It is two years before the foundation of Equestria, and a cold wind flows round the abandoned keep of the Unicorn King.
The innards of the keep are ice on silent nights: long halls and empty rooms. A few great, golden banners are slumped onto the floor whilst others flick and twitch inside the breeze; snowflakes flutter through empty windows and over the cracked remains of former stain-glass patterns.
And yet, there is life in it. Two creatures, as alone and as lost as the stone structure they dwell in. One white, one dark. One asleep, and one loud:
“Celes-tia!”
A heap of blankets within a dark, circular room at the tip of the tallest tower groans and shifts about; a lump within the centre of it flattens out, smoothing itself into a flowing, rolling plain of gentle rises and pits. Within seconds, any indication that there was anypony at all under the blankets has vanished.
It is a ploy that will not work.
“Celestia! Where are you?!” A sound clatters out from somewhere far away, and the figure groans again. “Are you still in bed?!” The groan becomes a single snort of alarm: the voice is much, much closer than before.
Part of the blanket—the same part that has been groaning and moaning away—glows softly from beneath, as if someone had just unleashed a jar of trapped fireflies below the covers. More of the room is revealed under the soft light, and it is bare: there is a door and a wardrobe and nothing else. The room's grey walls gleam as the light bounces off them.
A second glow lights up near the top of the door, focused round a latch that, under the guide of the golden aura, begins to slowly slide shut.
“Celestia!” A small, light-blue alicorn bursts into the room, her eyes wide and her breaths fogging the air. The glowing around the latch and blankets vanishes quickly—too quickly for the alicorn filly to notice. Not that she’s been paying the door that much attention; if anything, she looks confused, blinking rapidly as her eyes adjust to the room’s darkness.
The filly glances quickly round the room, eyes skimming across the heap of bedding and over to the wardrobe. They narrow. “I know you’re in here, big sister...”
She moves carefully towards the wardrobe, her movements echoing those of some predator after its prey. A pink tongue flicks out to wet her lips, and misty vapours pour out of the crack between them. “I know you’re in... the wardrobe!”
She pounces, and then bounces with a clunk off the wardrobe’s door before landing in a tangled mess upon the ground. It is still too dark for her.
The pile of blankets giggles once, then falls silent, realising its mistake the moment after it's made.
Slowly, the filly untangles herself and then twists towards it, grinning like a happy cat. With a single, fluttering leap, she bounces up onto the pile of cloths and begins wading her way towards the source of the previous giggling. Her smile widens as she feels something solid and warm beneath her hooves—a lump beneath the softness of the covers.
“Found you!” she proclaims triumphantly.
Nothing happens. The pile of cloths doesn’t burst outwards as her sister erupts from under them; there isn’t even a begrudging groan of acknowledgment. The filly’s lips purse together.
“Celestia, I know you’re in there.” She pokes at a part of the blanket with her hoof, hitting the warm, firm thing beneath the soft covers. “You’re not still asleep, are you?” The poking and prodding becomes rougher. “I know you’re not asleep, Celestia, so stop pretending!”
The blankets still refuse to unfold themselves and reveal the sister the filly knows lies beneath them. They are glared at for their reluctance, and a forceful intervention is decided upon.
She concentrates, eyes closing as her pink tongue thrusts out once more into the chilly air. Her horn pulses out a brief blue light, before descending into a spitting, flickering cloud of bright-purple. The filly winces, the cloud around her horn disintegrating as she rubs her forehead gingerly. And then, pouting, she pulls her hoof back down and kicks at a top part of the covers. Her hoof scrapes against the warm something.
“Ow... Luna, that hurt!”
The action has broken off one layer of covers from another, revealing the tip of a white and slightly bruised nose. It starts to wiggle away, back into the warmth.
“Knew you were in here,” Luna says smugly, sitting down next to the retreating nose and, with one hoof, flicking the rest of the covers surrounding it over and off her sister’s face. A great mass of tangled pink hair appears from underneath it, with twin tips of white—one the part of a nose and the other a slender horn—breaking out of it into two shivering peaks of exposed flesh.
“I hate you,” the hairball mutters. “I hate you so much.”
“Celes-tia, c’mon!” Luna stomps an indignant hoof down onto the covers and pouts again. The hairball is unmoved by the gesture. “You promised!”
“No! No, I didn’t!” The hairball attempts to slink back under the blankets, but is forced to stop when Luna raises a threatening hoof. “You said, ‘Will we make a snowpony when the storm’s passed?’, and I said, ‘You can if you like, but I’m staying in bed’. I didn’t promise anything, Luna!”
