It was a bleak and windswept December when a dark hand reached into the world and stole away the light of Sunset Shimmer’s life. It seized hold of curiosity, spiriting away the child of the stars to a place that none could see and the Sun ever failed to reach.
“Come,” whispered the darkness. “Come and find her... Before the night claims her and her blood is made ice, before her last breath turns to hoar frost on blackened lips, come to me. It is cold here, my little pony. It is cold...”
-
A week before Christmas, Sunset found herself sitting in Twilight Sparkle’s lab watching her girlfriend build her a Christmas present. In this case, a snow globe. Rainbow Dash, with all her usual grace, had pointed out to Twilight that Christmas presents were meant to be a surprise, but Twilight had responded that it was a “silly practice to elevate the surprise aspect of a gift when having the gifted party actively involved in the process more easily guaranteed satisfaction on their part.”
Sunset had laughed at that, as much for Twilight’s endearing quirks as for the crestfallen look on Rainbow Dash’s face.
“Ok,” Twilight said, throwing a just used screwdriver into a toolbox teetering precariously on the edge of her cluttered work surface. The components for the eventual snow globe—the glass bowl, the lid, a bottle of water, glycerin, the flitter—lay to her left next to the sci-fi looking helmet she’d just finished putting together.
“So the idea is that when you wear this, it should be able to draw images from your memories of Equestria and transfer them to the holographic display I installed in the snow globe lid. It should auto sort for places more than people or... er... ponies, I guess, and put together something that is wintery, cozy, and representative of your home.”
“Twilight,” Sunset said, shaking her head and sighing. She stood up and grabbed her girlfriend’s hand in her own, squeezing it gently. It was warm and a little sweaty from the work she’d been doing. “This is my home. You know that.”
Twilight giggled and played with her bangs using her free hand. “Yes, well, you know what I meant.”
“I do,” Sunset said, and despite herself, she couldn’t help but smile. Still, she wasn’t sure she liked the idea of Twilight using Equestrian magic for something as small as a Christmas present. She said as much.
Twilight shrugged and waved off Sunset’s concerns. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I asked the other me for some help, and she said she thought this was a great idea.”
“Ok, but Princess Twilight also accidentally turned herself into an antique set of tableware a few weeks ago and only returned to normal because Rarity noticed the new teacups in the castle kept blushing every time she took a sip. If she hadn’t gotten Discord to undo the spell, the Princess might still be a set of plates in a cupboard. She isn’t always, you know, the most responsible when it comes to experimenting with new magic.”
Twilight laughed at that but shook her head. “Don’t worry, Sunset. It’ll be fine. Here!” She grabbed the helmet and held it against Sunset’s chest, excitement sparkling like tinsel in her eyes. “Try it on. I promise it wont hurt you.”
“Fine,” Sunset said, grabbing the silly looking contraption and placing it on her head. “You know, I could have helped put this together. It may have been a few years, but I used to be able to give the Princess a run for her money when it came to magic.”
“Aw,” Twilight said, messing around with several dials and switches on a control board she’d made for the helmet. “You’re cute when you’re jealous.”
“I’m not jealous, Twilight.”
“Well, maybe not, but if you helped make it, it wouldn’t really be a gift from me so much as a collaborative project, and that kinda defeats the point of a Christmas present, don’t you think?”
“Fine, fine. You’re right.”
“Almost always,” Twilight said, grinning. “Now hit the blue button on the side of the helmet so we can test this thing.”
-
Sunset knew that Princess Twilight had a time travel spell. It was a dangerous spell that the Princess had locked away and forbidden anyone from ever using... If the option had been afforded Sunset in the days to come, she wouldn’t have hesitated for a moment before breaking into the palace to steal it, consequences be dammed.
-
It happened quickly. She had tried to focus on the beauty of Canterlot during Hearth’s Warming Eve, remembering the snow on the houses, the garlands strung between streetlights, and little groups of pony carolers moving from door to door, singing their songs. She’d tried to keep her mind on the special way Equestrian snow refracted the light, and how the hues of everything were ever so slightly different from her current home, how the lights and colors all tried just a little bit harder to sparkle and shine.
She had tried to remember the smells and tastes of pony confections, the warmth of mulled cider, and the way a pony nose and the tips of pony ears all stung in the cold differently than her human nose and ears did. The whistle of the wind in the mountain tops, the aurora, the clip-clop of hooves against cobblestone streets, the sudden slight dampness of a frost covered tail when stepping in from the cold.
But thinking about all of those things forced her to think about herself as well, who she’d been back then, why she’d fled Canterlot in the first place... She felt it briefly, a sort of small stabbing pain in her stomach or heart or somewhere inside where a person keeps all their feelings wound tight, and then the world exploded.
