the cave and plotting.

Winnette trotted into the cave and dropped the rabbit onto the floor. Welga and Wyna’s eyes immediately snapped to it. It was the biggest creature Winnette had caught in years.

“Gimme!” Wyna shouted, diving for the rabbit. Winnette caught her and held her back.

“Listen to me,” Winnette said, pressing down with her forehead and trying to stare into Wyna’s tourmaline-pink eyes, which looked past her as Wyna fought to get to the rabbit. “I will always protect you. I will always care for you. If I wanted you dead, I could toss you onto the beach from up high, or just never feed you.”

“Welgaaaaaa!” Wyna whined in a wet, shrill scream. “She’s not letting me eat!”

“I love you,” Winnette said. “I’m not sure you understand what that means, I’m not sure you ever will. But I do. Don’t ever doubt it.”

She let go of Wyna, who beelined for the rabbit and sank her teeth into it, tearing up fur and meat and bones, blood staining her cheeks.

“You will be the last windigo,” Winnette said, sitting down on her cot and watching Wyna burrow her face into an opening in the rabbit her teeth had made. “If Welga and I have to starve and die like Mom did to ensure it, you will be the last windigo.”

Wyna ate less than half of the rabbit. She was small, and it was more food than she sometimes got in a week. Now she lay on the floor by the rabbit, clutching her stomach, which actually bulged out when she breathed. The sight made Winnette’s heart freeze with joy.

Thank the stars, she did love Wyna. Mom, I’m going to take care of her.

“No,” Wyna said as Winnette and Welga approached the rabbit.

They looked at her. “What?” said Winnette.

“I’m going to eat the rest,” Wyna said. “Don’t touch it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Winnette said. “You had enough. Welga and I need to eat too.”

Wyna rolled over and covered the rabbit with her legs. Her cheeks were streaked pink with blood, matching her eyes. “There’s not enough for all of us.”

“We’re going to share, Wyna,” Winnette snapped.

“Then we’ll all die.” Wyna blinked her big pink eyes at Winnette. “I’d rather just you and Welga die.”

“Wyna, don’t be selfish,” Welga said.

“I’m not being selfish,” Wyna answered her. “Winnette said you two would starve for me. So starve for me. I’m eating the rest of the rabbit.” She bit a piece of skin, barely chewing.

“Wyna,” Welga begged. “Don’t pick fights.”

“Winnette’s the one who’s going to start a fight,” Wyna said. “She always starts the fights.”

“Right,” murmured Winnette. Her throat felt like ice, and her voice was a chill whisper. She broke the grip Wyna had on the rabbit and pushed her away from it with one leg. Wyna thrashed, but Winnette pinned her head to the cave floor with a hoof.

“Welgaaaaaa!” Wyna screamed, kicking. “Don’t eat it! It’s mine!”

“Eat as much as you want,” Winnette said to Welga. “I’ll finish whatever’s left.”

“Let her go first,” Welga trembled. Her tourmaline-green eyes were starting to frost over with tears.

“No,” said Winnette in that chilly whisper. “Eat.”

“Let her go,” repeated Welga. She blinked ice crystals out of the corners of her eyes.

“I hate you!” Wyna was screaming as she fought for purchase to bite or kick Winnette. “You starve us! You keep us in this cave!”

“Sh,” said Winnette, barely even a whisper. She wanted Wyna to keep going.

“I wish you had died instead of Mommy!” Wyna screamed. “You killed her by being bad at hunting! I’m not going to let you kill me too!”

Winnette seized the thin skin on the back of Wyna’s neck. She was so light that Winnette had no trouble lifting her with her mouth and hauling her out of the cave to the switchback, dangling her over the edge. Below, a long fall to the rocks awaited.

“No!” Welga shrieked, chasing after them. “Put her down!”

Wyna kicked viciously, catching Winnette on her chest and legs. But there was no weight behind them. She barely had to readjust her grip to keep from dropping Wyna.

“Winnette!” Welga shouted. At almost the same moment, the wind howled violently. Winnette’s mane was whipped around, and the wind threatened to push her off-balance.

Wyna was growling, biting, twisting, trying to get leverage to kick or push. Winnette tightened her grip.

“If you break free, Wyna, you’ll fall and die!”

Wyna didn’t seem to care. She only thrashed harder.

“Calm down!” Welga’s voice was almost torn away from her by the wind. It had come out of nowhere, storming along the cliff, bending the sparse plants on the top of the rock almost sideways. Winnette stumbled a few steps, nearly losing her balance as her hoofs skidded against the edge.