Luna frowns as she considers this. It sounds correct... on the whole. Close enough to what she remembers, anyway. Still, what was is not the same as what ought to be.
“Well, you should of promised.”
“Should have,” Celestia mutters back from out the tangled mat of pink hair. Luna’s frown turns dangerous, and, reaching down, she grabs hold of one of the long locks of hair between her teeth, and tugs.
“Ah! O-Ow! Ah, Luna, that’s my hair! Stoppi—ah!”
Slowly, and with a great and obvious degree of reluctance, the rest of Celestia emerges shivering into the world. The blankets slump down from off her back, revealing a tightly scrunched up pair of wings and a coat on which every last hair is beginning to rise. Celestia puffs out a breath of shuddering air.
“I’m sorry, Luna. I shouldn’t have said I hated you before.” Celestia’s lips separate again as she blows a lock of hair out of her eyes. “I didn’t realise how much stronger the feeling could get. I've got no avenues left to exploit, now.”
“You don’t hate me,” Luna replies confidently, trotting away from the shivering Celestia and over to the wardrobe. “You just hate getting up.” She clambers inside—her body half-in and half-out as it dangles over the side—and begins to rummage about, socks and hats and other garments piling up beneath, around and occasionally, on top of her.
Turning her head, Celestia frowns at Luna’s wiggling backside. Her gaze flicks on up to the wardrobe’s lock. It's a very big wardrobe; she'd brought it up especially from the abandoned room of the Princess, and it's large enough that she can fit inside it.
Her gaze flicks a few more times between that of her now clothes-covered sister and the wardrobe's lock, before, with a sigh, she turns deliberately away. She blows some of her frustration out in a breath of cold steam; today is going to be a day of building snowponies after all.
Boo.
And then a yellow scarf slaps into the back of her head and coils round her face, further improving upon Celestia’s good mood.
“I got you one the same colour as your magic! Do you like it?” Luna bounces over, a thick and dark-purple scarf wrapped carefully round her neck. A stripy green twin is slumped into a hazy approximation of neatness upon her back. The bouncing does little to help its structure.
Yellow glow fading from the yellow scarf now wrapped around her neck, Celestia eyes the purple scarf briefly, and a smile starts to tug hopefully at her lips. “What did you base yours on, then?” She turns and walks towards the door, counting away inside her head. “I thought you weren’t sure what your magic looks like, because, you know, you can’t cast any spells yet.”
“I can so!” Luna splutters from behind her, and Celestia’s smile breaks out fully in response, confident now that there’s no chance her little sister can spot it. “I-I can cast lots of spells!”
“Oh, I don’t know, Luna. Unless all of these spells are invisible, then I can’t say I’ve seen any of them.” Celestia trots out of the room with Luna following quickly after, eager for a chance to correct her sister from a closer position. Suddenly, Celestia stops and lifts a thoughtful hoof up to her chin. “I don’t suppose you could... show me one, could you?”
“I... I think I will!”
“It so moved!”
Celestia trots out of the keep’s decaying entrance and out onto the snow, her hooves sinking slightly into the frigid whiteness. The outside’s wind whips at her mane, driving a flurry of snowflakes into her face, and yet her smile remains, trim and pointed and almost at a grin.
“I’m sorry, Luna, but I'm afraid I simply didn’t see it. For all I know, you could have just kicked that stone when I wasn't looking.”
“But It... It flew and everything! Like, in the air flew!” A disgruntled Luna is fast on Celestia’s heels; she slips about slightly as her hooves hit the icy part of the snow, but then gathers herself back up and carries on. “You can’t have not seen it, Celestia! And... And my horn! It glowed!” Luna points up at her horn frantically, almost stumbling over as she tries to keep up with her sister’s longer pace whilst on three legs.
“Did it really?” Celestia’s lips tighten together, quivering slightly as a laugh struggles to break loose, and she pulls a face. “I don’t remember seeing anything which looked remotely purple.” Her face brightens. “Are you sure you didn’t just look at your scarf by accident and think that you were looking at your horn?”
“I—No! I know the difference between my scarf and magic, Celestia! I’m not that...” There’s a pause in which Luna stops in place. Celestia keeps walking, her lower lip now clenched firmly between her teeth. “I mean, I think I know the difference...”