The helmet on her head tore itself apart in a cascade of sparks and shadows, and a dark acrid cloud billowed into the workshop, hissing angrily and spitting sparks and flurries of snow in every direction. Sunset had never felt anything so cold in her entire life, and the shock of it immobilized her for a brief moment, but that brief moment was long enough.
Through the cloud she saw Twilight flail and heard her scream as something assaulted her, and then, as soon as Sunset was able to force her feet to move, the cloud and the noise and the cold all disappeared, and there stood Twilight, still as a statue and pale as death. Her arm stretched out towards Sunset, and her face was locked like a grotesque theatre mask in a silent howl of agony. Frost covered her from head to toe.
Sunset tried to process what she was looking at but her mind struggled to wrap itself around what had just happened.
“No, no, please...” she heard herself mumble. Her body moved clumsily through the room towards Twilight, as if puppeted by a blind drunkard, and she felt herself kicking over tools and contraptions on the floor and slammed her hip into the corner of the work desk, but all of it was dulled and distant, happening to someone other than her.
She tried to grasp Twilight’s outstretched hand, but as soon as their fingertips met, Twilight’s began to disintegrate, slowly coming apart into flakes of snow. It continued up her arm until her whole body began to fall apart, and after only a few seconds, where once Twilight had stood, there was only a pile of snow.
Sunset fell to her knees and saw her hands plunge into the dry snow, the puppeteer apparently frantic, mindlessly digging about for some fragment of Twilight, and when she found none, she screamed. The haunting wail that filled the workshop belonged to someone else, tore at someone else’s throat, but the wracking pain as her body trembled was all her own.
-
It had not been her intent to bring Fluttershy along, nor any of her other friends for that matter. The voice had spoken to her as she lay in the melting remains of the love of her life, and she had not spared even a second to think things through before rushing home, preparing a travel bag—one meant to be slung over the back of a pony and that had not been used in many years—and then running as fast as she could through the frozen night to the statue at Canterlot High School.
By chance, Fluttershy had been there. Why or what she was up to were questions Sunset had been too panicked and rushed to consider, and when her friend had called for her, asking what she was doing and why she was heading for the portal—asking where Twilight was—Sunset had ignored her.
The voice had given her a sort of fearful jagged hope, and she had flung herself into Equestria with reckless abandon, desperate to take action before the disappearance of Twilight was made real and permanent. But of course, Fluttershy was a good friend, and so when she saw Sunset, pale as the moon, sprinting across the grounds and practically throwing herself through the statue, she did what any good friend would do. She followed after.
Instead of emerging from the mirror in the at least somewhat familiar studies of Princess Twilight Sparkle, Sunset landed face first into a snow drift that felt more like concrete than snow. Sharp ice crystals cut into her legs and her snout, and a patch of frozen grass scratched her hard enough across the belly to draw blood. She had about a second or so too look up at the empty and hauntingly vast landscape surrounding her, before Fluttershy was tossed out of the air behind her, landing just as hard as Sunset but with the benefit of having a unicorn between herself and the frozen snow.
With a high pitched yelp, Fluttershy tried to scramble off of Sunset, but the poor soul had to contend with suddenly having two extra limbs, no hands, and four feet—or hooves, as it were.
“I’m so sorry!” she said, fumbling over her own legs before stepping on a wing and faceplanting in a somewhat softer pile of snow. “You were running,” she mumbled from the gound, “and I was worried, and you didn’t say anything, and I didn’t think, and oh...” she trailed off, looking confused and miserable, but Sunset was too strung out to worry about her friend’s feelings or how she was dealing with the suddenly alien state of her body.
“What the hell, Fluttershy?!” Sunset climbed to her hooves with the natural dexterity of one who had been born with them, then cast her gaze about the barren tundra in which they found themselves. “Where— where are we?” she asked the emptiness, and without waiting for a response, “This isn’t Twilight’s Castle... I was supposed to come out of the mirror. I need her help! No, no, no. No! Why?! This is wrong!”
The last word came out as a screech, and she threw her saddlebag with her magic as hard as she could into the dark night-sky and its unfamiliar stars, watching as it sailed through the air and landed with a soft thud some hundred yards in the distance.
Then she sat down on her haunces, stunned and out of breath, feeling the shock that had protected her so far begin to slowly fade as horror and sorrow set in.
Fluttershy walked over to her slowly and as awkward as a newborn lamb, then sat down beside her, shoulder to shoulder. Despite the snow and the ice-cold air, Fluttershy felt warm.
