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// The ravening wind that leaves trees cold and bare 
// Story: The Education of Tumbling Leaf 
// by Slipshod Extension 
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A streak of ruddy, bare burn cut through Gloaming’s mane and down her neck, the signature of the lightning bolt by which had she saved Leaf from the dragon. Leaf watched it in pain as she paced across the canyon where they hid from Felsite’s wrath. Gloaming insisted that there was no time to delay, that they must tell the Princess of the horror of the dragon and his slaves’ plight. And though Leaf knew she was right, he felt she was wrong. His heart churned and ached in his breast, and the dragon’s words echoed in his mind. Ask the Last Crystal Pony. Where had love brought her people? Love had brought Gloaming to that terrible forest and had carved that scar across her body. But what else could be harmony? Leaf had to know. And so he argued.
What could the Princess do, he said. She was too busy repairing the damage of the Long Night. And could she truly best the dragon after all, and what would the deer and dogs do if liberated? And the dragon would expect them to fly toward Canterlot. But if they bore north together, they could seek out the Crystal Ponies, and learn the true meaning of harmony.
Leaf watched Gloaming’s lips purse, part, and twist as she told him truths he could not admit. It would be their duty to warn Celestia of Felsite even if no creatures lived beneath the dragon’s claw. The lightning strike had damaged a wing, but Felsite would heal soon. And neither pony knew, nor dared to imagine, what the wyrm would do once he recovered. So Gloaming argued, and Leaf knew she was right, so he railed at duty and love and at Gloaming for rescuing him, and felt his heart coil and begin to eat itself as tears dripped from her eyes. And at last he watched as she stomped away, flexed her wings, and leapt into the sky. He watched her wing her way toward Canterlot until she disappeared above the enveloping clouds.


The air grew colder as Leaf walked north, and day by day he watched the trees turn to fire. In the evenings, he missed the warmth of Gloaming’s wing around him, and in the days he missed her lively voice telling him how a warm updraft sculpted a cumulonimbus cloud or repeating the names of the flowers he picked her.
“Dandelion,” he said one night, looking at the meager supper he had scavenged. “Ox-eye daisy."
When he ran a hoof down his side, it rattled along the ridges of his ribs. Leaf knew he was in poor shape to survive a winter. But he walked north nonetheless, for he was not sure he wished to survive. He could not return home, more ignorant than when he left. He could not return to Cloudsdale, having drawn Gloaming into danger. Love had been a mistake. His mother had been wrong. Had he never loved Gloaming, she would be healthy and safe in her bed of fluffy cumulus. Had she never loved him, he would have lost himself on the plains, and at last retreated, shamed but whole, to his home.
There was something wrong in his right shoulder.  It had swollen and bruised while they hid from the dragon, and the swelling had never wholly gone away.  Now the leg cracked and snapped when he walked.  It felt at times as though the sinews within plucked like guitar strings on the picks of his sharp-edged bones.  At first it had been a mere irritation, but now it hurt with each step by the end of the day.  It occupied his mind as he walked, so that he scarcely noticed as the first snowflakes began to fall.

He had been climbing for weeks now, toward snow-capped peaks which rose like Felsite’s teeth on the northern horizon; and as he climbed, the snow crept down from the peaks to meet him.  His breath puffed white before him as he struggled toward what he hoped to be the fabled Pass of Princess Amore, from which Arrow’s Flight had said she had once looked down on the Crystal Empire.
Leaf’s saddlebags were nearly empty, and he wore the tent he had taken from Cloudsdale wrapped around him like a cloak.  His hooves he wrapped in the oilcloths in which he had brought a few delicacies for Gloaming.  Leaf had not planned to travel in the winter.  He knew now that he would not see the spring.
He climbed now between the dragon’s teeth as he should have in the wood.  He wished at least to look down on the beauty of the Crystal Empire before he died, and perhaps to perceive what had happened to the Crystal Ponies.
No emissary of the Crystal Ponies had come south since Arrow’s Flight was a young mare.  The terrible dragon had spoken of a “last.”  What lay within the dragon’s gullet, where all love must perish?  What fate had love wrought upon that people?  The cold and the shoulder made it difficult to think.  He had hoped that the former would numb the latter, but that would come only when the frost set into his bones.  He was out of food and had only a few sticks of firewood left.  Step by step he hauled himself through the drifting snow toward the grey apex of the pass.

Step.

Drag.

Breathe.

Shiver.

Step.

The turn was only a few yards away.  Leaf was beginning to feel warm.  Only a few more yards, and then he could lie down and rest.

Step.

Two yards.

Step.

One.

Step.

Leaf’s eyes watered with cold as he gazed down the majesty before him, a deep, curving basin held within the circling Crystal Mountains.  The mighty peaks and ridges swept precipitously down to the smooth white floor, unmarked by sign of life.  On the opposite side of a basin, a frozen waterfall cascaded incrementally down the face of a nameless peak.  Where was the Empire?  Surely this had to be the place.  There could not be two basins like this in the mountains.
Could it be buried beneath the snow?  It was said that the fire of friendship kept the spirits of winter at bay.  But love could be mad and passionate--a source of conflict, strife, and tragedy.  Had love driven out friendship and opened the gates to the windigo?
It seemed easier to think, now, in a loose sort of way.  His shoulder didn’t pain him so much anymore, and it really was getting warm.  Leaf tried to kick off the oilcloths bound around his hooves, but his legs felt clumsy.  Well, he had been climbing all day.  Perhaps he would feel more agile after a nice nap in the snow.  He dipped his nose toward the white frosting.

Bare inches before his eyes, there were hoofprints leading down the other side of the ridge.  Many, as though a herd had passed here only minutes before.

Leaf found that he could not stand.  But he could still breathe, and that meant he could probably shout.  It took him a few tries to remember how words were supposed to sound.