Our Kind of Weather

by mylittleeconomy

Rating: teen
Tags: Twilight Sparkle, Alternate Universe, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Length: 30294

In a new year, amid deepest winter, trees stir and ancient enemies emerge. A storm comes to Ponyville, and Twilight Sparkle must decide how to allocate the scarcest resource she has: the love she feels for her friends, which refuses any tradeoffs....

The New Year has come, and thanks to some quick thinking from Twilight Sparkle, all life on Earth was not extinguished during the festivities. But now Equestria is gripped by the worst winter it has seen since the windigos were defeated, and the new sun is as weak and unsure as any newborn thing.

That would be bad enough, but Pinkie Pie has been visiting the Everfree Forest almost every day. Something seems to be brewing in the dark forest, and it isn’t the overly sweet coffee she brings to share during long chats with the plants she’s befriended.

Otherwise, life goes on much as normal. Twilight attends to the Daughter bank and visits her friends. But while she enjoys the small-town life, her Sisters are making moves. Even in the dead of winter, events are in motion, and the world continues to change.

Because unbeknownst to all of them, cold winds are rising in the northeast. So close to the dead ocean, something strange emerges, and Equestria finds itself facing a storm from right out of the history books.

And Twilight has two tickets to the Grand Galloping Gala and five friends she’d like to take. Scarce resources must be allocated. What is an economist going to do?!

This is a sequel to The Great Succession and Its Aftermath and is the first major story arc to pick up the events after My Little Economy. Please enjoy.

Published 2022-03-23 22:40:01 UTC
Last updated 2022-03-23 22:40:01 UTC

1. The Cliff at the Northeastern Edge of Equestria

The lonely figure drifted amid the lifeless rooms.

Ze stumbled occasionally. Ze was asymmetric at the moment and finding balancing quite tricky.

Ze righted hirself and lumbered on. Walking helped hir think, and ze had been thinking a long time. Ze and hir thoughts, alone together in the castle.

Ze passed by abandoned dining halls where even the termites hadn’t come to eat in almost a century, past dusty lecture halls where the broken-down remnants of chalkboard erasings had settled into the narrow pores of everything, through corridors with dented walls and paintings that hung crooked or had fallen, and up and down crumbling staircases, trailing dirt and soil behind.

Ze drifted onward…

...bumping against the walls now and then….

There were never going to be any new books.

All of the Universe runs on Law. There are many theories why this is so, but none of them are entirely satisfactory. For example, many people credit a higher Creator as the Lawmaker, but this raises the question of whether He is also the Judge and what grounds there are for Appeal. One also has to wonder whether His laws produce unintended consequences—perhaps black markets in negentropy, well-hidden beyond some event horizon.

Most of the Universe runs on Physical Law. These laws are simple and natural, and so they are studied by people with complicated minds and a robust fear of going outside. They involve ohms, inverse squares, and fiddly little diagrams sketched neatly onto sheets of paper made of lots of little gridlines. Physical laws are precise, specific, and rigid, and leave little to the imagination. This is probably a good thing. If the Laws were less reliable, the greater uncertainty would raise interest rates, thereby reducing economic growth. Thus it may be supposed that the Creator is sensitive to the value of His Stock Options.

Whether the Creation has any Shareholders is unknown, although most religions promise Dividends to those who attend the regular meetings. Questions are encouraged, but, like actual shareholder meetings, answers are always long and boring and rarely reveal much about how the Company is really run.

There is one planet in one solar system in one galaxy that does not run on Physical Law. It runs on Economic Law, the key distinction being that Economic Law is more a set of guidelines.

This planet used to run on Physical Law. It used to, but it does not anymore. This phase shift, for lack of a better term, may have had something to do with the greater volatility induced by rapid technological growth on this planet, where chemicals became cells, cells became animals, and animals became little gods. The result of the rapid growth was a big Boom, an extraordinary reorganization of energy springing up on this wet planet seemingly out of nowhere, like mushrooms after a rain.

The Bust afterward was quite long, and deep, but at least there were no shareholder complaints, being that there were no more shareholders, and since the corporation responsible for the incident had said at its last meeting that its next project would resolve all shareholder complaints, this can be regarded as a success.

This planet is a lonely one. It is the only planet in its solar system. And it does not orbit its Sun but instead carries it along behind it. The Sun arcs every 24 hours like a yo-yo over the Earth, and it involves essentially the same mechanics. The holder of the Sun’s tether, an Alicorn called Princess Celestia, does her duty faithfully, although deep down she really wants to see what would happen if she tried a few tricks. She saw a yo-yo contest winner do a Reverse Slack Moebicide to take the grand prize and has been dying to try it ever since. The sad knowledge that every other pony would be dying if she did try it holds her back from doing anything more than a simple Around the World.

Her sister, Princess Luna, had been able to get away with more daring maneuvers, seeing as how the Moon was less imminently necessary for life. It had been fun sharing the sky with her sister. It had been good. It had worked. But there had been a falling out, there had been a fight, and Princess Celestia, perhaps to her misfortune, had won.

The princess’s power did not come from the Sun. And when her sister, cloaked in the anger and madness of Nightmare Moon, returned from the night sky with vengeance in her sharp terrible horn and fury smoldering in shadows around her dark hoofs, it was not the Sun she seized from her. And when Twilight Sparkle, Princess Celestia’s best and most faithful student, gathered the Elements of Harmony and defeated her, restoring Princess Celestia to the throne, it was not any celestial body that the throne represented. It was the One Bank. Or just the Bank, as it was often called, for the same reason that Princess Celestia was redundant. No pony ever felt the need to say “the hot fire” or “the unpopular debt collector.” Similarly, the Bank was just the Bank. There were other banks, in the sense of deposits and loans and so on. But every pony could hear the capital letter of the Bank. There was something almost magical about it.

For this world does not run on Physical Law, and mere mass and light and ongoing thermonuclear fusion reactions have less power than silver and gold, if ponies believe it so. And they do believe it, because the value of their bits has wavered only rarely and briefly over the millennia of Princess Celestia’s reign. She manages their expectations with all the panache and sleight-of-hoof of a circus ringmaster and all the care and diligence of Head of Safety at a nuclear power plant.[1]

[1] And in keeping with the latter, she has an unhealthy penchant for donuts.

But it was Twilight Sparkle, a mortal pony, who had saved the world. And it was Twilight Sparkle who would have to do it again.

But Twilight Sparkle did not understand the source and nature of her power. She had read many books, and reread them, and taken very detailed notes—copies of her notes fetched a high premium among the graduate students in economics at the great university in Canterlot for decades after she left—but her books taught her nothing that was not obvious. For what ran the least on Law was the minds of her fellow ponies. Indeed they seemed to positively revel in ignoring and defying it. Mathematical certainty meant nothing to a mare doing her weekly scratchcard. The undeniable fact of scarcity melted in the heat of the scorn of a stallion who liked his long showers but did not like his utility rates, not one bit.

In fact, “not one bit” was his expressed willingness to pay to the head of the local water supply authority, who suggested in turn that he take it up with Princess Celestia herself, who had final, if typically delegated approval over rate changes. This worked to end the matter, because while sheer logic might be defied without consequence, Princess Celestia would not be. And she had the most peculiar habit of smiling, and listening with grave concern, and making such simple logical sense in expressing her own point of view that the complainant would usually stumble out of her office with a vague sense of unease, having come away with the impression of talking to a brick wall who was also their mother. Hoofwritten notes for tyranny-defying speeches inevitably ended up in a conveniently located wastebasket that got emptied after every meeting.

Princess Celestia was very good at her job.

Twilight Sparkle was not. Because when she met with the complainant first, she ended up ranting to him about the price system until he asked to speak to her manager. Which is why the story is about her and not the all-powerful princess. It’s much more interesting this way.

Oh, Twilight Sparkle was good at her job. Rather worryingly good, actually. She was good at it in the way that a woodpecker is good at drilling holes into a tree. When exhaustion forced her to sleep, she slept fitfully, like a vampire on gas at the dentist: unable to resist her body’s chemistry, but quite certain she was doing something wrong.

Twilight Sparkle drove herself in part because she suspected that Princess Celestia might have been looking for a successor. Yet Twilight Sparkle as princess would have been, quite literally, a catastrophe of astronomical proportions.

Fortunately, Princess Celestia, being immortal, had time to wait. Time for Twilight Sparkle to grow.

This story takes place in the dead of the coldest winter Ponyville had seen in a thousand years. It was not a time for anything to grow. It was a time for hard tests and painful consequences, which is why it might be surprising to learn that Princess Celestia had nothing to do with it and was quite unaware of the whole thing.

But this story does not begin with Twilight Sparkle. It begins, instead, with another of Princess Celestia’s loyal and most faithful students, hundreds of years ago. When Ponyville wasn’t even the seed of an idea in the mind of Frankie Knight, and the Everfree Forest hadn’t got its name and was instead called the Equestria National Park…..

…The story starts when Princess Luna returns to the park for the first time in over a thousand years and sees something entirely unexpected.

But the first chapter deals with something else. It deals with a certain cliff, and the caves under the cliff that overlook a cold and silent ocean.

It deals with the end of the time of the windigos who fled east, and what their last daughters chose to do about it.

A long mass of thin white clouds drifted toward the northeastern edge of Equestria, pushed along by a group of Pegasi at the back. As they went, the clouds began to fall apart.

Snow fell like a giant’s dandruff on the landscape. It came undone and drifted loosely through the air to add to the growing piles below, the clouds themselves flaking apart to coat the ground with snow. Snow fell like the price of an asset that somepony was desperately trying to get rid of.

The weather Pegasi did in fact have an excess of slushy water this year due to a budgetary snarl resulting from the Great Succession.[2] Saving it for next year was not really an option since the quality of the water would just degrade in storage. In Equestria, water could not be saved for a rainy day.

[2] Also called the Nightmare Moon incident. For the first time in a thousand years, the One Bank of Equestria failed to prevent a recession. It was brief but terrible, like kindergarteners in the school play.

The plan, developed by the eggheads in Cloudsdale, called for them to distribute the extra snow as equally as possible, geographically speaking, in the hopes that this would dilute the difficulties of melting the snow that would emerge during Winter Wrap-Up.[3] The focus was speed: get the snow out, hit your precipitation numbers, and be back home in time for the New Year.

[3] The seasons in Equestria have a tenacity to them. Like an object flung in a particular direction, they would continue on with the same inertia unless nudged by something magical. It was in fact possible for Equestria to have a winter that lasted a thousand years, and they didn’t want to try it again.

Downdraft thought this plan was stupid. Different geographies and ecosystems handled snow differently, and you could not infer from this as to how they handled extra snow. She’d explained this at the open forum with charts and graphs and phrases like “extrapolating beyond the data” and “literally the most basic fallacy, like I’m talking to a bunch of bird-brains, OH SHUT UP THAT’S NOT SPECIESIST THERE AREN’T EVEN ANY BIRDS HERE oh sorry Miss Nuthatch, I didn’t see you—no, you do have a right to be here, I understand how this pertains to you…I’m sure your brain is fantastic, look some of my best friends are birds—WHAT HOW IS THAT MORE SPECIESIST?” until her flight commander dragged her off the stage.

Bloody politics, that’s what it was. Because it would be favoring some ecosystems over others to give them more living water. So they were going to flood the basins and drench the grasslands when there were perfectly good mountains that weren’t doing snapple; the mountain goats would lick that s#%& all day and not say boo.

She’d been so mad that she’d eaten through the entire supply of Sugarcube Corner cupcakes that her friend Rainbow Dash had sent her. Those things were like crack. Seriously, the sugar made her shake. And she kept looking at the snow and thinking it was frosting.

So they’d set off on their stupid mission to ruin Equestria’s water supply and maybe drown a koala. Downdraft flew ahead of her team, occasionally doubling back to give the mass of clouds they were towing an experimental lick.

Then things got even stupider, because of course it wasn’t just the flight teams that were strained to the limit, having to push more water on longer flight paths, but the ponies at the cloud packaging plant must’ve been overworked as well, since one of Downdraft’s team’s clouds burst apart, scattering its contents into the atmosphere. Unable to afford to let precious living water[4] be lost, they had to stop everything until they’d gathered up every errant snowflake they could find.

[4] Water can die. Maybe it’s something it learned from us. In any case, the effort to revive completely dead water, like they had tried in Caliponia, was not worth the cost. Instead, Equestria relied on recycled water that hadn’t completely died and only needed to be refreshed thereafter. It was impossible, however, to completely refresh the water, so Downdraft and her team were working with water that was only 80% or so alive, which was lower than ever. The consequences, like more frequent cloud-bursting accidents, were predictable and, in Downdraft’s increasingly agitated opinion, almost not worth the trouble of cleaning up.

They packed up the clouds in a denser formation after that, which slowed them down. And the going after that was even harder than it should have been because the path they had to fly wasn’t making the best use of the wind, and if another cloud burst she’d fly straight back to Cloudsdale and start killing ponies; they’d call her the Cloud Killer, and she’d be voted a national hero.

The December sun grew paler over the days, appearing almost sickly in how white it was, and Downdraft kept an uneasy eye on it as she led her team northeast.

On what should have been the last morning, she was watching the Sun struggle to pull itself above the horizon. Downdraft flew back to her team, spiraling down from above and matching their velocity as they pushed the mass of clouds forward.

“Report,” she coughed.

“We’ve been driving these snowclouds for an hour now,” Scud said, snapping a salute. The moonlight shone off his reflective vest. The phrase “Give it to them soft and fluffy!” was written in ink on his vest, which made her smile, and she decided to misfile the report when she wrote him up for it. “We’re supposed to stop at the northeastern edge and work backwards, spreading the snow away from the coast.”

By northeastern edge, he meant the snow northeastern edge. The snow wasn’t actually allowed to reach all the way to the coast. “Or it could fall into the ocean,” sighed Downdraft. And to think she’d hoped at the start that it might have been possible to be home in time to spend Hearth’s Warming Eve with her husband. They’d missed the last three, a common peril when you were both weather pegasi. They’d been stupid enough to laugh about it together when they were still dating. It had been romantic: the waiting, the uncertainty.

He’d left out milk and cookies for her last year, and she’d loved him for it (and eaten the entire plate), but, like, come on.

“I know we’re behind on time, but—”

“You do realize we’re not getting paid overtime for further delays,” Downdraft said. “It’ll take hours just to allocate the snow the way they want. The accident wasn’t our fault; they rush the cloudmaking with rubbish water and then expect us to spread it like it’s the finest ganache on a wedding cake. Besides, it’s freezing,” she added, shivering.

“So what do you want to do?”

“I was scouting ahead. The whole area’s been hit with at least one storm of clouds already, maybe two. I think some teams misread their flight paths or got off course. The bears around here will be hibernating till July.” Because of course that would get screwed up too. I’m going to start a public awareness campaign: If One Thing Goes Wrong, Then Everything Does. “I’ll send somepony to check out the geographic northeastern edge. I mean, they want us to spread it evenly, right? There’s got to be some rabbits around there who’ve never seen snow.”

“We’re not allowed to dump it on the cliffs. There could be caves, and snow could get trapped in them. And even if there’s a beach, water could still fall into the ocean.”

We’re talking drops of waste in an ocean of stupidity from back home. “I didn’t say we dump on the cliffs. But the structural integrities of the clouds are compromised. There’s nothing we can do if they fall apart again.”

“Got it.”

“Then let’s push.”

They touched their hoofs to the cloud and added their weight to the drift. Flying with or above the clouds, Downdraft didn’t need to worry about getting snowed on. But temperature went down as altitude went up, so she was heavily wrapped in a scarf, coat, and hat. Only her hoofs had to remain naked so as to properly massage the clouds in order to keep the water in them from freezing completely, and the only mercy was how swiftly her hoofs were numbed by the burning cold of the snowcloud.

