Yak in a Library

Yaks do many things. Yaks are strong, and yaks smash--but yaks are also hardy, and rebuild. Yaks take pride in who they are and what they can do, but yaks know their limits. Yaks know what they cannot do.

And yaks cannot do magic.

Yaks do not enchant objects. Yaks do not brew potions. Most crucially of all, yaks do not cast spells.

Freya is a good yak. She likes to think she is. A little shy, maybe, but she loves her family, and she loves her home, and she loves being a yak. She loves doing the things that yaks do. She does not do the things that yaks don’t do.

She is just like any other yak.

Except.

Last Yickslurbertfest. Only a few days ago (really so recently? It seems like it’s been longer). Spirits are high. Some yaks get carried away. Not unusual.

The mountain responds.

A blanket of snow comes crashing down, hurtling to meet the village, called by the yaks’ show of power. This has happened before. Another time, the ponies arrived to help. Perhaps they might come again, once they hear of what has happened, but Yakyakistan is far and food is already scarce and a missive might take days to reach them--

--and Freya has a brother at home, only a calf, whose fur is still thin in comparison to the adults and who will struggle with even the normal winter’s cold--

and she looks at the snow coming down, and something in her shoves it back.

The snow glows blue and retreats as though pushed, shoved back into place atop the mountain where it belongs, and every yak turns to look at Freya, and then they turn to each other to whisper…

…and Freya moves on her own, running home to her hut, frantically tossing things aside and throwing on a pair of saddlebags, more and more panicked as she hears hoofsteps coming towards the hut, and she bursts out, running past her parents as they try to intercept her and running away from the village square and out the gates and down the mountain and onto the first train from the Crystal Empire, not knowing where she’s going but needing it to be anywhere that is away.