Celestia snorts uncontrollably, and then throws a guilty look over to a Luna who has not noticed, who is instead frowning down thoughtfully at her hooves. Celestia snorts again, and this time it is too loud for Luna not to notice.
“What? What are you—” Celestia starts laughing uncontrollably, and Luna quickly twigs. “Celestia!” Luna reaches up and, with one push, shoves her sister over into a cackling heap on the ground. Within a few seconds, Celestia’s mane and coat are covered in a sticky layer of snow. “You did so see!”
“And you forced me out of bed.” Celestia sticks her tongue out and blows a raspberry with it. “We’re even.”
“Urrgh! You... You...” Lost for a suitable insult, Luna presses her hooves against Celestia's exposed belly and gives her sister another shove, turning her over and over inside the snow.
“Haha! Ok, ok—enough!” Luna bumps into a suddenly steady Celestia, her momentum carrying her over and onto her sister’s back. Celestia’s head twists round, and she sniggers slightly at her unexpected passenger.
Then, legs unfurling and pushing her up and Luna off, Celestia stands and shakes, snow falling off her in fragmented waves. Luna copies her, and after a few shakes, the two of them are relatively snow-free.
Relatively. Celestia’s mane is still a speckled white and Luna looks like she’s argued with a paintbrush. But it is enough; it will do.
“So... Where are we building this snow pony exactly?” Celestia’s eyes are bright and expectant, and Luna’s frown soon vanishes, the thin line of her lips turning into an expectant grin.
“The old town.” Celestia’s eyes change.
“No. We’re not going down there, Luna. We can...” Celestia looks around, her eyes skimming over a barren landscape near-composed in its entirety of snow. Only the keep and a few wooden outlines stand out nearby; mountains and the pointed blades of a distant pine forest frame the horizon. She bites down on her lip.
“We can go to...” She turns round completely, and smiles. “We can go back inside and forget about the snowpony altogether!”
“Celestia!”
“Phooey. Fine, then. We’ll go...” She turns round once more, ending the motion with a smile and a nod. “Over there! We’ll go to the pine forest. That’s a far more safer and nicer and—”
“No! You don’t understand!” Luna stomps a hoof, digging it down into the snow. “We haven’t got everything we need yet!”
“What?”
“I need... I need some coal and a carrot.” Her blue mane flicks behind her ears as Luna tosses her head. “If we’re gonna build a snowpony, we have to go down into the old town.” She starts to wade forwards, almost having to leap as her hooves start sinking into the snow. “So there!”
“I’ll go.”
Luna pauses, and looks back. “What?”
“I said I’ll go.” Celestia brushes past her sister, her longer, pale-white legs easily traversing the boggier parts of the snow. “You go and get started on making the body. I’ll... I’ll go down to the old town.”
There’s a pause, and an exasperated little sigh follows after it. Celestia smiles as the sound of Luna trudging off reaches her ears. The smile vanishes as she looks over the ridge she's been walking towards, her eyes following the frozen remains of the path down to its bottom. She swallows down a ball of spit that'd begun clogging up her mouth.
Hot breath on her cheek, wet eyes and stuck lashes. A kiss on her nose and a cloud of green tucking her mane behind a twitching ear. 'Be brave, love, and look after your sister. I'll be back soon.'
Celestia swallows again, though this time her mouth is dry, the action being more mental than physical. Still, the memory does its work, and she takes her first step onto the path. The second step is easier, and the third step easier still, till it becomes a harder thing to imagine stopping than it is to keep going. One hoof in front of the other: the path conquered one step at a time.
The hints and traces of buildings down below become clearer as she walks, the dark lumps of two steps before shifting into slumped-in roofs and broken walls. The shattered remains of a chimney pot point like a dagger up at her; it must have fallen off recently, for the snow has not yet covered them.
The wind whips crystals into her coat, and she shivers. She assures herself that it’s from the cold.
A few buildings have been left standing, though they’re hidden under the snow like the burrows of a rabbit. Dark holes peep out at her as the light of the sun flashes off their broken windows. Snow piles up over a few of them, blocking their dark insides from view and making them look like white hillocks.
Celestia’s wings bristle, wanting to spring out and make her figure larger, more impressive, but she reigns the feeling in. There’s nothing to be frightened of down here, nothing but the clinging remains of memories that never have been hers.
The snow clears off a patch of black road-ice as her tail sweeps over it; the muddy ground it covers—about half a hoof down from the surface—still has upright blades of grass frozen inside. A shaky hoof-print caught inside the churned-up mud glints briefly, the light catching off ice crystals frozen at its edge.