A scout came twisting through the sky, wearing a white face mask. “Sea-edge spotted! We’ll hit the cliffs in three hours.”

Downdraft shook her head. It was a myth that you could catch disease from the breeze by the dead ocean. But there was no harm in her team wearing face masks, so it was pointless to tell them not to.

More and more Pegasi peeled off the back line to fly through the cloud, breaking it up. The pieces began falling faster, crumbling apart into snow as they tumbled toward earth. As a result, the remaining Pegasi driving the cloud didn't lose speed.

“I’m going up,” Downdraft said. “Hold velocity steady. Don’t do a full drop until my word.” With a pump of her wings she was up and over the cloud, streaking past it until the terrifying sight of the ocean was all that was before her. Lifeless and gray, it was eerily still.

Her wings pounded against the air while she hovered in place, studying the geography to see how the snow would settle. Deciding she needed a better view, she saw the edge of the coast below and dived toward it.

It was weird. All the vegetation just stopped in an uneven semicircle before the cliff. It was like a mouth had risen up from the edge of the dead water and taken a bite out of the forest.

She kept flying, studying the unfamiliar geography with an ill feeling.

“Captain!” Lieutenant Stratum above her screamed. “Captain, pull back!”

Downdraft brought herself to a screeching halt. Sweet Celestia! She had nearly gone over the edge of the coast! No telling what would have happened to her if she had tried to fly over the ocean itself. Sheared in half by a sudden spike of dead water? Snatched by some enormous monster? She didn’t want to think about it.

Lieutenant Stratum caught up with her. “Are you okay?” she asked worriedly. “You nearly went over.”

“Dust the cliffs,” Downdraft said, shaking violently. It came out in her voice and made her sound like she was much colder than she was. In fact, her heart was pumping so hard that her ears were burning. “Make low flights, hit those formations there, get it piled up everywhere short of the beach. See those weird switchback-like formations connecting the caves under the cliff there? Get them too, just make low sweeps so water doesn’t get in the caves. It’ll help us spread out the snow. Don’t go over the edge, obviously.”

“Sure, Downie. That was a close call, huh?”

“Then we’ll head west if we have any leftovers and see if the griffons in the area can stand any more snow,” Downdraft said, pointedly ignoring the question a second time.

Celestia and Bank above, the ocean scared her. Experiments had shown that you could bring a container of dead water right up to the doors of the Bank and the water wouldn’t even twitch in the direction of the Numeraire.[5] And things lived in it! Though lived wasn’t the right word. They were an in-between case, like a virus, if viruses were twenty feet tall and had tentacles and could whip them fast and hard enough to slice a boat in half.

[5] They hadn’t tried bringing the dead water inside the Bank. They weren’t insane. That was Discord levels of crazy. Even Nightmare Moon might not have done it.

“Is it alright to leave so much snow here?” Stratum asked. She kept glancing nervously at the dead, black ocean under them. It oozed at the edges of the rock beach like some acidic beast slowly eating its way to the cliff.

Downdraft flicked her wings. “Nothing lives down there. The edges of Equestria are empty, and not just because of the dead ocean. The Bank pulls everything toward it. Anything still here is too small to care or doesn’t want to be with the rest of us. Let them enjoy the snow, I say, while the rest of us huddle up in our own homes.”

Downdraft gave Stratum a bracing slap on the shoulder, mostly to calm her own nerves. “Come on, Strat. Let’s get back to the cloud. How’re things going with your boyfriend? What’s his name again? Dirty?”

“It’s Mulch, and he’s an Earth Pony, and he’s super shy and really nervous about coming to Cloudsdale so please don’t be yourself at the New Year party.”

“I solemnly promise to embarrass you as much as possible,” said Downdraft, grinning as they flew away from the dead ocean. Sweet Celestia, it felt good to fly away from the dead ocean. She wanted to fly all the way to the Bank and give it a hug and never leave.

Above the tired cliffs, a tight formation of clouds drifted into place. By the afternoon, rocks dotted a snowy plain like decorations on a white cake.

It was a bad winter, and it was only going to get worse.

The cliff is hard to see under all the snow. Come back to yesterday with me, and let’s look at it before Downdraft and her team dusted it so thickly.

Yesterday, in the sunlight, it seems to be an ordinary cliff, rocky and cold and mostly empty, no different from any of the other cliffs you could find along the edge of the northeastern stretch of Equestria.

Under the cliff is a rock beach. There used to be more of it; the dead ocean has crept up and swallowed more and more of the shoreline over the last millennium. The rocks that remain, instead of being rounded by lapping waves and the tide, are broken down from centuries of contact with the dead water. The results are rocks that ooze under pressure, secreting their gooey innards like tubes of toothpaste. A film of mysterious slime has built up on them. It seems to have no source, like maggots on rotting meat, and you might begin to suspect that the rocks are losing their form altogether, falling apart into something less than liquid out of sheer apathy. As they do, they seem to take on many of the qualities of dead water.

Walking along the beach, each step is an effort. Each is a little more exhausting than you expected from the last.

Isn’t it easier to just give up…?

Turn away from the sight of the dead sea.

See where roads have been dug out of the cliffside. Switchbacks zig and zag along the rockface, running from the beach to the cliff, connecting all the caves, traveling left and right via up and down. If this were a painting, you might expect to see someone walking upside-down under one of them only to emerge elsewhere right-side-up.

But nothing walks along the switchbacks. Nothing comes out of the caves.

The sun moves over the cliff, light glinting off the white mica and making the quartz glitter, reflecting in brilliant sparks where it touches nuggets of pink garnet—but none of these shine as brilliantly as the tourmaline—and dips down toward the horizon. Now you see what is interesting about this cliff. You see how, at the northeastern edge of Equestria, the sun would never cast its light directly on the caves thanks to the way the cliff hangs over them and covers them always in shadow.

The moon takes its turn in the sky, and the stars come out to keep it company, twinkling like the stones had when the sunlight caught them just right.

It’s night now. You were safer during the day.

A cold wind tickles the back of your neck.

Hold very still. Especially your breath: hold it in. Only move when the air is utterly still. This means that you cannot move and breathe at the same time.

Look at the protective curve of the cliff over the caves. See how it hides in shadow anything that might emerge.

Don’t shiver. They can hear you shivering.

That is how you must run: in bursts, using the stillness to move, but also to breathe. You do not know when the wind will blow again.

If you hold very still, you may be safe.

...This is what the animals in the forest will tell you to do, speaking with their teeth clenched as if afraid to let any air escape—and they will not speak at all if the wind is blowing. And long ago, they would have been right. But nowadays, the ocean creeps up the beach, the sun’s eye burns everlong, the One Bank remains in its dayside awake…

Now there is only one left. And it is evident that she is no huntress.

Hold still, and keep a keen eye on a particular cave, by a particular switchback. She’s too thin for you to see her slip out of the cave, a mere shape against the darkness, but—there! That light where the moon’s glow touches the switchback! Look!—how her pale blue form glitters like ice in the moonlight, how her skin seems almost translucent with shades of white under the waves of blue; see how her skin sticks to her skin, stretches across her ribs so tight that you can count each one, how it clings to her knees, her jaw!

You can see her skeleton through her skin and are amazed she can even make the climb to the top of the cliff. But she knows that she can get skinnier still, because she watched it happen to her mother.

Wind rushes down from somewhere, streaming between the rocks, flicking strands of her blueish white mane. The wind makes a faint sighing noise. The dead sea is undisturbed.

Look! She’s at the top of the cliff, a pale glittering figure with hints of blue and bone showing as the moonlight passes over her. Her legs reach out toward the dead sea…

...beseeching? The dead ocean doesn’t harken to any voice.

What could she possibly be doing?

Winnette strained her limbs further until they reached well past the edge of the cliff, like she was trying to stretch them to the horizon. She’d memorized the words of the spell she’d read in her mother’s journal, including the new changes Winnette had made; she recited them now.

“I call to the winds from far away,
To my womb, and to my grave,
To the storm, and the calm within,
To the place where windigos end,
I call for the return of times that were,
When ice and snow and hail ruled all.”

Was that a new breeze that tickled the top of her head? Was the air colder, or was that just her imagination?

“I call not for myself, but for order’s reign,
The sun and the moon to be unchained,
Water to revive, the wind’s howl be heard,
And answered by life’s unspoken word.”

Her ears strained. Yes—that rushing sound had to be wind gathering on the horizon. It would be slow, it would be sluggish, since it was making its way across the dead ocean. And the temperature was certainly dropping. Those white sparks she saw when her eyes squinted from concentration had to be crystals of ice, forming in the air from the sheer power of her words.

Winnette squeezed her eyes shut, straining with every fiber of her being, wavering on the edge of the cliff as she reached forward. “I call on the stars to give me favor! By the sign of my mother that you gave her! Save us, eyes of the galactic swirl, bring us wind! Freeze this world!”

Her legs stretched so far forward that she lost her balance and pitched over the edge of the cliff. She fell, grunting when she landed on the switchback a few feet below, the breath driven out of her lungs. It wasn’t that far of a fall, but there wasn’t any fat to shield her bones. Hip and knee and shoulder all smarted, sending arrhythmical throbs of pain through her body, while she lay on the ground for a while, breathing hard.

The air didn’t feel even a little bit colder.

2. Wyna, Welga, and Winnette

“Where were you?”

That was the question Winnette was greeted with upon returning to the cave.

Wyna was lying down on her cot. She had her doll, a icy-white explorer wearing a wide-brimmed sun hat, tucked under one leg. She had asked the question.

Welga, the middle sister, was sitting up on her cot, working on the hat that she was fixing up for Wyna. She blinked her green eyes, which were the same glassy emerald color as tourmaline.

Winnette had seen a lot of tourmaline. Long ago, windigos had mined tourmaline, along with copper and other things, from the nearby mountains. As the population dwindled, everywone had been awash in the stuff until it became totally worthless. The back of their cave was overstuffed with tourmaline necklaces, earrings, bangles, and uncut gemstones, along with with all the other antique junk.

There were books back there, and tools and toys and games; precious orbs of lilac-colored crystal and monoliths of smoky quartz; mounds and mounds of copper from the old mines, and even a few nuggets of gold that had escaped a fit of paranoia that had seen their ancestors dump most of their gold into the dead sea. Every now and then Wyna went diving into the pile in the back of the cave for a different game or toy to play with, sending copper coins and chunks of tourmaline tumbling to the cave floor, but otherwise there was little reason to go back there. Winnette had taken the books she thought were useful and kept them on the ground by her cot. Wyna had her toys, and Welga sometimes played with Wyna; other times she read or went out onto the beach to stretch her legs.

Mom’s journal was sitting on Winnette’s cot, but not in the same position that Winnette had left it. There was a fourth cot that had a few quilts lying messily across it. There was nothing else to the cave, unless Wyna had somehow failed to consume any of the bones from the badger they’d eaten three days ago.

Wyna’s eyes were the same rosy pink that tourmaline sometimes was. That’s what Mother had said: “She’s as pink as the tourmaline.” Wyna’s eyes could be brilliant and faceted, in the layered, translucent, icelike way that the eyes of windigos often were. But to Winnette, Wyna’s pink eyes were a rabid pink, signifying danger.

“It’s dark out,” said Winnette, in response to Wyna’s question. “I can go wherever I want.”

“Go hunting. I’m hungry.”

Like that was news. Wyna’s bluish skin was so taut against her bony frame that her ribs bulged out every time she took a breath. The shape of the bones that made up Welga’s haunches were visible. Their pale manes were thin and the strands of hair that composed them limp, like melting icicles.

Winnette got exhausted just walking up and down the switchbacks. How was she supposed to hunt?

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Winnette said.

“You never catch anything anyway.”

“Shut up, Wyna.”

“Don’t tell her to shut up,” Welga said. Winnette shot her a look. Welga thought of herself as the peacemaker, but in reality, she just coddled Wyna.

“She doesn’t ever catch anything,” Wyna said.

“I caught that badger three days ago.”

“I should go hunting. I’d catch something.”

“When you’re older,” Winnette said.

“I’ll never be older because you never catch anything.”

“Shut up, Wyna!”

“I thought I heard you talking,” said Welga.

Was she trying to change the subject? “I talk,” Winnette answered guardedly. “The wind is better company than you two.”

“We heard your voice on the wind,” said Wyna, wiggling her loose upper tooth with her tongue.

“Wyna!”

“We did,” Welga said apologetically. “It sounded...like you were praying?”

“To what?” Winnette replied shortly.

“To Mommy,” snickered Wyna.

“SHUT UP, WYNA!”

Wyna’s rabid pink eyes taunted her. “I read your diary.”

“Wyna!” Welga begged. “Stop it.”

“It was Welga’s idea, she read it first—”

“It was not, you liar!”

“I believe you,” Winnette said to Welga. It felt so good to see Welga get mad at Wyna that Winnette almost forgave her for always taking Wyna’s side. “Wyna, shut up.”

“You can’t keep talking to her like that,” Welga whispered.

To a windigo, a whisper hid nothing; it only communicated tone and intent. Wyna sniggered and pushed her loose upper tooth with her tongue again.

“I’m going hunting,” Winnette said with strained calm. “Because somewone has to feed you, Wyna, even if you wished they were dead.”

Welga was stricken. “She doesn’t wish that!”

“Do too,” Wyna said happily.

“See?” Winnette spun on the heels of her hoofs. She moved to the mouth of the cave, where the stars blinked dispassionately at her in the dark sky.

“Teach me a game first!” Wyna shouted. “I’m bored.”

“So play with something.”

“I’ve played with everything.”

Go on, thought Winnette. Say something. Anything. Give me a reason. “Go into the pile and find something new.”

“There isn’t anything new! Just tourmaline and torn hats and copper junk.”

“Then make up a game with Welga.”

“She’s boring.”

Winnette had been waiting for this. She stormed back from the mouth of the cave and cornered Wyna against the moss-slick wall. Wyna backed up as Winnette pressed forward, but her pink eyes only grew more brilliant as they lit up with some dark, wild excitement.

“Welga puts up with you all night while I’m out hunting!” Winnette bellowed. “The least you could do is show some respect!”

Welga jumped to her hoofs. “Don’t bully her!”

“She needs to be bullied!” Winnette barked. “Don’t defend her, Welga, you let her get away with everything.”

“I do not!”

Wyna’s pink eyes danced. “Welga says you’re terrible at hunting and everything was better when Mommy was alive—”

Wyna cut off with a gurgle as Winnette pushed her to the wall with a cold hoof against her neck.

There was so little skin around Wyna’s neck that it seemed too small to hold up her head. And often it didn’t, when Wyna’s head drooped with tiredness from hunger and she slept most of the night. Those nights were the scariest, when neither she nor Welga knew if Wyna was going to wake up.

Winnette could feel the arteries in Wyna’s neck, could see them pumping as they struggled to push their cold, blue fluid to Wyna’s brain.

Welga might have shouted or begged, Winnette wasn’t sure. For a moment everything was searing cold in the back of Winnette’s head. Her vision tunneled; there was just darkness and Wyna’s wild expression and glowing pink eyes, her grin spreading maniacally across her face as Winnette’s hoof squeezed her neck harder against the cave.

Her smile grew fiercer until her expression changed. Her eyes rolled up and her legs kicked in panic. Winnette released her, and Wyna ran, stumbling, to Welga, collapsing against her as she sucked in huge, gasping breaths.

“She choked me!” Wyna sobbed as Welga petted her cold, white mane and whispered reassurances.

“I know,” Welga said, blinking frosty tears away. “Wait!—Winnette, don’t leave. I know she provoked you—Winnette!”

Winnette raced out of the cave. The last snippet of the conversation behind her that she heard, carried to her ears by the wind, was Welga saying to Wyna, “Why must you always tell lies?”

“SHUT UP!” Wyna shrieked in a chilling impersonation of Winnette.

Winnette’s hoofs carried up the switchbacks to the clifftop.