“What happened?” she asked, her voice as soft, kind, and gentle as Sunset had ever heard it before.
Sunset’s throat trembled, the threat of tears looming if she deared to speak. But she did. “Twilight was... something took Twilight... I don’t know if she’s ok or where it took her.”
A moment of shock and alarm passed over Fluttershy’s face, but the newly turned pegasus swallowed and took a small breath, then nodded.
“You should have gone to the others. They could’ve helped.”
For a moment, Sunset said nothing, and when she finally did, her voice trembled.
“They could have,” she said. “I’m scared Fluttershy. I’m scared that she—” She took a deep breath and looked Fluttershy in the eyes. “I wasn’t thinking straight, but we need to find her. Please, will you help me?”
“Of course I will,” and the steel in Fluttershy’s eyes seemed almost as cold as the snow around them. “She’s my friend too. I’d go looking for her with or without you.” She stood up, stretching her wings out awkwardly and giving them an experimental flap. “Oh, this might take some time to get used to. I don’t feel very cold either.”
“You’re a pegasus. It’s part of your magic. To live in the sky and fly at elevation, you need to be resistant to the cold, so pegasus magic keeps you warm. Mostly.”
Sunset tentatively tested her horn. It had been a long time since she cast any real spells using it. It had been a long time since she’d had a horn at all. It felt simultaneously familiar and impossibly alien when she pushed her magic through its grooves, but the heating spell she tried seemed to go off without a hitch, covering her in a thin bubble of warmth.
“We’re lost. This isn’t anywhere I’ve been before, and it certainly isn't the Crystal Empire. The mountains look different and I don’t recognize the stars.” Sunset looked Fluttershy over. For all the confidence in her eyes, she looked as uncomfortable as ever in her body. She chewed on her lower lip for a second, contemplating their options.
“Do you think, if you had to, you could fly up and get a lay of the land?”
Fluttershy’s eyes widened and her face blanched, but after a moment she nodded. “If... if you think it will help, I’ll try.”
She stretched her wings out, flapping them carefully. “I don’t suppose you know how this works? Do I just flap them like a bird? They seem too small to lift something as heavy as a pony.”
“Don’t worry,” Sunset said. “Its all magic. Think of all the times you’ve levitated or hovered when using magic back in our world. It shouldn’t be too dissimilar.”
Fluttershy took a deep breath then began beating her wings forcefully and with a steady rhythm, then she jumped. Both of them were caught off guard by the power with which she was launched into the air, and before Sunset could blink, the young florist and veterinarian trapped in the enchanted body of a small horse had gained a hundred plus yards of elevation.
Even at that distance, Fluttershy’s terrified squeak was clearly audible. Her immediate reflex was to clamp her wings tight to her body, which of course sent her hurtling back towards the ground like a rock.
“Flap your wings!” Sunset yelled, readying a spell to catch her friend if she didn’t.
Luckily for both of them, Fluttershy seemed to regain enough composure to do as instructed and successfully steadied herself before crashing into the snow.
“Alright,” Sunset instructed, trying to sound calmer and more in control than she felt. “See if you can climb back up to as high as you were and have a look around. Just go slow and steady, and you should be ok.”
Fluttershy nodded, swallowed hard, and tried again. It took a moment, but she seemed to manage well, and when she eventually landed next to Sunset again, breathing heavily but safe and sound on solid ground, she nodded towards a particularly prominent mountain peak in the distance.
“There’s something that way. It looks like a house or a tower, but it was hard to tell. It’s very far away.”
Action. Sunset needed to do something, to take control. She forced her fear down deep inside of herself, locking away as much of it as she could. Fluttershy had given them a target. Something to move towards. For now, that would do. She sighed and adjusted her saddlebags for comfort.
“We best start walking then. Let me know if you get cold, I’ll see what I can do to help.”
Fluttershy fell in beside her and nodded.
“Don’t worry, Sunset,” she said. “We’ll find her. I know we will.”
-
The thing that had been Twilight Sparkle screamed, and the sound cut through the air, bleeding it with its agony and panicked fear. She tried to fling herself against the glass that caged her, hoping to smash it open and flee into the night, but she had no weight and no substance. She was made of the air, of the old and freezing. She was a lingering breath on a winter morning, barely perceptible. A snowflake on a snow-covered field. She wailed against it, incorporeal terror consuming her wholly. She needed to get away. She needed to be real. She needed Sunset.
A wind blew through the mountains, but nopony had lived in this place for hundreds of years, and it meant nothing to the animals who remained when the storms flowing through the mountain passes suddenly and inexplicably carried with them the withered pleas of a woman’s voice. To them, it was just another sound, another manifestation of a winter that would never end.