Celestia swallows as her hoof crosses over the path's end and into the old town’s boundaries. Her eyes dart faster round, trying to keep an eye on every entranceway at once. Snow slides off a broken rooftop, and she flinches.
The old town unnerves her, even from a distance. So to be close is... She walks on edge throughout it, her hoofsteps light and careful, her gaze wide and watchful. The cracked remains of a statue jutting out of a snow heap are eyed carefully before she approaches; she does not move out of the middle of the road, keeping a firm distance between herself and the surrounding, lumpen remains of the town.
Celestia mutters under her breath as she walks, counting the houses passing by. Her breaths blur the air as she slowly huffs out through her mouth; hazy trails rise up from her nostrils, dissipating quickly.
She reaches one of the houses and stops. A conical blur of gold rises from her forehead as the door gets wreathed in light. Ice flies off it as she tugs the door open, the wooden hinges squealing as their icy coatings rub together. She winces and looks round the town once before stepping gingerly inside.
Her horn remains lit, shattering the gloom into shadows that cling onto the furniture, skulking away from the sudden intruder. The inside of the house is wood coated in a thick ice that's almost a deep, glacial blue in places. In others, it swirls round in some weird whirlpool pattern, the ice frozen like waves across the surfaces. Icicles dangle dangerously from the ceiling; a few have fallen down, impaling a table placed at the centre of the room. Some of the chairs surrounding it—four in total—have fallen over, ice freezing them onto the stone floor. Her horn-light shines off two icy statues perched inside the room.
Celestia does not look at them. Celestia pointedly does not look at them.
Gathering her courage, she patters carefully though the room, her hoofsteps slow and consciously positioned. She dances round the statues, chairs and icicles, and makes her way towards a more than halfway open door. She pauses again before entering, her line of vision fixed on something in the other room. With a brief blink and a tremble, she breaks out of whatever trance had held her and carries on inside.
The second room is almost as equally dark, though a partially clear window to the outside lets in a little light. The foggy beam dances off a smaller ice-sculpture, a thick chunk of ice placed almost randomly inside the room. Celestia passes it quickly by. The tallest part of it barely reaches her chest.
She wrenches a cupboard open. There's nothing: the cupboard is bare except for a thick coating of ice. The sole pony who’d left here must have taken the contents with them. She tries another one, a drawer under a tabletop. Again, nothing. This house is empty; her trip into it has been wasted. Swallowing, Celestia turns and leaves, her gaze never straying from a constant stare pointed dead ahead.
She's some distance away from the door before she begins breathing again, making up for all the breaths she'd held whilst searching through the building. Eventually, the pulse of her breaths returns to normality, and she opens up her eyelids, eyes tightening into two rings of pale magenta.
They flash round, and she spots the dark shape of yet another door hidden under the frost. Swallowing again, she turns and walks towards it, her hoofsteps slow and heavy. The clouds of mist rising from her mouth halt as soon as she steps inside.
Celestia clomps back up the path besides the ridge, a carrot clenched between her teeth and two dark shards of coal tucked inside her scarf, rubbing against her coat. She is not yet strong enough to maintain the levitation for all the time it’d take to get back up, and so has had to find alternative ways of carrying them up.
The wind has died down, though it was never really raging. Regardless, her mane no longer flickers and flows as if it has a life of its own. Instead, it flumps downwards in a waterfall of pink, tickling her knees and covering off one eye. The idea of cutting it is becoming attractive.
Her tail is just as bad; it drags annoyingly inside the snow, sweeping it along behind her like a brush. She has grown tired of trying to lift it up. For the third time, she wishes that her wings were strong enough to carry her.
She crosses over the ridge’s peak and then shakes parts of herself out—a type of advanced shivering, designed to heat every part of her up, from her chilled wing-tips to her too-numb hooves. Luna is now visible, a blue figure rushing about off in the middle-distance, only a little way from the castle. Celestia carries on towards her, and before too long, she's past the Keep and nearing her sister.
Luna doesn't notice her for a long while, being utterly fixed on carving out a chunk of snow from the great, almost-circular lump in front of her. An entire pine branch sits slumped onto the snowy ground a little way off—a great, sweeping wave of compressed snow frozen round its tip. The image of Luna tugging it over from the forest filters into Celstia’s mind, and she has to resist the urge to start cackling again.