Damn Wyna. And damn Welga for encouraging her! It was always the two of them against her. Things had been better when Mom was alive—

Winnette stumbled over a rock and shook her head, tossing her thin mane out of her eyes. The exertion made her vision swim, and she had to stop for a moment, crouching her head between her forelegs.

—even if Wyna was too young to appreciate it. Winnette wasn’t the hunter Mom had been. So what? She was doing her best, damn it!

Stupid Wyna. Sitting around in the cave playing all night while Winnette did all the work!

Stupid Welga, for not getting it. She kept saying, “You have to understand, you have to understand, she’s starving, she lost her mother very young, she knows she’s the last windigo”—Blah blah blah blah blah! They’d all lost their mother very young! Even Winnette didn’t have her star sign yet!

And they didn’t know Wyna was the last windigo, it depended on what order they died in. And they were all starving, that was the problem, that was everything. It was why Mom had died, it was why there was going to be a last windigo, it was why Winnette got angry, but it wasn’t why Wyna got angry, because Wyna was a monster. She’d be a monster even if she ate a whole elk every day.

Damn Welga, for not understanding that.

Winnette took her head out from between her legs and trotted up to the top of the cliff.

Her eyes, which were an icy blue color, not tourmaline-bright like Welga or Wyna’s, didn’t need much light to see by. Windigos were adapted for the dark; the harsh, murderous light of day was blinding.

The rock became forest eventually. From the edge of the cliff you could see the shape of the jagged semicircle of vegetation that ringed off their home. It looked like some kind of creature had risen up from the dead ocean and taken a bite out of the forest, leaving a barren, rocky area where plants and animals wouldn’t go.

It meant she had to trot for an hour just to start hunting.

The night was darker when she reached the forest, and the trees caught much of the remaining light, but moonbeams made it through, and more importantly, the starlight. Thousands of years ago, the Sun and the Moon had been tiny, distant balls in the sky, and the stars had been brighter. There were supposed to be as many stars as there were going to be windigos. That was why each windigo had their own special star sign waiting for them when they reached maturity. When you discovered your special talent or destiny, it would manifest on your flank.

Mom’s star sign had been three little icelike stars, “For the three little girls I’m going to have,” Mom had said. “One and two,” she touched Winnette’s nose, then Welga’s. Then she touched her stomach. “Three. You’ll take care of her when I’m gone. Tell me you will.”

No, Winnette’s mouth made the motion as she walked carefully through the forest, eyes searching for something she could track.

“That’s my girl, I know you will,” Mother had said.

High above, the stars were like a million shards of ice spilled onto a vast black ocean. Winnette’s eyes and nose stayed close to the ground, searching through the grass for a trail to follow.

There was something. A thin, winding path of grass bent in a different direction from the grass around it.

She followed it. Occasionally it stopped, circled around, changed direction. But it kept moving deeper into the forest.

Winnette’s legs brushed aside snakeroot. She lurked in the shadow cast by the limbs of a spruce tree.

Very peculiar, for an animal to be so close to the edge of the forest at night….

When she spotted it, the explanation became clear. The shrew she had been stalking, its long snout twitching, was only an infant, probably recently orphaned. Confused and untaught, it had wandered too close to the cliff.

Winnette crept closer. A breeze flicked at her mane.

She wasn’t a bad hunter. Stupid Wyna. Stupid idiot Wyna—

“Hi!”

“AAAAAAAHHH!”

She screamed, and the baby shrew took off, diving into the brush. She charged forward desperately, but it had disappeared, and she could no longer find it.

“Sorry,” said the voice. “Did I scare you?”

Winnette whipped around, but no wone was there.

She took a deep breath. If she was starting to have delusions from hunger—

“Were you after that shrew? I’m sorry,” said the voice in her ear.

She jumped and kicked the air. “Get away from me!”

“Sorry,” said the voice in her other ear, “but you’re the wone who has a choice in the matter, not me.”

She slapped the air. “What are you talking about?”

“What,” said the voice, “are you listening about?”

She shouted at the air again, but there was no answer. The voice had gone, along with her meal.

Winnette began to prowl once more through the forest, but there was no scent to follow, no trail of crushed flowers or broken stems. Any chance she had of catching something tonight had been lost when she had announced her presence to the forest by shouting at whatever phantasm had spoken to her. The only thing that kept her from turning back was the shame of coming home without anything to show for it. Just the thought of Wyna’s taunting made her blood boil.

“Um,” said the voice.

She kicked hard, and whiffed. Scything around, she glared at a tree. It didn’t glare back, however.

“If you’d just—”

She lashed out with her forehoofs this time, catching only air. The sudden effort left her light-headed. Dizzy, she sank to her knees, ducking her head down low in the anti-nausea posture she had learned from years of hunger.

“I’m going insane,” she whimpered, while darkness swam in front of her eyes.

“You’re really not,” said the voice. “Or, well, you might be, but you shouldn’t think so because you’re hearing me. Of course, you might not be saying that because you’re hearing me. You might be saying it because you’re hearing somewone else who I can’t hear. Then you would be going insane. Unless I’m insane. Are you hearing somewone else? What are they saying?”

She groaned.

Then frowned. “Somewone?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Somewone?”

“Right. You know, when you mentioned going insane—”

“You’re a windigo?”

“I was a windigo. Now I don’t know what I am.”

“What does that mean?”

“What does it mean to you?”

She clenched her eyes shut. She still felt like the world was falling away underneath her, like she was clinging to a melting piece of ice, and all that lay underneath was the dead ocean.

“No riddles. Please.”

“I’m not trying to confuse you. I don’t have any answers. I think whatever made me this way was very sudden.”

“That’s helpful.”

“Is it really? I don’t think I’ve ever been told that I’ve done something helpful before. I only remember other windigos saying that I talk too much. Do you think I talk too much? I don’t mean to talk too much. It’s just so much fun, don’t you think? There’s so much variety: so many sounds, so many meanings. Isn’t that interesting? Do you like to talk much? You seem like the listening type. I like somewone who can listen for a long time. Good listeners are very rare. Not like good talkers.”

“Argh,” said Winnette.

A breeze tickled her ear.

“Are you all right?” said the voice.

“No.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Hungry. My sisters. I don’t know.”

“I’m not sure I can do much about the hunger,” the voice said sadly. “I seem to be having an, um, out-of-body experience. But maybe you can tell me about your sisters? I’m not the listener that you are, but perhaps if I talk enough about it a solution will come out. It’s never happened before, but that doesn’t prove anything, since everywone always tell me to stop well before I’ve run out of breath.”

“The hunger is the problem.” At least for her and Welga. Wyna was another story.

“Hm. Have you tried hunting?”

“I…yes.”

“I can’t feed you, but maybe I can help you hunt.”

Winnette’s ears swiveled up. “How?”

“You were following that shrew’s trail, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

The voice sounded smug. “That is not how a windigo hunts.”

3. Dead Wind

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.

4. Things the Wind Has to Say

Moments before end of Nightmare Moon’s short reign:

“Gilda, don’t!”

“Stay back!” Gilda warned. Her talons shuffled around the spear, tightening her grip.

The other griffon squashed herself even further into the rock wall behind her, trying to create distance between herself and the spear-tip wavering in front of her chest. Grace, she kept saying. My name is Grace.

It might have been true. Gilda had known somegal named Grace with teal fur and brown feathers, just like this griffon had. But even though Gilda could make out every other part of the other griffon in stark detail, her face was invisible.

She could see it. But her mental impression of it was just a hazy blur.

Gilda leaned the spear forward. It poked toward the other griffon’s stomach, who sucked herself in against the rock.

“Please!” the griffon begged. “I’m a friend.”

Couldn’t see her face. Couldn’t tell if she was lying. “Prove it.”

“I don’t have any money!”

Convenient.

Gilda’s spear moved forward another centimeter. The other griffon made a choked noise.

She sounded afraid. But was she really? Or was it all an act? There was no way to tell by looking at her face.

The whole thing could be a trap. Act innocent, then strike when her guard was lowered.

Yes…. It probably was a trap. That was what Gilda would do, after all. You couldn’t trust anygal who wouldn’t show you their face.

If Gilda backed up now, that would give the other griffon the opportunity to attack. It was kill or be killed. Right now, she could kill.

The fear was like ice coursing through her veins. And the anger was like a hot wind in the back of her head. It caught her wings and her arms, the same arms that held the spear, and drove them forward.

In the same instant that her body arms twitched, some of the colors that were the blur of the other griffon’s face cohered. Gilda saw two wide eyes and the seven colors reflected in them. For a moment she thought the seven colors were just part of the blur. But in fact they were demarcated, making a clear image.

The eyes reflecting those colors were not looking at her, nor at the spear. Something else had their attention.

Gilda caught herself in time. And she turned and saw the rainbow.

When she turned back, she still couldn’t see the other griffon’s face. It was because her wing was covering it. The poor girl was shaking with fright.

Winnette wondered if she had died in her sleep and joined the living wind. Everything was so white and perfect outside the cave at dusk as she awoke to the first light of the stars that it seemed impossible.

She was the first one up, as always. Wyna was sleeping with her doll’s head between her teeth. Welga’s face was covered by her quilt.

Winnette’s neck turned her face back to the snow like a plant’s stem turning toward sunlight.

Dreamlike, her hoofs carried her to the mouth of the cave. She poked her head out into the frosty air and breathed in the frosty air and saw with her eyes the white sweep that had come over the cliffside.

Did...did I do this?

A gust of wind lifted a tuft of snow that broke apart into powder. She watched the starlike flakes dance and twirl in the air and felt for a moment that she was rushing through the universe at a million times the speed of light, so fast that the stars were caught in her draft and spilled around in the night sky like leaves in the breeze.

Without her noticing, her legs started to step forward into the snow. She felt the sweet rush of the chill up her left foreleg as it sank into the snow up past the knee. Her other legs joined in, and then they started to move.

She had scythed down the length of an entire switchback before she even realized what she was doing.

She was swimming.

Winnette laughed at the sight of the dead sea, black and empty and cold in a way that the snow and the crisp, biting air weren’t. She howled at the sky, dark and blinking with stars for little icelike eyes; she bawled, and the sound bounced once off the rock and was buried in the snow, waiting for her to find it. She pitched her voice differently, raising her chin, and screamed. The sound ricocheted off a farther part of the cliffside and deflected into the snow coating the switchback underneath; again the sound was damped immediately.

She kicked, and marveled at how fast she was, how easy it was; and she was weightless, her light frame floating on the surface while her legs struck through the snow underneath. She tucked her head down and dived in and was even faster moving through the snow rather than on it. She popped up on a switchback higher up the cliff, giggling, and jumped in again. This time she misjudged her aim and threw herself off the switchback, only to land on a pile of snow on a lower level, submerging herself; the force of her fall was completely absorbed.

She popped out of the snow, breathing snowflakes out of her snout. She shook her head and shrieked with laughter at the tiny storm of ice made by the powder flying off her face and mane.

Winnette rolled her body around in the snow like a dog trying to get a smell into its fur. Then she thought of something devilish. Her eyes found the cave, just one among dozens dotting the cliffside, and a wicked smile spread across her face.

“Wake up!”

The snowball flew and exploded in a burst of white powder against the back of Welga’s head.

“Moon’s out, sleepyheads!”

The second compacted ball of snow and ice smacked Wyna awake.

Winnette nearly fell over laughing while they blinked at her, stunned, and stared at the wet stuff on their quilts and at the white pile that Winnette was shoving into their cave from outside.

“What’s going on?” Welga asked, her tourmaline-green eyes wide and uncomprehending.

“Snow!” Winnette answered simply. She made another snowball. “Come swimming or I’ll get ya again.”

“What is that?” Wyna asked. “Winnette, where’d you get all of that?”

Both she and Welga stared as Winnette flopped into the pile of snow, her laughter muffled by the powder covering her face.

“Welga, where did Winnette get all of that stuff?” Wyna asked. “What is it?”

Winnette’s hoof punched through the pile of snow, sending a compacted bunch of powder flying at Wyna, who fell backwards out of her cot to avoid it. Winnette’s face popped out of the end of the pile closest to them, smiling upside-down. Wyna crouched cautiously behind her cot.

“Stop scaring her,” said Welga, taking big gulps of cold air. “Wyna, that’s snow. Winnette, where did it come from? It doesn’t snow here, you said it hasn’t snowed here since before you were born.”

Winnette grinned at her. “You can get anything you ask for if you say the magic words.”

“But what is it?” Wyna demanded.

“Snow—you know what snow is,” Welga said.

“Snow is this,” said Winnette, tensing as if to send another blast of snow flying.

“Don’t throw it at her!” Welga said. A fraction of a second later, a flurry Winnette had slapped at her splattered across her face.

Wyna laughed.

“Very funny,” said Welga, wiping the snow off her face with one foreleg. It froze against her face and her leg, clinging to the cold surfaces and yet it was curiously malleable when she touched it, easily directed by her force. It was almost harder not to shape it.

She licked a bit off her hoof.

It was cold….

A smile lit up her face. Winnette twisted around in the pile of snow, gazing curiously. She hadn’t seen that smile on Welga since Mom died.

“Hey, Wyna?” said Welga.

“Huh?”

“I think we need to teach Winnette a lesson about throwing snow.”

“Yeah!” shouted Wyna eagerly, clambering over the cot. Winnette was already kicking away though, moving past the mouth of the cave and onto the switchback.

“Come on!” she heard Welga say.

Winnette scythed down the switchbacks, building up so much speed that she actually burst into the air when the path took her back up and over the turn of a steep upward slope. The snow easily caught her descent.

The powder flying up behind her made an easy target for Welga and Wyna to follow. Winnette swiveled around and watched their path along the switchbacks. She slowed down so that they could catch her, and surrendered under their combined onslaught as they pelted her with snowballs.

They buried her next, piling snow on top of her and covering her wherever her face popped out to poke her blueish tongue at them.

“Okay, okay,” Winnette said, lifting her neck out of the snow above Wyna, who was still trying to cover her up with snow. Winnette’s ribs hurt from laughing.

Welga sat back, just her face poking above the surface. She was beaming.

Wyna ate a mouthful of snow. “It’s so cold!” she exclaimed.

“It’s snow, dummy,” Winnette said.

“You’ve never seen snow either!”

“‘Course I have. I swim around in snow every day. I just don’t share it with you because it’s so much fun.”

Wyna’s eyes were immediately suspicious and hopeful. “You do not.”

“Sure I do.” Winnette gestured with her head at the clifftop. “Up there. Want to see?”

Wyna looked at it fearfully. “But...but I’m not allowed up there. Even Welga doesn’t go up.”

“It’s fine.” Welga’s eyes were shining as she looked from Winnette to Wyna and back. “It’s completely safe.”

“You two are so lucky,” said Winnette as she struck out up the switchback, marking out a path to the cliff, “that you have the awesomest older sister in the world.”

“I’m so high up!” said Wyna. “Look, Welga! I can see the whole ocean!”

“I’m just as high up as you are,” said Welga bemusedly. Her smile, which had to be hurting her cheeks by now, just kept reasserting itself every time Wyna said or did anything.

Wyna’s eyes swept the shore from the top of the cliff. “How come it doesn’t go all the way to the ocean? See how it barely touches the beach?”

Winnette didn't know why the snow didn't reach the shoreline either. “It's because the water there is dead, so it’s not going to freeze,” Winnette said anyway. “Welga, keep an eye on Wyna. I’m going hunting.”

Wyna whipped around, eyes narrowed. “Catch a rabbit again! A big one!”

“Are you going to share?” Welga said. “Don’t behave like you did last night.”

“She won’t have to share,” Winnette said. “There’ll be enough for everywone.”

“Don’t promise her that!” Welga said. “You’ll get her hopes up.”

