The pile of snow in the hole shuddered before falling apart as Thorax burst out of it, gasping for breath. While changelings needed very little air, spending a few hours buried under snow was one way to hit the limits of that. He looked around, confused at why there were snowflakes in his chamber, then how the roof managed to collapse on him.

And then the memory of the collapsing caverns hit him. He pulled himself the rest of the way out of the snow that was burying him, hovered up several hooflengths above the surface and started yelling out the names that he had given the foxes.

After a few minutes of doing this and getting no response, he had the terrifying thought that they might not have escaped from the tunnels. He dropped to the ground and started digging away at where the tunnels used to be, hoping to find something, anything that could tell him what happened to them.

A couple hours of digging, and most of what he found was just little clumps of fur. He dismissed it as a bit meaningless, as they were fairly easy to find before the tunnels were destroyed.

What was interesting was that he managed to dig his way into the food stockpile chamber, still mostly intact. It had nothing in it, so either something managed to sneak in and steal it all, or one of the foxes had the foresight to grab it while trying to flee.

He found no other traces of them, which was a good thing, in a way. The last thing Thorax wanted to see was the unmoving body of one of the foxes stuck in the snow he was digging away at. It gave some hope that they made it out, but they must feel terrible about needing to leave him behind...

Another epiphany arrived, and he fluttered his wings to gain altitude in the snow storm. He swept a circle while focusing on his emotional sense, hoping that the falling snow wouldn't block it too much. There was direction that got a ping that he ignored until he made three full sweeps. It was in the last direction he wanted to go, the one with the repulsive magic.

Still, if it was his only hope to find them, it he could push through. Probably. He grit his teeth and shot out in that direction. The icky magic was a lot closer then he remembered it being, but it didn't intensify nearly as much as it did before, which he was grateful for. It did get a bit colder as he went along, but again, it did not worsen much.

He expected to see the creepy frozen-in-the-air snow again, but that was not what he found, as the snowflakes fell as they should. Instead, he saw a set of silhouettes reaching for the sky, the middle one both taller and wider the ones surrounding it. It reminded him of Canterlot's castle, though the shapes weren't quite the same. He could also barely see some smaller obstacles that looked like structures. They and the towers reflected the weak sunlight in weird ways, making it hard for him to tell what exactly they were by sight.

His emotional sense wasn't affected by that, though, and what it told him was disconcerting: there were simply too many sources of negative emotions to easily identify the foxes. Even worse, the ones he could tell apart were all far too strong to be the foxes, either. Animals in general didn't have very strong emotional energies, and the only beings he ever saw outputting that much were fellow changelings that have recently fed and the ponies.

He glided his way down as discreetly as he could manage and landed near the outskirts of what was now obviously a city of some kind. What it was doing in these frozen wastes, he had no idea, but it was there all the same. With no guards of any species racing his way, he either avoided detection or was deemed no threat.

Erring on the side of caution, he took on Vix's now familiar form and stalked his way into the depressed city, hoping to find those he was separated from. The pawprints he left behind quickly vanished, with the snow in the air slowly filling it in while the winds brushed the surface snow back to uniformity. The footprints from his landing persisted longer, but they too faded in the face of the weather.

Author's Note

Some wisdom I found while studying philosophy and politics:

Hope always dies last, for once a person loses hope, they regress to surviving, which isn't truly living anymore.

Anyway, depressing bits set aside for the moment, Act 1 is over. The burst of writing I just had is starting to slow down, so newer chapters are going to take longer to come out than once every two days... especially since I'll need to do a bit more character research just to ensure I'm writing a couple of them correctly.