A few steps on, and Celestia's standing behind a still ignorant Luna. Before she can turn round, Celestia tugs the carrot out of her teeth and sends it floating out into the air. With a plop, the two pieces of coal likewise drift out of her scarf and join it. Then Celestia tosses her mane out, freeing her eye, coughs and says, "Luna."
"Hmm?" Luna looks over her shoulder, a bare and frozen branch clenched inside her teeth. She spits it out. "Celestia!"
With a rush of snow, Luna bounds over, breathless and bright eyed and with a tangled mane of blue draped over her forehead; her scarf is equally as messy.
“You got them! Come and see what I’ve done!”
Luna turns and scampers off, Celestia following behind at a slow and almost regal pace—her standard speed whilst tired. If the world were any warmer, she'd surely be sweating, but even with the cold helping her cool down, her magic is barely strong enough. She's young, far younger than she looks, and it shows itself the most in the things she is proud of.
But that is hardly of interest. What most certainly is, however, are the two large balls of snow placed side by side together—one small and one large. Luna scurries round them, her eyes running over them with the appreciative gaze of an unqualified architect: one who nods when he thinks he's being watched and makes meaningless notes within his journal.
As if on cue, Luna nods, turns and struts proudly back to her sister. "You can put the head onto the main body. I'm going to go and get the wings." And with that, Luna turns and rushes back towards the branch, not noticing that the light around her sister's horn has snapped out, that the carrot and lumps of coal have tumbled into the snow, that the smile has wholly vanished from her sister's face.
Wings... Oh no.
Her eyes shuffle round the landscape till she spots the extra scarf, piled up neat and tidy a little way off. It's green, a dark, rich green. As green as grass, as green as a summer's leaf: the colour of life and nature itself.
Of course it's green. What other colour would it be? What other colour could it be?
Celestia pants out, feeling as breathless as she had whilst walking out of the town, feeling the numb and the cold and the bitterness seeping through her again, as painful now as they were the first night. Her wings feel as heavy and her horn feels as dull, and the part of her that'd wanted to leave her sleeping sister behind and chase after the shooting stars—to see if she could catch them; to see if she could kill them—twists angrily in regret.
And then the resolve grips her again as the memory of a promise flashes through her mind. The resolve to conceal, to hide, to protect. For as young as Celestia is, Luna is still the younger sister, still her responsibility, still the thing she cares most about in this world.
And Luna doesn't know what happened; Luna couldn't possibly know what'd happened. This isn't her sister seeing through her words but her sister playing along with them, her sister reacting to them. Nothing about this suggests that Luna knows. Nothing.
Celestia breathes out again, eyes closing over. Then she steadies herself, face melting into one of reclined joy, a sort of armchair enjoyment of the world. Turning, she carefully rolls the smaller up and onto the larger, before reaching out and dabbing at it a bit with her wingtips. Within seconds, it starts to resemble a pony, though she deliberately carves it blocky in a bid to keep the growing resemblance at bay.
And then Luna is back, spitting out the two branches before the chiseled hooves of the snow pony, placing the two black eyes into its hollowed-out sockets and shoving the carrot into its forehead. Celestia sits and watches carefully, eyes following her sister rather than the growing creation Luna's making.
And then one wing is in. Celestia blinks slowly, her face as frozen as the world around it. The other branch is in Luna's mouth, the younger sister's neck stretching out as she reaches up carefully and slots it into place. The snow crumples round the branch's tip, parts of it falling off in a white, bleeding wave.
And Celestia smiles, then pointedly turns her eyes away from the snowpony with the green scarf, the carrot horn and the leafless wings. She can't look at it, even though it's not a real snow-pony, even though it's made only of snow. She just can't.
It's too close, far too close. Luna has no idea of just how close it is. Celestia closes her eyes.
"You know, don't you?" Luna says beside her, and Celestia catches herself before she stiffens. Luna continues: "I'm not stupid, you know. I know you'll have figured it out." The sounds of Luna moving about reach Celestia's ears: the sound of scuffed up snow and disturbed air. "When are they coming back?"
Something sharp jags into Celestia side, being replaced moments later by a muffled apology and the warmth of Luna's head pressing into her. Her wing stretches out and pulls her sister closer in, hugging her tightly against her chest.
Any moment now, Luna's going to ask the question, and Celestia has no idea how she's going to respond other than to carry on tricking her, to carry on masking the truth away.
The truth...
She swallows. "Luna, what do you know of Windigoes..."