Winnette just laughed and kicked away toward the forest. She was so fast in the snow that the journey, normally an hour’s trot, took her maybe ten minutes, if even that. She burst into the greenery, which was submerged under a fat, lush blanket of powder. Only the trees rose above it. Winnette thought she could see their branches shivering from the cold.

“Winnette!” a voice said happily. “You’re back!”

“Will!” she greeted him. “Thanks so much for helping me hunt yesterday.”

“Look at all of this! Do you know what this is? It’s snow!”

“Sure is,” said Winnette smugly. She resisted the urge to add, “You’re welcome.”

“I haven’t seen snow in so long,” said Will. “Hey, are you going hunting again?”

Winnette laughed.

“Oh—good—I have some more things to teach you—but—hey!”

Winnette surged ahead. She felt Will’s voice rushing to keep up behind her, a stream of wind kicking up powder on the surface of the snow.

Winnette slalomed between the trees. Each time she kicked through the snow, she thought she felt the entire lake of powder tremble. From the way it shook, she could tell what was coming up ahead, enough to dodge snow-buried thickets and snatching thorns.

“You’re going too fast!” Will shouted. “Wait—I like talking to you!”

Other streams of wind were joining the trail. They matched her speed and direction like a V of winter geese meeting in flight. Winnette laughed and slowed, enough for the winds to rush ahead and then circle back.

A storm of snow and ice spiraled around her as dozens of different streams of air gusted in every direction.

I am the universe, thought Winnette, and these are how the stars are made, whipped up out of a vast white canvas of possibility, and if I was just cold enough to freeze each one in place—

“—hey—”

“—hi—”

“—hello—”

“—can you hear us?”

Each breeze, and each accompanying flurry of fresh snow, had a voice. Winnette’s ears flicked while she swiveled around in the snow, taking it all in:

“—my name is Wendy—”

“—call me Wren—”

“—how come you can hear us?”

“—Can she hear us? Hey, who are you?—”

“—where’d the snow come from? Did you see—”

“—it’s cold again! Look, look at me go!—”

“—back in my day we had proper snow, this stuff is basically just frozen water—”

“—wêman wê wmolt wher? wôd wnagh wacan? wmîn—”

“Stop bothering her!” said Will, storming in with a protective huff. “She could hear me even without the snow. I’m her friend, and she listens to me! We talked all night last night, isn’t that right, Winnette? We had a really great conversation going, I did all the talking and you didn’t mind, right?”

The snowy funnel around Winnette whipped up angrily.

“—shut up—”

“—who’s this—”

“—there’s too many talking—”

“—I want to be heard! Hey, listen to me—”

“—wðâ wunlaeð we. wen whristende wmôgh—”

“Listen to me!” Winnette cried above the storm. A fierce blue smile lit her face like all of the starlight was reflecting off her sharp, bright teeth. “I need to hunt! I need food for three windigos! You voices, you want to be heard? Then show me the way!”

“—I saw a deer—”

“—she doesn’t want deer, she wants a nice, juicy rabbit—”

“—don’t listen to them, follow me, I know where a goose is—”

“C’mon, Winnette!” Will urged. “Let’s hunt and talk like last time. It’ll be fun, I have a whole bunch of stories, come on!”

Winnette’s laughter rose in pitch until it was a howl that consumed her entire body. She shook from the sheer desperate hilarity of it all.

She chose a stream at random and kicked off, the howl echoing behind her.

Brown rabbits that hadn’t seen so much as a dusting of light powder in generations struggled to kick through frost to reach their burrows.

Deer stomped tiredly through more than thirty inches of snow that tried to drag them back, hold them in place.

Plump little warblers and black-bellied plovers suffered in the dense, wet air. Juicy gray grouses and fat blue geese visiting from the Crystal Empire struggled alike in the unpredictable, wild winds.

Owls traded silent glances across the snow-topped branches of spruce trees.

Bears fought an inexplicable urge to eat lots of food and then sleep for three months.

Bats warbled and shrieked, battling the hard air with their wings.

A coyote shivered somewhere.

They could all hear the howl. It was a howl that bounded on the snow, deft as a wing on the surface of a living river. It tore through the leaves and scared birds out of the sky. Prowling cats curled up small and quiet, and bears hunkered down low.

Nothing currently alive remembers this scream.

But they all remember to hold their breath. Somehow, they remember—

Hold very still. Especially your breath—hold it in. Only move when the air is utterly still. This means you cannot move and breathe at the same time.

Look at the way the cliff spreads out to cover the rock underneath. See how it hides in shadow anything that might emerge.

Don’t shiver. They can hear you shivering.

This is how you must run: in bursts, using the stillness to move, but also to breathe. You do not know when the wind will blow again.

The icy wind rushed ahead, and behind. The snow was everywhere. Nowhere to hide, impossible to run—

An owl’s brown eyes focused on a dot of moving snow in the distance. A distance that was increasingly less distant….

The flurry of snow flashed by under and past the owl’s brown eyes, obscuring a figure that was just a blur amid the storm.

The owl’s head swiveled. Brown eyes blinked at brown eyes on a distant branch. Owls have long memories, and they are careful guardians of factual, level-headed history.

The monster that took a bite out of the forest has emerged from under the cliff once again.

The animals shivered and were afraid.

Winnette swam back to the cliff, pushing the corpse of a stag in front of her. She’d packed snow into the holes in the deer’s neck to keep the blood in.

A tired, proud smile lit up her face, brighter than the stars.

There was too much food.

There was too much food!

Even Wyna had given up. She rested on her back in the snow, patting her bulging stomach.

Her stomach bulges!

The bright pink of her eyes was covered by her eyelids. “I’m so happy,” Winnette heard her say.

She and Welga looked at each other. There was so much understanding in Welga’s eyes.

They rested by the bloody carcass until the eastern horizon began to light up dimly.

No, Winnette thought desperately. Don’t rise, Sun! You’re gone now!

But the sun rose nevertheless.

“Come on,” said Winnette. She roused Wyna. “Welga, take her down. I’ll bring the rest of the deer behind you.”

Wyna let Welga pull her onto her back. “Is it morning?” she yawned.

“Have you ever heard of breakfast?” Winnette asked. “You’ll find out what it is tomorrow night.”

They went down to the cave. Winnette dragged the half-eaten carcass along and submerged it in a pile of snow. She blanketed Wyna’s already-sleeping form with a layer as well. Welga made a pillow out of the still-fresh powder and fell asleep with a peaceful look on her face.

Winnette stayed awake into the dawn, writing furiously in the book that Wyna and Welga thought was her diary.

5. The King Beasts

Griffons stood blinking in the sunlight like cublets opening their eyes for the first time.

Occasionally the eerie silence was interrupted by the clatter of a spear rolling down a rocky slope. Sometimes it stopped because the spear had rolled into a body.

Gilda could see their faces. The memory of their faces having been a blur was a blur itself. Now, nothing seemed real. Nothing, except the incredibly bright colors of the rainbow. She wouldn’t ever forget that.

Eventually the screaming started. It was about time, thought Gilda, and joined in as well.

“Gilda!” the foreman cawed harshly. “Quit spacing out!”

Gilda shot a dark look at the foreman, who glared back with bloodshot, sleepless eyes. None of them had slept at all from the cold, the wet, and the persistent shriek of the wind in the distance.

The snow had come as a total surprise. They hadn’t brought any supplies to deal with the snow because according to the Cloudsdale weather schedule, it wasn’t supposed to snow this far northeast. That was the reason they were mining copper here in the northeastern Appaneighchian mountains and not further west.

No snow here—ha! It was white as far as the eye could see, and an eagle’s eye could see pretty far.

The foreman strode over to her, back hunched and his claws trembling. “Get back to work. You don’t get paid to stare at the ground.”

“I don’t get paid,” said Gilda. “I get promissory notes. You mean I don’t get promissoried to stare at the ground.”

The foreman just glared at her. He clearly had too little energy to say anything more.

Gilda hefted her pickaxe, fought back a wave of nausea, and swung it at the rock.

After the Nightmare Moon event, which ponies were calling the Great Succession, Unicorns from one of the new Daughter banks had come up to the Grokky Mountains to do something called a “randomized control trial.” The griffons made good test subjects, apparently, because they had a monetary economy—indeed, it was more monetary than the pony economy, one of the visitors had commented—but were otherwise fairly primitive, contracting with ponies whenever they needed advanced industry.

One of the visitor’s names was Helium Float. She said she came from the Daughter bank in Billet Rouge, and she bore a letter from the Chief Executive Economist, Nova Flare, to prove it. She said she was interested in the health effects the Great Succession was going to have on the fetal health of newly conceived griffon babies.

Most of the visitors stayed in their place, living in makeshift houses they’d assembled out of materials they’d brought with them. Some of them even brought along their spouses and children, as they planned to stay a while. But Helium Float came alone except for that letter, and she used the word (and not, so much, the words) of Nova Flare to cajole, to impress, and sometimes to force her way into places she didn’t belong.

It wasn’t really fetal health she was here to study, Gilda eventually realized. That was for the others to do. Helium Float was here to study them.

Griffons weren’t entirely ignorant, despite what ponies thought. They deduced the monetary nature of the crisis that had driven their society to the point of a state of nature, a war of all against all. Now they had to decide what to do about it.

One set of voices said the obvious thing: get rid of money. Griffons were honorable creatures, or at least they were creatures obsessed with honor. Why not a system of exchange based on debt and promises repaid?

When Gilda had mentioned that idea to Helium Float, she got very excited and started talking way too fast about economies with no money where payments were made by check or credit, how it all worked and what it meant for the quantity of money and the price level. She said that Nova Flare was working on similar ideas. She said it let banks be banks.

But griffons weren’t good at letting things be. They weren’t going to let their banks be banks. They wanted a Bank.

That was the other idea: a griffon Bank to rival the One Bank of the ponies. They would fill it with copper and use it to separate their monetary economy from the pony one. That way, the next time a Nightmare Moon event happened, it wouldn’t affect them.

Gilda didn't told Helium Float about the plan. That would have been a betrayal. But Helium Float found out anyway, and Gilda was relieved that she had.

Because Gilda spent a lot of time talking to Helium Float about the Great Succession. She was surprised to learn that not a single pony had died during the event. Dozens of griffons had died in bloody conflict during those hours.

Within a few days, according to Helium Float, the pony economy had completely recovered. Growth was a bit sluggish, but even Princess Celestia’s critics called the Great Succession a “blip” and “basically unimportant.” Whereas the griffon economy was still reliant on promissory notes. Bits were in rare supply and mostly being hoarded as assets rather than being used as tokens of exchange.

“Your economy is so fascinating,” said Helium Float during one of their conversations. “It’s like you don’t have an informal economy whatsoever. Every exchange is either monetary and contracted, or it doesn’t happen. See, we ponies have this concept called a favor, where you do something for somepony else and just pretend like it’s pure altruism, and it’s sort of understood that they should do something for you later, but you never say that and they never say that, and they don’t actually have to ever do you a favor back, and you actually sometimes prefer that they don’t, and it’s really offensive to offer to pay somepony in bits for the favor they did for you, and…why are you looking at me like that?”

Now Gilda understood. The reason the pony economy had barely suffered from the monetary collapse of the Great Succession was because their economy wasn’t based on money.

They’d been shoveling snow out of the copper mines at the first crack of dawn, working as fast as they could in the numbing cold. The project could not be allowed to fall behind schedule. They all understood that. The project could not be allowed to fall behind schedule.

At mealtime, they made seats of wooden slats and ate with their paws in the snow. Their rations weren’t snow rations. There weren’t enough calories.

“I need a few griffons to travel northeast,” the operations manager said. “Find out if the snow ends somewhere that we can mine.”

“We should complain to Cloudsdale,” Gilbert said. He was a big griffon with wide shoulders. “I checked the weather schedule three times. It’s not supposed to snow here.”

“Well, it did,” the manager said. “And I’m not going to complain to the ponies about this. The last thing we need is them investigating our operation here.”

“Yeah, shut up, Gilbert,” said Gilda, chewing mindlessly on her protein crumble.

“Gilda, thanks for volunteering,” the manager said. Gilda glared at him. “Gilbert, you as well. And—”

“Me,” said Grace, raising her wing into the air.

“Fine. You three. Take some supplies and move fast. Should be only a week’s travel to the shore once you’re at the base of the mountain. Stay out of the ocean, you hear?”

“Ha,” said Gilda.

“What was that?”

“I thought you were telling a joke.”

There were heavy bags under the manager’s eyes as he gave her a hard look. “I wasn’t joking.”

“It seemed funny,” said Gilda.

“I wasn’t joking though.”

“Well, it seemed that way.”

Before they set off, Gilda bought rations and firestarters out of her bonus pay for the mission. Grace and Gilbert did the same. Now, an hour into the journey, she was already wishing she’d negotiated for more pay. The snow was soft and new, but it also came up past her knees. Her talons snagged on clumps of snakeroot that she couldn’t see, and her wings got caught trying to squeeze between maple branches.

It was a day’s travel to the northeastern edge of Equestria by the eagle’s flight. It was close to two weeks if you were trudging down the mountain and through the forest in the snow. Gilda, Gilbert, and Grace chose to walk.

That might have seemed strange. But recent snow meant that weather Pegasi might still be in the area. The griffons couldn’t afford to stand out too much.

There were questions that would have been too difficult to answer.

Questions had been asked of them during the migration from the Grokky Mountains to northeastern Appaneighchia. Pairs of curious Pegasi had flown down to ask why so many griffons were on the move and why they were carrying with them so much heavy equipment.

They’d made up some answer about a once-a-millennium cultural journey that involved the mining equipment of their ancestors. That had satisfied most questions. The uniformed, Cloudsdale-representing Pegasi who had been more inquisitive had been shut down by Helium Float, who explained that this was a real event in Griffon history, she was studying it as a representative of a Daughter Bank, and if the Pegasi reported the griffon movement to Cloudsdale, they risked causing changes to how the event played out and therefore would be interfering with Daughter bank research. She took down each of their badge numbers with a pen that trembled in the glow of her magic.

Gilda wondered what Nova Flare was plotting. She didn’t seem to like ponies very much, according to what Helium Float said. Either she was letting them get away with a rival to the One Bank for reasons of her own…

…or she knew it wasn’t going to work.

Down out of the Appaneighchian mountain proper, they still had the forest to cross. Gilda felt like the ground was punishing her with every step. The cold and wet seemed to have penetrated her fur and skin and was in her bones, making her shake violently at times.

Grace was visibly not okay. Her face was pale and she was slow to respond to words. Gilda wanted to send her back, but then Grace would have to forfeit the mission pay, and she’d already used some of it to buy food and supplies. Grace couldn’t afford to come out of this in the red.

Gilbert seemed to be relatively fine. He was so broad that sometimes the wind was like a wall to him, but Gilbert was built like a wall himself.

The wind was the worst of it. As they trudged through the forest, it only grew more wild, shrieking through the trees like a million angry ghosts. The wind was curious, ruffling their feathers and whipped their fur out of place. And it was violent, blowing against them, battering them back.

The howling wind didn’t stop them from sleeping. Sleeping was easy. Staying awake was the hard part. Sometimes she blinked, and after her eyelids opened, she wasn’t sure whether she was in the past or the present, whether she was marching toward the northeastern edge of Equestria with Grace or facing her with a spear, whether the wind was screaming at her through the forest or if she was talking to Helium Float at night in the Grokky Mountains after the children had gone to bed. Sometimes she was a child herself. Other times she felt old and haggard, and she had no children of her own to take care of her.

One more step, Gilda told herself, but she’d told herself a hundred steps ago, and a hundred steps before that. Her legs burned from the strain and the cold.

One more step, Gilda told herself. How many steps had it been? Now the wind crawled up her back and through the feathers of her face and out. The breezes turned indecisively and skimmed along the snow.

Something about the way the wind pounded between the trees reminded Gilda of a song.