Wyna twisted around. Her hindlegs found purchase on the rock from when Winnette’s head lowered against the wind. The thin white hairs of her mane whipped around in front of her face like branches in a storm.

Her eyes were manic and blazed with a fierce delight.

“Do you want me to drop you?” Winnette roared over the wind. Again she had to stumble as it pushed her. Welga was nearby, crying out to them, afraid to do anything that might cause either of them to fall over the side.

“I DON’T CARE!” Wyna screamed. “WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE ANYWAY! SINCE YOU CAN’T HUNT!”

The wind raged along the cliffside. Winnette was pushed, stumbling, along the switchback, fighting for purchase. Her head lowered further. Wyna seized the opportunity. She bounded off the rock and struck Winnette hard in the stomach. There still wasn’t a lot of force to the blow, but then, there wasn’t a lot of flesh to absorb it. Winnette dropped Wyna and sagged.

The wind died. Only a few scattered breezes fluttered here and there along the switchbacks.

Wyna huffed and trotted into the cave. Winnette and Welga followed her.

Wyna sank down in front of the rabbit and stuck her face into the biggest tear she had made, licking blood out of the meat.

Welga kept scrubbing little crystal tears out of her eyes. They went tink against the cave floor.

“This isn’t over, Wyna,” Winnette said quietly, coming up behind her. To a windigo, how loud or quiet a voice was didn’t matter—any voice that created its own breeze could be heard. Volume communicated tone, intent. Winnette’s voice was like the whisper of a ghost.

“Stop,” Welga begged, still rubbing her eyes. “I can’t—” she made a frustrated noise—“see!”

But Wyna picked up the rabbit in her teeth and trotted over to her cot. She spread open one of the mooseskin bags and dropped the rabbit in.

“What are you doing, Wyna?” Welga asked.

Next Wyna picked up the wide-brimmed sun hat that she’d asked Welga to restore for her. The work wasn’t elegant, but all the holes were patched. She placed it on her head. Even though there was already barely any light in the cave at night, Winnette was stunned by how effectively the hat cast Wyna’s eyes in shadow, dulling the pink to a dim red shade.

Wyna tied up the bag with the rabbit in it. She opened another mooseskin bag and started adding dolls and toys to it, starting with the chewed-up explorer doll that she had gnawed on almost every night.

“Don’t go,” Welga said to Wyna.

“The Sun will kill you,” Winnette wheezed. Her stomach was throbbing painfully, making it hard to take a full breath. “You think you know how to hunt? The Sun will find you wherever you try to hide.”

Wyna draped both the mooseskin bags around herself. “I’ll eat you if you try to follow me,” she said to them. “Welga, I’m pretty sure I hate you, but not as much as Winnette. You should eat her if you get hungry.”

Welga scrubbed at her eyes. “Wyna, no, we can talk about this.”

“Shut up,” Wyna said happily. “I’ve put up with you two for way too long.”

“You’re leaving?” Welga said like she was just realizing why Wyna had the hat and the bags.

Wyna just laughed.

The corner of one of the quilts on the fourth cot moved.

Wyna’s laughter died in her throat. Winnette held her breath, staring wide-eyed at the messy arrangement of quilts on their Mom's cot.

She thought she had heard—

just a little sigh.

An observer would have seen three windigos frozen like statues, all oriented in the direction of a messy cot.

Dead wind, Winnette thought desperately. She tried to remember everything she had read about it.

A long, long time ago, the land had been covered with ice and snow from one end of the continent to the other, like a white blanket keeping the land tucked in safe and snug. Even the ocean had been fairly alive, if dark with storms. The lakes were full of fish, and windigos had walked under ice and eaten what they pleased.

And the wind had been alive, and when a windigo died, they joined the living wind, and their voice was never truly lost.

But then ponies came out of the south and built cities, and after the windigos razed their cities and gorged on the inhabitants, the ponies rebuilt their cities and multiplied again. Ponies formed strange pacts with plants and animals, herded clouds like cattle, and drank dead water. Ponies became Alicorns, and windigos lost the war.

Or so Winnette’s books said. It was often hard for her to make sense of her books. Windigos weren’t used to writing things down. When you had a complete and unchanging oral history, what use was written text? But as the wind died, windigos had started writing things down. They never got very good at it.

In fact, they didn’t really write at all. They argued. One windigo never seemed to leave another windigo’s words alone. They all wrote in a stream-of-consciousness style, and their words were like a storm of winds, every individual breeze crashing together, and amid the turbulent chaos and churn, who could say what was really happening?