Strange, strange, the windigo ways,
Listen, daughter:
Ah eh ee oh ah
Ah eh ee oh ah.

One more step.

“You know,” said Grace in a ragged voice, “there used to be tourmaline this far northeast.”

Gilbert was broad-shouldered. He had taken the lead, plowing through the snow with his body. It made things a little easier for Gilda and Grace.

“Tourmaline?” he asked.

“It’s a shiny colorful rock,” said Grace. “My great-grandmother had a pretty green necklace made of tourmaline. She said it came from a long way back when the Bank hadn’t pulled things so far Bankward. I think she ended up selling it.”

Gilda nodded. A griffon couldn’t keep anything for long. They always ended up needing to sell it. And there was always less and less to buy.

Three pairs of talons dug into the snow and tore it up in showers of ice when they lifted out. Three pairs of paws trampled the plants left underneath, the sagebrush and ragweed and whatever else.

The wind rushed ahead of them, as if in warning.

One more step.

Business was not good. In the mountains, it never was.

Gilda’s ancestors had been rich farmers. They'd owned vast herds of cows and goats and pigs and elk and even bears. They had been rich enough to hire scores of griffons to guard the herds from the windigos, who liked nothing better than to steal through the fences with the wind and make off with the fattest portions of her ancestors’ living larder. Those had been difficult times, but fair ones. Griffons did the work of keeping the animals fed and safe from predators. In return, the griffons got to eat what they liked.

The windigos used to howl on the wind, and it had sounded, according to Gilda’s grandmother, like this:

Ah eh ee oh ah
Ah eh ee oh ah.

Gilda had worked all kinds of jobs to earn money to buy more stories from her grandmother. Even though the vile old bird had upcharged her because she was a kid and made her pay extra for doing dialogue with the voices.

Gilda’s favorite stories were about the before times, when griffons had been spread out across the snowy plains and not been cramped up in small, isolated mountain villages; when they’d been strong and proud and more than a match for the windigos. They had eaten rich, succulent pork and steaks oozing with fat. Their thick, furry coats had weathered the snow and ice, and the animals had rightly treated them as saviors from the windigos. It had been a golden age, before the current age of gold, which wasn’t a golden age at all….

Before Princess Platinum had taken the farms away.

One more step.

You’d think, Gilda thought ruefully, her rump numb and wet in the snow, that griffons, being part eagle and part lion, would be pretty good hunters. But eagles and lions weren’t good hunters. They were usually scavengers, using their size to bully smaller predators away from their prey.

The three of them rested against separate trees, taking a meal break. Gilda was eating an energy bar.

Eagles were kings. Lions were kings. And griffons had been kings. King Ranch, literally, had been the name of the greatest and wealthiest farm in Equestria.

There was an equality in hunting. The predator chased, and the prey ran away. The prey wasn’t obliged to slow down if it got too far ahead. The predator was allowed to starve. Both envied the other: prey wanted to be strong, and the predator wanted to be rid of its constant hunger. The windigos had been predators.

Kings? Kings didn’t hunt.

And the griffons had learned not to try. Eagle talons and lion paws did not work well together. Their wings were made to soar, their bodies to sprint and swim. They were too fat to glide between trees. Their wings and talons weren’t built for dashing along the ground toward prey.

Griffons didn’t belong in fields, savannahs, or forests. Their natural habitat, Gilda suspected, was the farm, where they could rule.

But if griffons belonged to the farm, then ponies belonged to the bank. And in the contest between Bank and farm...well, it hadn’t even been a contest….

Gilda looked at the wrapper on the Hybrid!! energy bar she had been eating and read the list of ingredients. She shivered at the first word on the list.

Now they farmed bugs.

One more….

It hurt to walk. Grace dragged behind, and even Gilbert was slowing down.

There was no end to the snow. Ponies had never let it snow this close to the ocean. Unlike griffons, ponies could keep promises without being paid to do so. But this time, they hadn’t.

Some of the pony researchers had brought their fillies with them for the duration of the study in the Grokky Mountains. They lived in makeshift houses that were nicer than Gilda’s nest. Gilda remembered a rhyme she had heard the fillies chanting as they played.

Wing and tail, fur and feather,
These things don’t belong to-ge-ther.
Paw and talon, beak and fang,
Why were griffons made so strange?

“We should turn back,” Gilbert said. “Even if the snow ends past the forest, it won’t make a difference.”

“No,” said Gilda. “We go to the edge.”

“We won’t make it there before nightfall at this pace.”

“I didn’t say we’d stop at nightfall.”

Grace didn’t say anything.

Gilda peered at the pale sun in the distance, so weak and faded and small. It was the tail end of December, and for a moment she thought the sun had taken ill.

But that was ridiculous, and she pushed it out of her mind.

Winnette woke before the sun had set. She stretched and yawned in her bed of ice-cold snow before getting up and trotting over to the deer corpse preserved in the bloody pile of snow by the mouth of the cave. She tore off a few frozen chunks of meat. It was more than she might have eaten all night just a few days ago.

She headed out onto the switchbacks, kicking lazily along. Even without trying, she was stronger than she’d ever been. She reached the cliff in no time.

A hard breeze struck her face when she reached the forest. “Turn back!” the voice urged.

Winnette shook her head, spluttering. “What’s going on?”

She pushed forward. More breezes joined the first one, blowing her off-course.

“Will!” she demanded. She felt his breeze sweep up along her side, making her ear flick.

His voice was urgent. “Winnette, you need to hide!”

“Why?” she shouted above the growing roar of the breezes around her. “What’s going on?”

“The breezes further west say that magical creatures are coming through the forest. They’re going in your direction!”

Winnette felt her heart jump into her throat. “Ponies?” she croaked.

“No! We do not know what these things are!”

Ridiculous. She controlled the weather. She had called the wind and ice from over the dead ocean. She had killed a stag with antlers like a dozen spear-points; she had watched bears clamber up trees to escape her. The centuries windigos had spent cowering in caves were over.

Winnette cleaved the many breezes and scythed into the forest, following the sounds of the wind.

Winnette heard them before she saw them. They were big, noisy creatures, crunching through the dense ice and snow with heavy limbs.

She sliced between the trees, watching them with eyes that were, if anything, keener as the sky darkened, though not as keen as she expected. She glanced up and saw the reason: though the sky was a deep purple color, no stars had come out. Even the Moon wasn’t visible.

Was this their magic? She studied the creatures that seemed to bring darkness with them. Their bodies were like mountain lions but much bigger, yet they had wings and beaks like eagles. Were they supposed to run or fly? Why weren't they flying if they were so slow in the snow?

And why were they moving in the direction of the cliff?

In the snow, she was fast and stealthy, and they were loud and slow. Still, they didn’t seem like prey to her. Nor predators. Not really creatures of the forest or the rock at all.

“What are they?” she whispered. The wind whipped around her nervously, until an ancient voice spoke.

“Wê wndryhto wðone ws wengel wnêat.”

“They’re king beasts,” Will translated.

“What does that mean?”

“Wê wfremman wnâteshwôn wteohhian. Wîe wonniman.”

“They’re thieves,” said Will.

The old voice spoke harshly. “Wê wscieppan wðorp wrâd wryht.

Will winced. “Not thieves. They made gardens of animals.”

“That sounds nice.”

“Wnânne.”

“It isn’t,” said Will.

“What do they want?”

The old voice sighed.

“Where are the stars?” Winnette demanded. “Why haven’t they come out yet?”

“Stars always disappear eventually,” said Will. “The Earth keeps moving on. New ones will come, you’ll see.”

“They can’t find us,” Winnette said. She watched two of the king beasts stop against a tree to wait for the third, who was smaller, to catch up. “There are dozens of caves under the cliff. They’ll take whatever they came for, and we’ll watch them leave without ever being spotted.”

Winnette chose a path through the trees, cutting back to the cliff. As long as she warned Welga and Wyna, they would be safe.

Gilda sagged when she reached the cliff. Gilbert had already been there for a few minutes, resting, like a boulder in the snow. Grace still had a ways to go.

Gilbert nodded at the sight of the dead ocean under the cliff, past the beach. “No snow there.”

“Mission accomplished,” Gilda muttered. She barely had the strength to speak loudly enough to be audible to her own ears. The wind had been fighting them the entire way. Now it was shrieking like an alarm all around them. She wondered if the wind was as scared of the dead ocean as she was.

They waited for Grace to join them. When she finally did, she sat, breathing hard. Gilda gave her a couple of minutes.

“I can’t get back,” Grace said.

“You can fly,” Gilbert said.

“No,” said Gilda.

“Just one griffon won’t stand out,” Grace pleaded.

“Then the fate of the project will be on your head.”

“So sue me! I’ll pay!”

“Not a price you can afford.”

Gilbert shifted. A small snowstorm fell off his shoulders. “Maybe it will be easier on the way back.”

“We’re not leaving empty-handed,” Gilda said. “Ponies never let it snow this far northeast, they’d risk losing living water to the dead ocean. They’re hiding something.”

“What do you think you’re going to find?” Grace demanded. “Gilda, please!”

Gilda stood up. “Come on."

They say history is written by the winners. If you win hard enough, you get to write the future as well.

That’s what Princess Platinum had done. She’d used the Bank like a cudgel, enforcing the order she preferred with the threat of economic extinction.

So the ancient pact between griffon and livestock had been shattered. The animals had been set loose beyond the once-safe borders of the disbanded griffon farms, and ponies took over ensuring their survival. Meanwhile, griffons had been forced to the mountains where farms wouldn’t be able to thrive.

They had to hunt instead, and the hunting had been bad. Griffons were imbalanced in the air and ungraceful on the ground. The winters, although warmer than they had been when the windigos used to run wild with the wind, had been especially hard.

And griffons had turned to studying the best available source of protein, the ants and beetles and things, and noticed, in their desperation, certain possibilities.

“There’s caves,” said Gilda, leading the path down the switchbacks. There were slopes rising up and down all along the cliffside, so much and so orderly that they seemed unnatural. “We’ll sleep in one. Maybe catch some grubs holed up where it’s warm. In the morning, we’ll find whatever the ponies are hiding here.”

The griffons had faced two questions after Princess Platinum had conquered the sun and moon. One was resolved by farming bugs.

The other questions griffons had was this: how do we go back to our farms and ranches, our cattle and pigs and goats, the steaks and ribs and the sweet, oozing fat?

Or, more simply:

How do we become rulers once again?

After much deliberation, griffons had concluded that ponies were strong because their society was built around friendship. Across the continent, pony society worked together peaceably to accomplish extraordinary tasks. A pony in Caliponia and a pony in Manehattan had an easier time cooperating than two griffon neighbors did.

This power of cooperation had something to do with money. That was why the One Bank was so strong.

So griffons had decided to copy the ponies. And to copy ponies, they had changed themselves. For generations, griffons had interacted with each other monetarily, or not at all.

Wing and tail, fur and feather….

When Nightmare Moon had returned with a dark fury to the throne, it had been “not at all” for the lucky, and a spear between the ribs for the unlucky.

Paw and talon, beak and fang….

Griffons had made a critical mistake. They had left the money supply, the glue of their societal order, in the hoofs of ponies.

”Your culture is so fascinating,” Helium Float had exclaimed. “It’s like you found a way to increase transaction costs by using markets! We do things the other way around.”

Gilda slid cautiously down a slope.

Never again.

She peered into a cave.

Never again.

Gilbert followed after, bent over with his wings folded in. Grace came too, and sat against the cave wall, shivering.

Gilda took out an incandescent bug attractor she’d bought for the mission and switched it on. Once they had caught enough for a few mouthfuls each, she would light a proper fire.

The harsh blue glow hurt her eyes. Wincing, she turned her face toward the back of the cave.

Never….

“Whoa,” said Gilbert.

Grace looked too. “Oh...oh, wow! Gilda, hey, Gilda! Look!”

Gilda was looking. The back of the cave was piled with old junk. She saw scrolls and quilts and hats and clothes, toys and devices and things, brilliant pink and green gemstones.

And copper.

Lots and lots of copper.

6. A Place of Perfect Memory

Winnette sat stock-still by the mouth of the cave. Her ears occasionally flicked.

“They’re coming down the switchbacks,” she whispered.

“Toward us?” Welga asked.

“No,” Winnette answered after a moment.

Wyna wanted to know if Winnette was going to go hunting.

“Quiet,” Winnette said. Her right ear twitched.

“I’m hungry,” Wyna insisted.

“Eat the meat we already have!” snapped Winnette.

“I like it better fresh,” Wyna said.

“Wyna, shh, come over here and eat,” said Welga. When she’d gotten Wyna settled munching on the remains of the deer, she joined Winnette again. “What’s happening now?”

Winnette swiveled her head back and forth, raising one ear up higher, then the other. “They’re going into a cave.” Her ears flicked again. “They’re looking for something.”

“How do you know that?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you listening to something?”

Winnette looked at her with a frown. “Aren’t you?”

“I’m listening to you.”

Winnette didn’t answer. Welga sat down by Wyna and stroked her mane while she ate noisily.

“Quiet!” said Winnette.

Wyna made even more of a mess.

“Wyna, stop that!” Winnette hissed. Her face was a mask of fury.

Wyna glanced at Winnette, then at Welga, then grinned, the corners of her mouth sharp. Welga stroked her mane worriedly and looked out of the mouth of the cave at the evening sky. It was darkening, but stars weren’t coming out.

The sickly setting sun was more than halfway over the horizon now. It was like it was dying and taking the stars and other old things with it.

But I’m not old, Welga thought fiercely. You won’t take us. Not tonight.

“It’s leftovers from an old mine,” Gilda said. “This is what the ponies didn’t want us to find.” She turned to Gilbert and Grace. “They know about the project.”

She grabbed some pieces of copper from the back of the cave, then turned around and strode past them to the entrance. “Come on. We need to fly back while the ponies are distracted with the New Year celebration tonight.” Though she didn't like the idea of flying in this weird sky. The sun was all but set, and not a single star had come out, nor the moon.

“What are you talking about?” said Grace, bewildered. “It’s just some old junk from whatever lived here.”

“We can’t take that chance. Come on, Gilbert.” Awkwardly, the big griffon unfolded himself and began to follow her out.

“Wait!” yelled Grace, chasing after them. “Gilda, stop! We can rest here!”

Gilda shook her head.

“Gilda!” Grace screamed. She chased up the switchback after them. “Please, you’re being ridiculous! We can spend one night here!”

“Do you hear that?” said Winnette.

Welga had heard it. She’d understood it too, which was scarier. Whatever these things were, they could talk.

“I think they’re arguing,” said Winnette.

“Quiet!” said Wyna in an uncanny imitation of Winnette. She’d finished eating and was sitting at the mouth of the cave, resisting Welga’s attempts to wipe the area around her mouth clean.

“Stop that, Welga,” Winnette said automatically. Her head swiveled again, ears flicking almost constantly.

“Why should I?” said Wyna.

“Don’t,” said Welga.

“Because you could die!” said Winnette, blue eyes flashing.

“Don’t!” said Welga.

Winnette wanted to scream. Instead, she said, “Wyna, your safety depends on you listening to me right now. Do you understand?”

Wyna didn’t answer.

“Wyna, look at me!”

Wyna looked.

“Nod your head that you understand. If you don’t listen to me, you could die! Don’t you care about that?”

That sharp-cornered smile spread across Wyna’s face again. She broke eye contact with Winnette, looking out the cave mouth at nothing in particular. Then she jumped to her hoofs and was dashing away from them before anywone could stop her.

Gilda turned around. “Grace, I will pay you out of my own pocket. I will feed you out of my own rations.” I’m hurting her again. Why am I hurting her again? There were tears in her eyes, and she blinked them away before they could freeze. “Come on, we can’t wait!”

“Gilda, I—GILDA, WATCH OUT!”

Gilda whirled and saw a rocket speeding up the switchback, blasting snow out of its way. Gilda pressed herself against the rock wall. It shot past her. Gilbert stuck his taloned forefoot out, and suddenly the rocket was a kicking, struggling, blue-white—

“Pony!” said Gilda. “I told you! There must be more around here.”

“My paw is freezing,” said Gilbert. “It’s like holding ice.”

“Hold on tight,” said Gilda. The blueish filly was twisting to try to bite Gilbert’s foot, but she couldn’t reach. “We can get some answers. And some food,” she added to Grace. “They’ll have heard us arguing anyway; they know we’re here.”

“Where’d you come from?” Gilbert asked the filly. “Do you live in one of these caves?”

The filly screamed at them. A weird grin showed on her face, and then it was gone when Gilda blinked.

Gilbert hauled the violent little creature up the slope, Grace hurrying along behind. They didn’t get far before they saw two other ponies emerge from the mouth of a cave. In the gloom of the starless evening, their bodies were a deep, dark blue.

“Let her go,” said the taller one, stepping forward. The wind was so loud that Gilda could barely make out what she was saying.

“Do you live here?” Gilda called out to them. “We’ve traveled a long way. Let us join you in your cave!”

“Stop!” said the pony as Gilda advanced cautiously. “Stop all of this! We don’t want you here! You can’t be here! This is our place!”

“I’m a friend,” said Gilda. “I know a friend of Nova Flare of the Daughter bank.”

None of this seemed to register. The pony growled at her, viciously. It was a predatory noise. Gilda had never heard a pony sound like that.

“Wyna, are you okay?” the other pony shouted. She was smaller than the one who had stepped forward, but bigger than the filly struggling with Gilbert, who had to inch his way cautiously up the slippery slope. The middle sister, Gilda guessed.

“We caught her when she was about to fall off the switchback,” Gilda said. “She was going way too fast.”

“She’s going to fall!” the middle sister screamed. The wind stopped as suddenly as if they were indoors and all the windows had been closed.

“...Okay,” said Gilda, shaken. “We don’t want anyone to get hurt. Step back into your cave. We’re coming along with your sister. Grace, can you light a torch now that the wind has stopped?”

Grace passed the torch up to Gilda, who led them into the cave the ponies had retreated into. They were standing at the mouth but backed up when Gilda entered with the torch, hissing and averting their eyes at the bright light.

“Come on,” said Gilda quietly. Gilbert and Grace came in, the filly struggling tirelessly the whole time. Gilda examined the interior of the cave. It was overstuffed with junk, but she saw that there were mounds of copper here as well.

“Let her go,” said the oldest sister. Gilda nodded. Gilbert released the filly, who bounded toward the middle sister and hid behind her.

Gilda studied them. They really did look like sisters, and the biggest one stood bravely in front of the other two. As for their species, she wasn’t so sure anymore that they were ponies. Ponies didn’t have translucent white-blue color coats. Ponies didn’t have chills emanating from them like they were made of ice. And ponies didn’t live in caves by the dead sea and come out at night to swim through snow faster than they could gallop.

All three of them had bodies like ice, and two of them had eyes like tourmaline. The oldest had blue, icy eyes. The middle sister had green eyes, and the youngest sister had pink eyes. That wasn’t how pony genetics worked. That wasn’t how any genetics worked, as far as Gilda knew.

Strange, strange….

There were four cots. “Where’s your other sister?” she asked.

“What are you talking about?” the eldest demanded. “Why have you come here?”

“Keep an eye out for a fourth,” Gilda said to Gilbert. To the icy not-ponies, she said, “Do you live here alone? Do you have parents? Who lives in the other caves?”

“Why aren’t they going away?” demanded the littlest one in a choked voice.

Grace looked miserable. “Gilda, what are you doing?”

“Not sure,” Gilda admitted. She lifted the torch, sending shadows fleeing across the walls of the cave.

Strange, strange….

“Who cares if some ponies live in a cave?” Grace said. “Gilda, look, they’re afraid.”

“They’re not ponies,” said Gilda.

Listen, daughter.

Ah eh ee oh ah.

“They’re windigos.”

The sun fell below the horizon, and the sky was utterly dark. Under that starless canvas, the torch of the leader of the king beasts was the only source of light.

Winnette’s eyes jerked back and forth between the three king beasts. She couldn’t think of what to do.

This was it, this was it, this was it, it was over, and she’d failed, she’d lied, she’d broken her promise to Mom.

You’ll take care of her when I’m gone. Tell me you will.

I didn’t, Winnette shaped the words with her mouth. They disturbed the air so lightly that they hadn’t really been said at all.

…Then again, the air was so utterly still in that moment, and the sun so totally gone, that it was entirely possible that Winnette’s tiny little not-even-really-a-noise was, to somewone listening as intensely as you could possibly imagine, a scream loud enough to wake dead wind.

And if you listened even harder than that, you might have heard it screaming back, so faint and weak that the scream was no more than a little sigh.

Didn’t?

What ‘didn’t’?

I’m not gone yet.

In the corner of her eye, Winnette thought she saw the edge of the quilt on the fourth cot move with a rush of wind that snuffed out the king beast's torch.

Go, the voice might have sighed, or maybe the torch just went out on its own, maybe the quilt moving had been a trick of the light, maybe it was the fate of all windigos to die by the dead ocean or be burnt up under the sun, but all the maybes in the world mattered less than the fact that right now, she needed to take care of her sisters.

“GO!” Winnette screamed, and she was jumping and kicking where she knew the leader of the king beasts had been, and she felt the impact and heard the grunt. Winnette landed on the ground, stumbled, “GO!” she screamed, and Welga got it, “Come on!” she said to Wyna.

“What’s going on?” demanded the male king beast. She heard him step forward. She screamed at him, the scream of the windigos who had hunted with the wind from one end of the continent to the other, who had walked under ice. She heard him stumble backwards.

The three of them tore out of the cave, landing in the snow outside. Winnette struck up the switchback, blind in the utter darkness, but she knew the path, and she heard Welga and Wyna right behind her. In a minute they reached the cliff.

“Winnette!” said a voice.

“Will!” she cried with relief. He was there suddenly, a breeze finally blowing again.

“What’s going on? The king beasts went down to the caves, and then the sun…Winnette, something happened to the sun!”

“Good!” she snarled. “There’s a lot more that’s going to happen to it if I have any say.”

“What do you need from me?”

“Be my eyes and get us out of here.”

“No problem.”

“Who are you talking to?” Wyna said.

“Wyna, trust me, okay? Stay close to me. We’re finally leaving the caves like you always wanted.”

“Wait—why? Winnette!” Her voice rose in pitch until it was a terrified shriek. Winnette heard Welga move to comfort her.

There would be time to deal with that later. There would be time for everything.

“Here,” said Will, and Winnette heard his voice and followed, and her sisters heard her and followed. Swiftly other voices joined as well, the once-quelled winds rising all around them. She couldn’t see it, but she felt the snow blowing all around them and knew that nothing could see well enough to follow them, nothing could swim fast enough to catch them.

The snow was as fresh and soft as it had been the previous day. And the voices joined her in her speed, keeping up and running ahead, calling out every rock and root for her, and she never felt anything but snow and wind and the tears sticking to her cheeks.

At first it was ten voices, then a hundred, then a thousand, then….

“Faster, faster, faster!” one screamed with glee.

“Follow me, I know the fastest way,” bragged another. “Back in my day, no wone could keep up with me.”

“Can’t you fly? Go on, fly if you can! Just jump into the air and weigh nothing at all!”

“Wâlêoran! Wâlêoran wonlic we!”

Winnette answered back with screams and cries and a single thought.

I don’t know most of you. But there will be time for that. Somehow, I’ll find time for that.

The griffons stumbled out of the cave, staring in shock at the disappearing forms of the windigos rushing up the switchbacks through the snow. Then their eyes carried up past the cliff to the empty, velvet sky.

The rush of wind, less than a breeze, swept to the mouth of the cave and back around, passing over three of the cots. As it did, it turned the pages of what might have been old diary, a spellbook, a journal, or a conversation. By some coincidence, the book opened to the last page, which had but a single line written on it, and the little breath of wind passed over the words and faded into nothing.

Don't worry, Mom, I figured it out. —Winnette

Under a sky where not a single star shone, three figures streaked through the snow like wraiths.

They flew up slopes and leaped into the air and were moving even faster when they landed.

By the time they reached the forest, a hurricane of winds surrounded them, whipping up a storm of snow and ice. The three wraiths burst through the trees, and a multitude of winds streaked ahead of them and behind and around.

Winnette’s eyes were starting to adjust. There was no light from above, but the snow was faintly white, casting everything in a spectral glow, as if it had held in the starlight from last night.

It was bright enough to see now, and so Welga and Wyna didn’t need to follow right behind her. They spread out beside her, taking in with tourmaline eyes the frozen trees glimmering with starlight from below and the sky as dark as sleep.

For a while, hooves made no noise as they sliced through the snow. Even the voices were stunned into silence.

For a while, hooves made no noise, and the snow damped the sound of their breath.

There was no sound from the spin of the Earth or the growth of a tree, no sound from the slow decay of a mountain or the dying of water.

For a while, the only noise was the sound that reading makes.

Until a voice from the wind finally broke the silence:

“Sorry, but I’m really bad with awkward silences. My name’s ______, can I ask yours?”

And as Winnette journeyed in the land of new snow, breathing the breath of old voices, she began to understand that the place of the windigos was not under the sun, nor even exploring the dark night of the faceless moon. No, theirs was the land of eternal whiteness, where beautiful blue creatures swam a scene of snow under the pale and winking stars.

A suspended place of perfect memory, where no voice was truly silenced and no dance had to end. Where Wyna, the last windigo, would have forever to roam, to hunt, and listen, and her sisters would still be able to find her, play with her, teach her, tease her, hold her and love her until even the stars fell from the sky and the universe was a single black coal with all its embers burnt out.

Author's Note

The blank is meant to be there.

7. Incidents Under an Unwatching Sky

Captain Downdraft and her team winged silently through the empty night. Many of them were flying upside-down.

Any other time, Downdraft would have snapped at them. But Downdraft herself had spent the last three miles drifting on her back, gazing up at the rippling velvet sky.

With the winter wind burning behind them, they had flown southwest, giving them a perfect view of the sunset. The sun had been eerily red and large, like a dying star. In its final minutes, the sun had seemed to loom close enough to the Earth, towering over it like the mountain peaks above the griffon villages, that Downdraft could see the motion of the huge red orb spinning above them. Arcs of fire bigger than the Earth streaked over the center, like the tail of a great phoenix. And Downdraft wondered if there had once been something flying over the surface of the Sun very much like she flew over the Earth now, watching the small blue planet below, watching the ocean slowly turn black.

Veins of superheated plasma bulged throughout the sun, like a tumor inside it had expanded and metastasized.

“Sweet Celestia,” yelled Scud, “the Bank is pulling the Sun into the Earth!”

Doldrum knew then that it wasn’t just a vision she was seeing. The Sun really was falling toward the Earth. In the dying light of the evening, something long and narrow flashed in the distance. It was thin, but dazzlingly bright. When Downdraft blinked, she saw a thin purple line imposed on her eyelids, the result of local dimming in her retinas.

“She wouldn’t,” gasped Lieutenant Stratum. “She can’t!”

“She’s not,” said Downdraft. “The Sun is tethered. When you swing something on the end of a string, how do you slow it down?”

Tears stung her eyes. The realization that Princess Celestia had to participate in this process wounded her heart. She had been on Princess Celestia’s side against her detractors ever since the Nightmare Moon incident. Nightmare Moon hadn’t even ruled for twenty-four hours out of a thousand years. Downdraft couldn’t get that kind of consistency from the fly-thru at the local Hayburger. And the oat fries always got soggy in the bag by the time she got them home.

The ultimate free-body diagram burned above them, meteoring to its final answer.

What did this look like from the ground? If there was any life anywhere else in the world, what did it look like across the oceans? And from the mountains? And in the Crystal Empire, if they weren’t all busy playing hockey and licking the maple syrup off of trees?

What did this look like at home?

Downdraft’s throat constricted. Her heart throbbed. She squeezed her eyes shut to fight the pain. That purple line stretched across a year of memories of cold beds and dinners left in the oven overnight. She remembered their Hearts and Hooves day, celebrated two weeks late, in a crummy diner sitting in the booth together, sharing chocolate chip pancakes and complaints about new noise regulations for thunder. Then it was March, and she’d just heard about his parents, and rushed home as fast as she could, and she’d still been a day late, not in time to hold his hoof or slap the doctor across his face for thinking he had any right to say that it was really for the best.

It was spring, and they were talking about children. She was lying with her head in his lap: “I kind of like where my career is going. We might as well wait till I’m fired to get pregnant.”

“I don’t know, the benefits package is actually pretty good for new parents.”

“Either way, we’d have to spend an actual night together. Remember what those are like? You know, I’m thinking we should sell the bed and get a single.”

“Is an entire night required?” He grinned down at her. “You know, eagles do this thing where they meet in midair and—”

She jammed her head into his stomach. “If you want to mate like eagles, then you can sleep in a nest like one.”

“Will you be there?”

“If there’s food.”

“Then nests are okay.”

Then it was summer, and everything was about the NGDP Targeting Festival and the weird guidelines that Princess Celestia had set. Then it was eternal night, for a few hours or so, and then it was about recovery and repair, reorganizing and recounting. And it was politics with a fresh edge, a razor slicing open the skin under old, hairy moles.

Autumn, and...what had even happened in autumn? Just one overtime job after the next. Date night had been early morning burritos and the shock of realizing she was already late for her shift.

It would all be better once the new year started. Although she was starting to see the appeal of doing things eagle style.

A hundred different images of herself broke across her eyelids like a reflection in cracked glass, and the only clear vision was the purple line from a single bright flare from an invisible chain. It was a gash between them all, or it was glue holding it all together, or it was just the sunlight bleaching the pigment out of the back of her eyes. Recovering from the damage—rebuilding the pigment in an ungainly purple fissure—took precedence over her personal life even in memory.

Her eyes opened, and the sun died.

It hurtled below the Earth and disappeared. And then it was silent.

Not that the Sun dying had made any noise. There wasn’t exactly a great crashing noise as the Sun hit the concrete floor on the bottom of outer space. But there was an unfreezing of the muscles throughout Downdraft’s body that felt a lot like silence.

Nighttime, and the stars didn’t come out.

Nighttime, and there should have been a moon.

After a while, Downdraft turned over onto her back and stared at the sky while she flew.

Now she was facing forward again. Looking down, actually, because the quiet gloom underneath her was quite interesting. She had never seen Equestria so un-lit before. It meant there were no shadows to disguise depth, nor to add it.

Little points of light flickered in the direction of Ponyville. Who are you, that you would light lights tonight? thought Downdraft. She remembered what she had read in the newspapers during early morning flights, the occasional flock of geese dodging out of her way with indignant squawks while she sipped cold coffee and caught up on last week’s news. Twilight Sparkle, was it? One of the ones responsible for the “brilliant” weather plan. Though Rainbow Dash, who was painfully honest (or was it loyalty?), had nothing but praise for the purple egghead.

She felt a slight change in the direction of the wind through her feathers. Lieutenant Stratum pulled level alongside her.

“Hey, Downie,” whispered Lieutenant Stratum. “What’s up?”

Captain Downdraft nodded at her.

Stratum gave an embarrassed smile. “It’s just...I know the sky is all crazy and whatever, but it’s been two hours and no pony is talking. I’m kind of going insane, you know?”

Downdraft exhaled.

“What’s up with that over there?” said Stratum.

Downdraft looked in the direction of Stratum’s gaze. “Ponyville. Some hicks setting their hay on fire, maybe.”

“Yum! But I meant over there.”

Downdraft squinted.

“See where the snowfall stops?”

“Oh...yeah. That’s the Everfree Forest,” said Downdraft.