But Winnette had struggled through her books anyway. There wasn’t much else to do while she waited for Mom's voice to come up to her from the beach or down from the cliff or out from behind the junk in the back of the cave.

Mom’s words weren’t much easier to read. She wrote like she was arguing with herself. Even her writing style changed when she did; there were subtle differences of vocabulary and worldview for each “voice,” as Winnette began to think of them. The voices didn’t have names, but they did have personalities. Winnette couldn’t imagine splitting her mind like that—how could one windigo contain so many different characters?

But Mom wrote poems in her own voice. Her journal that was sometimes a history and often an argument was also, occasionally, a spellbook. Spells were scrawled everywhere in the margins, and Winnette thought one of them was about dead wind, and not just because the meter was like a breath drawn in and out and then expiring.

Ice remembers, and fire forgets,
The Sun demands, and the Moon begets,
Mountains sigh,
While winds rot.
Life stops, and death does not.

The poem was scribbled over like everything else was, with words and lines crossed out and commented over. That was normal enough, but on this poem especially Mom’s comments and remarks, the proposed edits, the violent quibbles over meter and syntax, had been interminable and increasingly angry until finally Mom jaggedly cut through it all with what Winnette thought of as her voice:

This isn’t enough to stop her.

Not enough to stop who? There was nothing else about it in Mom’s journal. But it wasn’t hard to guess. Windigos had enemies. That was why they lived here, by the dead ocean.

Windigos had come to these caves under this cliff because of the long overhang that stretched across the rock and covered the cliffside in shadow. Not only the caves and switchbacks but even some of the beach was guarded from the Sun’s eye for most of the day. Here, at the corner of the world, the eastern windigos had made their home after Princess Platinum and her Alicorns leashed the Sun and used it like a giant, burning ball-and-chain, scouring the land and incinerating the windigos, the snow, and even the wind itself.

The scorched air the ponies had created was the strongest evidence for dead wind. In the places where the worst of it had happened, a vertical belt in the center of the land, the scorched air sometimes collected, whipping around each other in tight, violent funnels as if trying to put out phantasmic fires on each other’s backs. The result was the black vortexes of furious air called tornados.

Nowadays, thanks to the abominable One Bank and the ascendancy of Princess Celestia to the throne, the Sun no longer needed to be dragged along the Earth to burn up windigos like so many ants. It sufficed that the Sun was there; a windigo exposed to daylight would be burnt to a crisp in a matter of seconds. Even if you had a wide-brimmed sun hat like Wyna did, that gave you a few hours at most in the daylight, enough to find shelter, if you were lucky. If you weren’t lucky, you got burnt up. And when a windigo was burnt up, instead of joining the wind with all her ancestors, she became ash and died, really died. And the tornados proved the Sun could kill you even after you had already joined the wind, so you were never really safe.

So said her books.

It wasn’t like her ancestors hadn’t tried to do something about it. When Daddy was alive, he told Winnette stories of how windigos used to be explorers. When there had been more of them, overcrowding the natural caves on the cliffside and digging out more of them as rapidly as they could, some of them had fashioned wide-brimmed hats and sought to venture beyond the limits of how far a windigo could get on half a day’s travel. They found caves and hiding places and set up caches of food. It might have worked, except the animals moved away. The windigos were too good at hunting, too scary at hunting. There was no natural defense against the wind.

And shelter was scarce, and Daddy thought that the animals had played a part in making it so. A young Winnette dreamed up fanciful visions of bears rolling boulders along with their paws to block up the mouths of caves. Even the trees had grown farther apart to reduce the amount of shade. More and more windigos had been burnt up on adventures until they stopped going altogether. That was what had happened to Winnette’s great-grandfather, to her great-great-grandfather and so on for quite a lot of greats, according to Daddy.

Windigos had tried other things. Some were sorcerers, or sorceresses, mostly, who spoke to the wind and commanded the ice. They had begged the cold to come back and reclaim the land, return it from a hot, dry hell to the wind-combed snowscape it had once been.

They never accomplished much. Winnette had read the ugly details in Mom’s spellbook. Like the adventurers, the sorceresses got tired of failing, got tired of being destroyed. The best of them had only ended up freezing themselves with the cold that came from over the dead ocean. The price was ice, as Mom had bitterly joked in one of the margins—bitterly, because that was what had happened to Winnette’s great-grandmother and to her great-great-grandmother, and so on, according to Mom. It was what Winnette had tried to do to herself earlier this night.

According to the spellbook, their frozen forms had to be pushed into the ocean. The ice was dead ice, and it was dangerous to keep it near the caves.