“Doesn’t it need snow too?”

“If you want to fly a cloud over it, be my guest. Just be sure to finalize your will first.”

“I’m good.”

Their wings beat the air behind them.

“Doesn’t it need water though? A forest is trees, right?”

“No pony knows what the Everfree Forest does about water,” said Downdraft. “Only eight ponies alive today have ever been inside it.”

It wasn’t much longer until sunrise. Behind her, Downdraft thought she could see the first intimation of pink light at the edge of the world. Westward, somewhere in the distance, her husband was waiting at home. There were probably oat cakes in the oven. That, or she was getting a divorce.

“But, but Downie...look at that! Isn’t that tree on fire?”

Downdraft looked, but there was nothing.

“No, Downie, look—that little ripple!”

Downdraft saw it.

She said a word that made Lieutenant Stratum cover her ears politely.

Oat cakes browning in the oven, and a pot of coffee boiling…. He knew exactly how she took it. Twenty lumps of sugar. And a few more to suck on. It pulled at her attention like a magnet on iron.

“Change course,” she muttered. “We need to check that out.”

“You don’t want us to go into the Everfree!” squawked Lieutenant Stratum.

“No, but we can talk to the pony who does.” Downdraft remembered the name from the papers and Rainbow Dash’s rather baffling description of her. “Pinkie Pie.”

Black flames rushed up Willow’s body like a thousand teeming ants. More black torches were pressed against parts of her trunk and to the ends of her long hanging leaves. Everywhere the torches touched, black flames clung on and started to climb.

Her screams were like a saw blade against a metal pipe. The sky above was serene, empty, and waiting, like a freshly erased blackboard. Her voice scratched across it like nails.

The black fire was spreading all over her body. It carved into the exposed places on her trunk with brutal intelligence. Smoke made of Willow’s body filled the air.

The ones who carried the torches touched them to other places on Willow. She went up like a rocket.

“Next,” said a tree, a black walnut.

They dragged the next one forward.

“Where is the Decision Tree?” prompted the black walnut.

“Dead,” mumbled Holly.

“Burn hir children first,” said the black walnut.

“First,” roared Holly with unexpected strength, “do not think about pink elephants—”

A scream lit up the night, brighter than a forest fire.

Far away, to the north and east, three windigos cut through the snow like seals arching their bodies through living water—

—when there had been living water—

—they swam on, and above them, in the sky—

Elsewhere...the night dragged on.

It teetered on the edge of yesterday and tomorrow.

Under the unwatching sky….

Darkness gloomed into a clearing in the Everfree Forest. It fell languidly, like snowflakes in a snowglobe. This darkness wasn’t just the absence of light. It was thicker, like a fluid. Translucent in the nighttime, like a jellyfish in the water, its tentacles touched here and there, groped and felt….

The murky black jellyfish settled like snow over an island surrounded by a moat. There was a castle, and around the castle was a garden.

Trails of darkness glided over the plants that bordered the exterior of the castle. Purple Knights they were, though the leaves were falling off and the stems cracking. Elsewhere, the tenebrous shadow oozed through rough bluestern grass, which surrounded a small pond where slimy pondweed floated on the surface, gently decaying.

Plumes of Indian grass were so dry they broke off under the gentle pressure of the darkness, which hastily withdrew. What should have been bright purple blooms of blazing star had flaked away.

Individual sunset-colored honeylocust trees stood over dying rows of wild rye. Dry husks of white snakeroot jutted out here and there.

There was a dry feeling to the whole collection. These were prairie plants, out of place in the wet, shadowy Everfree Forest.

A little bit of shattered glass was on the ground. The caliginous tendrils rushed up and found the broken window. They flooded in…

...searched the lifeless rooms…

...found a smashed table, dust and splinters, and flecks of dried scraps of leaves, as if caterpillars had been there and consumed all but the most disgusting parts…

...hesitated for a moment in the library...

...and retreated.

A hypothesis was confirmed. The darkness lifted, leaving only the regular sort.

Tomorrow became today, and today became yesterday. Like an uphill sprinter, the Earth strained toward morning.

The sun began to rise.

In the morning hours of the new year, three windigos streak across a white plain. In the morning they skulk under the shadows of a long-leafed tree and watch the brilliant red blaze of the newborn sun sweep across the sky and burn away the shadows.

The fire-sparked light touches them, and to their astonishment, they are not burned.

And the colors are like nothing they’ve ever seen.

Across Equestria, across the whole expanse of the world, creatures big and small, smart and dumb, magical and ordinary, watch the sun fall and rise and die and be reborn.

Some of them have snow in their hair….

There are two creatures who miss the New Year’s sunrise.

One is Nightmare Moon, a pony. The other is a tree who wanted to be a pony. Their meeting, brief and violent though it was, would prove to be a turning point in the history of Equestria.

But that was over six months ago. And now, it is…

...One week later.

Shh. The creature called Twilight Sparkle is waking up.

Let’s see what she does.

8. The Second Ticket

“Pppbbbh!”

Twilight woke up spluttering. A midnight snore had sucked strands of her mane into her mouth, making her feel like she was choking on an old net. Her dreams had been filled with spiders, and she wanted to slap her hooves at the shadows on the bed, just in case.

“Blegh….”

Well, that was a pleasant night’s sleep ruined. Twilight slid out of bed and noticed the mail next to Spike’s sleeping body. She crouched over his form, brushed her lips over his scaly forehead, and took the mail in her teeth so that the glow of her magic wouldn’t disturb his sleep.

It was still dark out. Twilight stumped down the stairs in the heavy way of those whose legs haven’t quite gotten the signal yet that the body is supposed to be awake. They took her down to the kitchen area, where her head stuck itself in the fridge and rummaged for something to have for breakfast while her horn got busy making the coffee behind her.

She set the mail down on the counter to go through in a bit, but the gold trim from the package on top caught her eye. While the coffee gurgled in the background, she looked at the package with the light of the lavender glow cast from her horn. It was the invitation to the Grand Galloping Gala this fall—well, whatever. She had been going to it as long as she had been managing it, and though she wasn’t managing it this year, Princess Celestia always invited her old students.

Besides, basically everypony important got invited, and there was hardly anypony more important than a Chief Executive Economist of the Daughter bank of Ponyville.

Twilight turned to the window, cup of coffee floating by her head, where the faint yellow on the horizon that signified sunrise still had yet to show.

The Daughter bank….

After the hectic initial days, there wasn’t actually a lot to do at the Daughter bank. The thing ran itself, and what it did was little more than what ponies expected it to. Only in the event of a catastrophe like Nightmare Moon would the Daughters be more than a source of paperwork and a fancy title.

And headaches. There were all those editorials in the papers, all the research coming out of organizations she had never heard of before the Great Succession, publishing papers that wore the skin of science and had none of the heart.

“Who are you?” Spoiled Rich had asked her.

Twilight sipped her cup of coffee. She didn’t subscribe to any of the Flim-Flam-funded journals or their newspapers, but the Daughter bank had a subscription to everything that was relevant to its operations, as defined quite generously by Twilight. She spent a lot of hours in her office there, reading and thinking.

The sky was just barely giving off a golden glow in the distance. If she went out walking now, as she had taken to doing, the trees would be casting long bluish shadows on the snow. Those were quiet, frozen hours, with the trees like snowy statues, the new sun climbing sluggishly, and so few souls awake that it was easy to avoid them. The icy crunch of a single hoofstep that wasn’t her own could shatter the entire illusion.

Though some of those other souls she quite liked. She had spent a morning with Applejack helping her put blankets on the trees. And another morning with Fluttershy feeding her nmeoles[1], or whatever Fluttershy insisted on calling them this week.

[1] Naturally or Magically Existent Organisms, Life-forms, and Entities. Also known as animals.

It would be nice to take a walk.

Deciding she might as well open the mail first, she turned to the package on the counter and tore it open. She scanned the formal letter—no mention of her status as the CEE of a Daughter bank.

Two pieces of rectangular paper with gold trim fell out of the package onto the counter.

And between them was a third, smaller note, in Princess Celestia’s hoofwriting:

Bring a friend! —C

Twilight’s mouth fell open.

She had five friends.

Who was going to get the extra ticket?

Something rapped energetically at the door. Twilight quickly stuffed the tickets and the letter into a cupboard

“Coming!” she called, folding Princess Celestia’s hoofwritten note and tucking it behind one ear.

It was Pinkie Pie, beaming behind a white paper box.

“I won’t be long,” she said, stepping inside at Twilight’s stammered invitation. She wore a bright white scarf with a red line running through, making her look like she was wreathed by peppermint. When her poofy pink mane began to bob up and down as she talked, Twilight got a whiff of the ingredients Pinkie Pie must have recently been baking with and knew why peppermint had come to her mind. “How’s my favorite purple pony doing?”

Twilight winced. Pinkie Pie’s p’s popped like a balloon of bubblegum, and Spike was still sleeping.

“Oh, sorry!” said Pinkie Pie in a whisper that could have shaken the snow from the top of the tallest mountain. “I’m visiting the forest with some cupcakes, and your house is on the way, so I brought one by for you!” She popped open the top of the box, revealing a colorful assortment of, indeed, cup-shaped pastries.

Twilight swallowed her drool. Sugarcube Corner, Ponyville’s local pastry franchise, had been reviled in the Flim-Flam-controlled press two days ago for marketing addictive snacks. She had to admit, there was something—she swallowed again—alluring about the deep red velvet cake and the luscious dark chocolate, something painfully tempting about the generous heaping of peanut butter chips in one and the hypnotic swirls of vanilla frosting in another—

“Uagh,” Twilight’s throat made an involuntary motion. It was that or drown.

“Are you okay?” Pinkie Pie asked. Her bright eyes were completely innocent of any devious plot to bring the world to heel under her sugary dominion.

“I’m fine,” said Twilight. I can stop at any moment. I’m just picking up this lavender-frosted one with the glittering little sugar crystals and the cake that smells like what lemons probably wish they smelled like because Pinkie Pie was so nice to come all this way through the snow and it would be rude not to take one. I don’t need to eat this. It would be weird to lick it in front of her. Stop licking it!

Twilight got her tongue back in her mouth, and only a little frosting came with.

“Isn’t it a little early to be out?” Twilight asked. She set the cupcake down on the counter for later, trying not to look at it.

“It’s a long walk to the Everfree Forest,” Pinkie Pie said cheerfully.

Twilight couldn’t hold back a nervous shudder. “And you really feel safe there?”

“Safe? Um, no? I feel needed.” Pinkie Pie looked solemn for a moment, a very unusual expression on the face of a pony who was usually full of laughter, usually because she was laughing, usually at her own joke.

“Needed?”

“Yeah. You know, I used to live on a rock farm. Did I ever tell you? It was fun! Anyway, it was near the mountains, right? And so griffons would visit! Have you ever met a griffon? You should ask Rainbow Dash about them. Anyway, where was I? Rainbow Dash?”

“Griffons,” Twilight prompted. It wasn’t the first time that Pinkie Pie’s train of thought had been knocked off course by her own stream of consciousness.

“Oh, yeah! Well, it’s so funny! They use money for everything. If you ask, how are you???, they respond, a penny for my thoughts!!!”

Twilight vaguely remembered a report coming out of Nova’s Daughter Bank about a theory of monetary barter. She’d been too busy to read it carefully.

“It was just sort of sad, you know? And the trees feel the same way. They’re hungry, but they don’t know how to eat. That’s just how it feels. I can’t explain it. Just a feeling!”

“Is this your Pinkie Sense?”

Pinkie Pie nodded. Twilight didn’t doubt Pinkie Pie’s sixth sense for the language of the trees. Utterly blind, Pinkie Pie had led her and the rest of their friends through a maze of thorns without a single misstep during their adventure into the Everfree Forest. Twilight would have followed Pinkie Pie anywhere, except perhaps to a slim waistline.

“I’m sure you know what’s best,” Twilight said. “Your cupcakes could fill the void in anything less void-y than Nightmare Moon.”

Pinkie Pie scoffed. “Once I finish my experimental mega-chocolate ‘Black Hole’ cupcake, even Nightmare Moon won’t be able to escape the cake.”

“Oh. How’s that going?”

“It’ll be better once I find it. It keeps absorbing all the light in the room, and I lose track of where it is.”

Twilight decided not to ask any more questions about Pinkie Pie’s investigations into the mysteries of marshmallow and the cryptic secrets of confectionery. The dark unknown of the dolce was best left to experts. After all, the uninitiated or the weak-willed risked coming out of their experiments unrecognizable—mostly owing to massive weight gain and a rather embarrassing smear of chocolate around the lips. (The initial temptation and the inevitable self-destruction were just two of the ways in which baking and summoning eldritch horrors were very much alike, in Twilight’s opinion.)

“Speaking of Nightmare Moon, I did want to ask you about something,” Pinkie Pie said. She actually looked a little uncomfortable. Twilight hadn’t known that Pinkie Pie could be uncomfortable. Pinkie Pie bounced across the quicksand of interpersonal norms and rammed her way through the barriers of social awkwardness with all the awareness of a rhinoceros trampling through a spider web. What could possibly be bothering her?

“I know it’s a difficult subject,” Pinkie Pie said.

Twilight’s mind raced.

Lemon Hearts?

“No, it’s okay!” Twilight said. “I’m trying to—you can ask me about—”

“Since they’re your sisters,” said Pinkie Pie unhappily. “Or whatever. I mean, I know you’re not related to them.”

Lemon Hearts had never been a Sister. “What are you talking about?”

“I saw in the paper yesterday about a piece of research—”

“Oh.”

“—from one of the Daughter banks—”

“What?”

“—about the anticompetitive effect of Sugarcube Corners spreading to other cities—”

“Huh?”

“They said that too many stores from out of town would depress the, um, private creation of public goods, because, like, we’d be less invested in them? It was from the Manehattan bank,” Pinkie Pie added.

Twilight constructed what was probably Twinkleshine’s argument in her mind. “That’s dumb,” she said firmly after a minute of thought. “They’re using this to block your expansion?”

“Probably? I’m worried they might. I was trying to buy a piece of property in Manehattan. Just a small corner!”

Pinkie Pie looked so miserable and helpless that her mane was starting to droop. Twilight forced herself to smile. “Don’t worry, I’ll write to Twinkleshine and get this cleared up.” And find out why she’s going after one of mine.

Pinkie Pie’s prodigiously permed hair sprang back into place. “Thanks!” she beamed.

She gave Twilight a hug before leaving. That close, Twilight got strong impressions of vanilla and peanut butter from her hair in addition to peppermint.

The door closed. Twilight let out a deep breath she hadn’t realized she was holding in. She grabbed the cupcake from where she had set it down and sat heavily on a stool, floating the two golden tickets out in front of her eyes.

Was Pinkie Pie the one she should invite?

Consumed by thought, Twilight didn’t even notice as she took the first bite of lemon and lavender cake.

The sun lighting the snow like the golden edge of a toasting marshmallow, Twilight waddled through the snow to Rarity’s house, bundled in winter clothes. They hadn’t seen each other since the New Year, thanks to the piles of snow everywhere, and had made plans for an early tea.

“Now that school has started again, I finally have some time to myself,” Rarity said. She was draped across a glitzy purple sofa, wearing a fuzzy white bathrobe and stroking her cat, Opalescence, while next to her, her teacup floated in a magical blue glow. “Keeping Sweetie Belle entertained all day was not good for my productivity.” She sipped her tea. “Mm. Applejack came by earlier to cart her off with the other schoolfillies. An actual cart, mind you. Bless that pony. I can’t deal with this much snow, Twilight. I just can’t.”

Rarity was the most obvious choice for the extra ticket. She was elegant and fancy. She liked wearing dresses and talking to rich ponies.

“It’s all because of Nightmare Moon,” Twilight said. “This was originally going to be a mild winter. I did my best, but Ponyville had to take its fair share of the excess snow like everyplace else.”

Opalescence made a grumpy noise. Rarity shushed her and stroked her from head to tail. “Oh, I don’t doubt that this was the best plan. Canterlot knows what’s best!” She giggled nervously and took a sip of tea. “It just makes traveling such a chore. I don’t expect I’ll see Fluttershy until the spring if she doesn’t come up to visit. Ah! You’re one of the Canterlot eggheads who makes these decisions, or you were. I really shouldn’t complain to you.”

Rarity was also the most obvious choice not to give the extra ticket to. She had such an inferiority complex when it came to the rich and the elite. If there was anypony for whom Twilight could see the Grand Galloping Gala being an utter disaster, it was Rarity. She was the most vulnerable, the most exposed.

“All I ever did was help Princess Celestia with her workload,” Twilight said. She was buried in Rarity’s armchair. Experience had taught her that it would be a struggle to get up. “This is good tea,” she said to change the subject.

“Three times the regular caffeine,” said Rarity, staring off vaguely.

Twilight calmly put the cup back down on its diamond-pattern saucer. She might not have the opportunity to do things calmly in a short while. “Why?”

“Twilight, the dressmaker’s life is one of creative fits of passion,” Rarity said. “At any moment I might be struck by an idea for an entirely different concept of dress. I must be open to the possibilities. And I certainly don’t steal anypony else’s ideas,” she added gloomily. She was still staring away as if there was something incredibly distracting about the air to her left.

“What are you talking about?” Twilight asked. “Did somepony accuse you of stealing their idea?”

“Accuse?” Rarity laughed like the high chime of a bell rung by a furious hunchback. “Oh, no, dear Twilight, I have not been accused of anything. An accusation requires evidence, or at least courage! I have been insinuated against. Vile rumors—grotesque misapprehensions—but there is nothing for me to say, because what has been said? A linkage of phrases, a certain pattern to certain statements that give rise in the mind to ideas that cannot be reduced to any mere accusation. Twilight, I am dealing with the media.”

“Tell me what’s happening, and maybe I can help.”

“Ha!” Rarity’s cat gave a vicious howl at being rubbed the wrong way. Rarity didn’t seem to notice, just stroking the cat insistently over the noise. “How can you help me, Twilight? Nothing has been done to me! No wrong, no insult—I would sooner ask you to fight fog. Brilliant though you are, even you cannot refute the ghosts of arguments.”

“Rarity, you’re being dramatic.”

“I should hope so! It’s one of my better qualities. A dress that doesn’t tell a story is a sad affair.”

“Rarity. Please. A little more information?”

Rarity finished her cup of tea. When she lowered the cup, she wore a bitter expression that twisted further as she spoke. “Some—pony—named Gamma Glisten—I shan’t say accused me, or no doubt I’d be sued for libel—indicated, perhaps, the possibility of the notion that I might have directly plagiarized Suri Polomare’s latest collection. This is, to put it mildly, like saying that I style my hair after yours, Twilight, no offense.”

“None taken,” said Twilight. It was no secret that she put about as much work into her hair as Pinkie Pie did into eating a balanced diet.

“If anything, Suri Polomare is copying me,” mused Rarity. “I don’t know what to do, Twilight. These things are taken very seriously in the world of fashion. The only reason we stopped cutting the right forelegs off thieves is because society got soft.”

“Um—”

“It would make more sense to pluck an eye out. For a thief of visual beauty. Don’t you think?”

“As a public figure, I cannot affirm the reasonableness of plucking out eyes as a form of justice,” Twilight said. “But just between you and me, it does make more sense.”

“Great. I’ll lure her here, and you’ll be waiting behind the door with the ice cream scoop—”

“I didn’t say to do it,” Twilight said. “Did you say Gamma Glisten is the one spreading this rumor?”

“She used me, in a manner so oblique you could have slipped very far and very quickly down the slope she drew, to discuss aspects of modern copyright issues, or something to that effect,” Rarity said. “I found out only after tracing some very odd news stories to their source.”

My Gamma Glisten? Twilight wondered. But why?

There’s too much to read. I haven’t been paying enough attention to things.

I’ve been selfish. I’ve been paying too much attention to my thing. When it only exists to aid theirs.

“It must be a misunderstanding,” Twilight said. “I’ll sort it out.”

“You’re a dear, Twilight. I don’t know what I’d do without you. Sweetie Belle is unreliable with an ice cream scoop.”

Twilight laughed. She waited for Rarity to do the same.

“You were joking, right?”

“About what?” Rarity put Opalescence, who was fussing, on the floor. “Twilight?”

“Yes?”

“Sweetie Belle said that Diamond Tiara has been saying things about you.”

“Oh. Yeah. I know.”

“If you need any help….”

“I talked to her mother. It’s okay. I mean, it’s not, but I’m handling it.”

“Ah.” Rarity frowned slightly. “I was eager to befriend the Rich family when they moved here. They are Canterlot elite, you know, even if they live out here. I can’t say that I failed to ingratiate myself with them, nor can I say that I succeeded. Spoiled Rich is a very complex mare.”

“I don’t think so.”

Rarity looked surprised.

“I’ve read what she’s read,” Twilight said, “and I have the measure of her intelligence. I’m not impressed.”

“Don’t underestimate Ponyville ponies just because they don’t have your education.”

“I’ve learned not to. But she isn’t a Ponyville pony. She’s from Canterlot.”

Twilight slogged her way up to Applejack’s house. Partly she did this because slogging through the snow made her very hungry, and Applejack usually made enough food for one meal to kill a whole family of bears.

Applejack brought Twilight into her office, looking a bit strange with glasses on her face.

“Winter’s the season for budgets, accounts, new orders, applications,” she explained. “Have a seat. Walk must’ve been hard in all that snow. Care for a snack?”

“Ye—”

“Stay put.”

Applejack disappeared for a few minutes. When she came back, she was carrying a platter of apple turnovers.

“I’ll have a few,” Twilight said. They smelled like cinnamon and baked sugar. The apple smell was everywhere in Applejack’s house, but it was especially potent coming from the steaming-hot pastries.

“You’ll have ten,” said Applejack from experience. She set down a hot mug of apple cider by Twilight as well and sat behind the desk.

For a couple of minutes, Twilight worked steadily to transform the apple turnovers into crumbs and the apple cider into less apple cider. Applejack watched with a faint smile.

“Good?”

“Good,” Twilight agreed. She sat back and rested her forelegs on her mysteriously bulging stomach.

Applejack’s pencil looked like termites had gotten to it, it was so badly chewed. She tapped it rhythmically on the table. “You know you don’t need an excuse to come up and have a meal here.”

Twilight was all too familiar with how little reason Applejack needed to feed somepony.

“But you always do have a reason,” Applejack said. “What can I do you for, Twilight?”

Applejack would know how to use the Grand Galloping Gala to forge business connections. But I don’t know if she’d feel comfortable at a fancy party full of stuffy upper crust types. I mean, she is an expert on both stuffings and crusts, but not this kind.

“Um, how’s the Cerberus doing?”

“Sitting pretty in the barn you and the fillies fixed up,” Applejack said. “The snow doesn’t seem to bother her. She’s got a lot of blubber.”

Applejack spoke about having a giant three-headed helldog for a business partner like it was an everyday thing. Ever since coming back from their victory over Nightmare Moon, it had been.

Applejack took off her glasses. “But you didn’t come here to talk about the Cerberus.”

“No…something weird is going on. Rarity and Pinkie Pie’s businesses are both being attacked by some of my Sis...some of the other CEEs of the Daughter banks. I wanted to check on you.”

“Fluttershy doesn’t have to worry about that, and Rainbow Dash can weather criticism like the sky can weather a storm,” Applejack mused.

Twilight noticed that Applejack was avoiding the question. “What about you?”

“There’s always maneuvering among the members of the VEG[2],” Applejack said. “Fruit mares can fight like two dogs over the last apple core.”

[2]The Voices of Equestrian Growers, a professional fruit-grower association. Having been granted monopolies over their respective fruits, the growers had created their association to organize meetings both to discuss strategies to deal with shared problems, like an unexpected excess of snow, and to ensure that their monopolies hadn’t resulted in price fixing and uncompetitive behaviors. It was very important to meet regularly to discuss prices. That way they could be very sure they weren’t fixing them.

“Don't you mean the last bone?”

“No. But nothing has come out against me recently. I’m probably safe for a while.”

“Safe?”

Applejack nodded.

“What could happen?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised to see something in the papers about me eventually,” Applejack said. “Courtesy of my lovely aunts. They’ve bought into all this conspiracy talk, how Nightmare Moon and Princess Celestia plotted the Great Succession together and, then...actually, I’m not sure what’s supposed to have happened next. Did we pay you to come play the farce out in Ponyville to boost our industries?”

“I thought I paid you all to keep your mouths shut.”

“Could be both. It’s a bunch of flim-flam, but my aunts would rather rake through the mud for one dirty lie than plant an honest seed in the dirt. And, well—that’s all I’m ready to say.”

Twilight cocked her head to one side. “What’s going on? Or not going on?”

“It took courage and honesty to share what you shared about Lemon Hearts at the New Year celebration,” Applejack said. “It’s rude of me not to reciprocate, but I won’t. Not the right time. Sorry.”

Applejack has a story that compares to what I did to Lemon Hearts?

“All right,” said Twilight. “Well...it’s good to know that none of my Sis—none of the other CEEs are making trouble for you. Let me know if they ever do.”

“Thanks, sugarcube,” said Applejack. “Let me pack up a pie for you to take on your way. Actually, make it two. I’ve only got apple—do you like apples?”

The pond wasn’t magical, and neither were the lily pads drifting on it, nor were the frogs that laid their eggs there. But there is always something a bit magical about a pond full of lilies, especially when the pink and white flowers are in bloom. This was a real pond, with real lilies, and so it faintly seemed to breathe with magic.

The surface of the pond occasionally rippled as a frog dived into the water to pick worms out of the muddy banks. But it was mostly very clean and very still. The frogs had been here a long time, living and eating and loving and dying. The lily pads had been here longer.

Something great crashed into the pool. Water slopped up the banks; lily pads rode the waves to the edges of the pond. Frogs jumped out of the way as the thing pulled itself upright, or as upright as a thing like it could be. Standing up, it looked like a tree cut by a sadistic woodsman with an avant-garde approach.

Dead leaves and crumbled bark, the crushed remains of termites and other things all dribbled down from the thing into the pond.

“Six of them,” the thing said, its voice like wood shattering. “I need to see—I want to know how—”

After making sure Spike was up and had breakfast, Twilight went to her Daughter bank to do some reading in her office. She found the research that had been used to go after Pinkie Pie and Rarity.

Was it deliberate? Were two of her Sisters trying to start a fight? Or was it just coincidence, were the exceptionally successful businessmares of Ponyville starting to attract the kind of negative attention that the rich incumbents always showed to upstart new entrants?

By the time she had drafted and sent off a letter each to Twinkleshine and Gamma Glisten pushing back on their research, it was dark outside.

Which didn’t mean it had been more than a few hours. The Sun was still a babe, and it needed lots of sleep. Light was especially scarce this winter.

As she walked toward her treehouse home, she remembered the extra ticket to the Grand Galloping Gala.

Rarity was the best candidate, and the worst. Applejack might turn a profit, but she would have no pony to talk to. Pinkie Pie would have fun, which was good but also scary. Fluttershy was too shy to want to go but also seemed like the safest choice. Rainbow Dash would be the most vocal about wanting to go. She would also definitely break something valuable.

Choices, choices….

Twilight opened the door, sat down at the table, and without even noticing what she was doing, got out a pen and paper and began to draw up a model.

Pinkie Pie was carrying a basket of goodies into the dark and scary forest, and she wasn’t worried at all.

For one, she didn’t have a grandmother, or even a mother or father. They were dead. So there wasn’t anything to worry about re., e.g., talking wolves and big sharp teeth.

For twosies, she was friends with the forest. And friendship, Pinkie Pie was certain, could protect you from anything. Even the dark and scary creatures you were friends with.

Threesy-peasy, she just didn’t worry. Pinkie Pie had a theory that friends were like a puzzle: you put a new piece where there wasn’t one already, to fill a space that none of the others fit exactly. She was good at not worrying.

”You can’t bake a hot pie on cold rocks. Gotta let it warm up in the sunlight first….”

She remembered sitting on the porch with Maud, watching the rocks graze in the valley. The rocks fed on sunlight and warmed up the lizards and snakes that sat on them so they could get moving, which got the birds out to hunt, who made enough noise that even the grandmas and grandpas woke up. The sun was the engine of life, driving everything forward, and the rocks were there to take what it had to give through rain and snow and shadow. Maud had never worried...you could budge a boulder before you could budge Maud.

Pinkie Pie beamed at the memory of Maud. She started singing as she skipped into the forest.

“Oh, I’ve got cupcakes, lots of cupcakes,
I baked them for my friends!
And you’ve got a tummy, a big ol’ tummy,
I’ll fill it as best I can!”

She swung the box of cupcakes as she skipped. Each swing sent the smell of vanilla and peanut butter, lemon and strawberry, into the cold and sinister air.

Vines rustled through dead leaves trapped underneath the snow as they followed her.

“What are we going to play today?” she chirped. “Let me guess, you’re going to make a maze, and I’m going to have to solve it!” That was the game the dark thorny vines always liked to play. It was how they had met, though it wasn’t exactly a meet-cute. “Mother, Father, these are the viney thorn-things that tried to kill me and my friends, we’ve been having cupcakes together for a few months….”

The thorns slipped around her and rushed ahead, bumping her and knocking her off-balance. “Hey!” Pinkie Pie said, frowning at them. “You nearly made me spill the cupcakes.”

The vines thrashed and whipped and disappeared into the gloom. Pinkie Pie shrugged and skipped ahead, trusting in Pinkie Sense to guide her. But something felt off. The vines were taking a different path through the forest, one she hadn’t been on before. They seemed upset about something.

They emerged into a clearing, some sunlight coming in through the trees. Pinkie Pie squinted and smiled. “Hi! What are—”

A vine slithered behind her leg and cut into her with a thorn. Pinkie Pie yelped in pain and twisted around, swinging the box of cupcakes defensively. But the vines rose and shouted a message in the flutelike, piping language of the plants, and while she couldn’t understand it, she received the full blast of their emotions:

SADNESS

HORROR

RUN

A long branch whipped out and curled around the vines, tugging them back.

“Let them go!” Pinkie Pie shouted. She stepped forward and moaned, suddenly ill. Shivering with nausea, she couldn’t force herself to move away.

A black walnut tree emerged into the clearing, one branch squeezing the vines like an angry parent gripping an errant child. Sweating and feverish, Pinkie Pie began to sink to her knees as it got closer.

Pinkie Pie blinked through dizzy eyes at it. “They’re my friends,” she groaned, then doubled over in the snow.

It came to a stop in front of her and made a noise like a bassoon. She picked up two sentiments:

Triumph.

Fear.

The plants and vegetation native to Ponyville and the surrounding area contain many examples of natural beauty, quite a few of which are toxic to ponies. To make sure that fillies and colts don’t tread where they shouldn’t and think twice before sticking something in their mouths, Miss Cheerilee, the local schoolteacher, teaches them an old, old nursery-rhyme, which speeds up the longer it goes and is best enjoyed with hoof-clapping and a sing-song tone.

Most of it, anyway. It goes like this:

The leaves of the red maple,
Are beautiful and deadly.
The flowers of the fiddleneck
Are safe, but not the seeds.
Farmers hate pigweed,
Which isn’t named for pigs.
The golden chain will bind you
Feverish to your bed.
The buttercup is not
As delicious as it sounds.
Flowers smell of candy,
To tell you not to touch.
Don’t eat the fruit of the black walnut tree,
No, not the fruit of the black walnut tree.