That wasn’t how Mom had died though. She had just starved. Winnette had watched her waste away. Then Mom was just a rush of cool air and maybe a little sigh, if Welga was telling the truth, and then she was nothing at all.

Daddy had died too, burned up while searching for better hunting grounds almost two years before Wyna was born. Winnette didn’t remember him as well. Welga didn’t remember him at all. He had been a better hunter than Winnette was, and things had been better then. There had been a cot for him, and after he died, Mom put it away.

Welga was so skinny. Her skin clung to her joints, exposing ribs and bits of hip and chest. Her mane was thinning out, as was her tail. Welga got tired just walking up and down the switchbacks, which was part of why she preferred to stay in the cave with Wyna. Her only signs of life showed in the way she spoiled Wyna, and in the way her green eyes shimmered like tourmaline under the stars.

Winnette’s own eyes were an icy pale blue, paler than even her coat. It was a smooth gradient of iciness from her coat to her eyes to her mane. She was all ice, unlike Welga and Wyna, who had eyes like tourmaline. Both of their parents had blue eyes though, if Winnette’s memory wasn’t betraying her.

Come to think of it, Welga barely talked about their parents. Unlike Wyna, who liked to bring them up whenever she thought it would hurt the most.

Anger surged back into Winnette like a strong gust of wind. Everything was definitely Wyna’s fault.

It was the fault of all the explorers who hadn’t been able to think of anything better than a wide-brimmed hat. It was the fault of all the worthless sorceresses who could only freeze themselves. It was the fault of the windigos who got fat and lazy and let the ponies build a giant tether of metal and cast it into the sky, the fault of the old queens for losing the war, the fault of all the horrible, horrible ponies who had sought their extinction.

Winnette stewed in her hatred. Her blood froze over with anger. Her heart beat less than once per minute, and she lashed out with violent mental blows at everything she had ever seen or read or known.

The sky began to brighten. The serene, black sky, quiet and still, with little sparkling dots of light everywhere like tiny shards of ice bobbing in a black sea, was undergoing its ugly transformation to a hot, blinding blue. Winnette squinted as the sky turned orange, the Sun sending out its rays to sweep away the stars as if it couldn’t tolerate sharing the sky with anywone else, just like how the ponies had all driven the windigos away. Only the Moon was able to stay a while, growing paler and harder to see—apparently, the margins of her spellbook had joked, the Mare in the Moon put on a wide-brimmed hat every morning.

Though the Mare in the Moon had disappeared almost half a year ago. Even she had gotten burnt up, it seemed.

If Wyna left, it would happen to her too. Fear clutched what was left of Winnette’s thin stomach. She had imagined this happening, had known it would happen, had dreamed that it would happen, and still hadn’t thought about it actually happening. Winnette knew now that Wyna’s fiery death wouldn’t give her any satisfaction, wouldn't make her short life any easier. Fear and horror and regret would sear her skin like fire, and guilt would brand its black mark on her flank like the star sign she still didn’t have.

“Oh, no,” Welga said, staring at the dawning sky. Her eyes reflected orange tints in the interior, gemlike facets they displayed when the light caught them. They reflected the same understanding that Winnette had about what it meant for a windigo to walk under the sun. “Oh no, no, no, Wyna please, no, no, no.” She was crying, tears freezing to her cheeks despite the harsh morning air that warmed up their blood.

That was dead wind: the last gasp of the windigos, a dying race, starved into nonexistence in dark caves amid piles of rubbish and the relics of a bygone age, wasting away until all that was left of them were the frozen tears left on the floor, without even corpses left for the bugs to consume.

Winnette stared at Mom's cot where the quilt had moved, one corner of it flipped up so it was folded in the opposite direction from the way it had been every night before. Already her memory was struggling to recall if it had really been that way.

Dead wind….

Because there was no, no way that Mom had joined the living wind and left them like this.

“Um,” said Wyna. She seemed afraid to move, standing frozen in place as she stared at the quilt on the fourth cot. “I’ll stay for another night.”

“Okay,” said Winnette, voice strangled like an ice-cold metal vice was squeezing her throat shut. She didn’t say anything about the rabbit. She wasn’t hungry anymore.

Welga lay on her cot, staring morosely at the frozen pile of spherical tears on the ground. In the morning, they would melt and become just another part of the damp interior of the cave.

The Moon fell, the Sun rose. The shadow of a cloud drifted into position over the cliff.

Three windigos, sleeping fitfully in a cave under the cliff, didn’t notice.